preLease

preLease is Tape Lab’s first official album: a full-length, 16-track statement recorded in 2021 and built with the kind of commitment, humor, and sideways ambition that would come to define the project. It is a considerable effort, not just because of its length, but because it feels like a whole world getting mapped in real time.

The album’s central motif is simple enough, in the Tape Lab sense: parking your Previa on the Moon. That lunar minivan logic runs through the record as both a joke and a strangely convincing mythology, giving preLease its own atmosphere of movement, odd freedom, and cosmic DIY transportation.

The album opens with “Congolese Rice,” a huge bass banger that sets the tone immediately. From there, “DAnother Danse” and “Still Danser” bring clean, direct dance hooks, while “PAL Simon” lands as a beach classic jam: sunny, loose, and instantly Tape Lab. “Just Righteous,” a standout collaboration between 2yng2smpl and CD+, adds another layer of chemistry, and “Moon Bus” keeps the groove rolling with one of the album’s most natural rides.

As Tape Lab’s first official album, preLease captures the project moving from scattered transmissions into a fully formed release. It is playful, propulsive, strange, and surprisingly cohesive: a moon-parking, bass-banging, beach-grooving document of Tape Lab becoming Tape Lab.