Cypress Hill bring the hip hop to rock/metal fest Soundwave

Fri 17th Aug, 2012 by Jack Tregoning in News 2056 views

It must be said that we didn’t expect to be reporting on the 2013 edition of Soundwave Festival, which earlier this month announced a fleet of grizzled rock and metal acts on its first round line-up. Names like Metallica, Blink 182, Linkin Park, The Offspring and A Perfect Circle don’t usually turn up around these parts. However, the festival has just announced its second line-up, and amongst all the hefty rock names is a single act more familiar to inthemix, Cypress Hill. The hip hop crew isn’t quite the Skrillex we were kinda-not-really-expecting, but they certainly stand out on the list.

Cypress Hill is no stranger to rock, having explored the sound on various albums, but the last year has seen the crew getting tight with the world of ‘EDM’. First there was the joint EP with hyperactive bass star Rusko in April. “This is one of those styles that we felt doing with Rusko would be a great match,” the group’s mouthpiece B-Real said in NME. “We’ve always been the type of group to take chances on doing something radically different than what people expect from us. So this carries with the tradition of us going out of the box. If it’s not something that we embrace then we don’t dare mess with it and this is something we fell right into the pocket of.”

Following that outing, the guys also went into the studio with someone Rusko’s not overly fond of, Deadmau5. Their collab Failbait will appear on the mau5’s new LP > album title goes here <, out 21 September in Australia through Mau5trap/Parlophone. At Soundwave, though, you can expect Cypress Hill to stick to the greatest hits like Insane In The Brain, Hits From The Bong, How I Could Just Kill A Man and Light It Up.