Everlast has unveiled the new single and video for ‘Losing Man’s Game’, offering another preview of his first album in eight years, Embers To Ashes, due in August.
by Paul Cashmere
Everlast has released the new single ‘Losing Man’s Game’, accompanied by a striking music video that arrives ahead of the August 28 release of Embers To Ashes, his first studio album in eight years. The track is the latest glimpse into a record that marks a significant return for the Grammy-winning songwriter, rapper and musician, whose career has traversed hip hop, blues, folk, rock and Americana for more than three decades.
The release follows earlier album previews and continues the rollout for Embers To Ashes, which will be issued through Everlast’s Martyr Inc Records in partnership with Thirty Tigers and Regime Music Group. The album was produced by Yelawolf, mixed by renowned engineer Chris Lord-Alge, and features artwork by acclaimed visual artist Tristan Eaton.
For fans who have followed Everlast’s evolution from House Of Pain frontman to the genre-crossing storyteller behind Whitey Ford Sings The Blues, the new material represents another chapter in a career built on reinvention. While many artists from the early 1990s rap era remain tied to a single defining sound, Everlast has repeatedly shifted direction, incorporating acoustic instrumentation, blues structures and singer-songwriter traditions into his work.
“There’s a freedom in being broken. Go all in or go home. Losing man’s game,” Everlast said of the new song.
The accompanying video expands on the track’s themes with a cinematic approach directed by Ryen McPherson, whose previous credits include work with Sleater-Kinney, Billy Strings and Rise Against. The clip features appearances from Amigo The Devil, Andy Frasco and DJ Muggs of Cypress Hill, the producer whose work on House Of Pain’s ‘Jump Around’ helped launch Everlast into mainstream success in the early 1990s.
McPherson described the creative inspiration behind the video as coming from an unlikely source.
“The cinematic carnage at the end of Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Suspiria’ has always resonated with me,” he said. “It wasn’t just the visuals, but Thom Yorke’s score. I was inspired to finally take a crack at pairing onscreen violence with a ballad, the condition being that it had to be shot beautifully.”
He added that the production moved unusually quickly from shoot to completion.
“This video was edited less than 24 hours after we wrapped shooting, so to say that my crew and I are excited to share it with Everlast’s fans is an understatement. Enjoy your nightmares.”
The new single arrives as Everlast prepares to release what is his ninth solo studio album and the first since Whitey Ford’s House Of Pain in 2018. According to Everlast, Embers To Ashes draws heavily from the experiences of the past decade, including personal upheaval, loss and survival. Previous songs released from the project have explored themes of self-reflection, recovery and resilience.
Born Erik Francis Schrody, Everlast first emerged nationally through Ice-T’s Rhyme Syndicate before achieving global success as the frontman of House Of Pain. The group’s 1992 breakthrough single ‘Jump Around’ became one of the defining hip hop records of its era and remains a staple of popular culture more than 30 years later.
Following House Of Pain’s breakup, Everlast reinvented himself with 1998’s Whitey Ford Sings The Blues. The album blended rap with acoustic guitars, folk influences and blues sensibilities, producing the hit single ‘What It’s Like’ and establishing a template that would define much of his later work. The record became his biggest solo commercial success and demonstrated that artists associated with hip hop could successfully cross genre boundaries without abandoning their roots.
His subsequent career included a Grammy Award-winning collaboration with Santana on ‘Put Your Lights On’, as well as projects that continued to merge hip hop rhythms with Americana, rock and blues influences. Along the way he navigated health challenges, independent label ventures and changing music industry models that increasingly favoured artist-controlled releases.
The release of Embers To Ashes also reflects a broader trend among veteran artists who have embraced independent distribution partnerships to retain ownership and creative autonomy. For Everlast, whose catalogue has often resisted easy categorisation, the album arrives at a time when genre boundaries have become less rigid than when he first began experimenting with hybrid sounds in the late 1990s.
With ‘Losing Man’s Game’ now available and Embers To Ashes scheduled for release on August 28, Everlast is once again drawing on personal experience and hard-earned perspective. The new material suggests an artist still committed to storytelling, even as he revisits themes of loss, survival and redemption that have echoed throughout much of his career.
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