This Is Our Fellowship
Important, Not Urgent
Propaganda & ProducerTrentTaylor Mid90s Records / Reflection Music Group Released April 10, 2026
A note before we begin: If you are offended by ideology that differs from yours, whether political, religious, or otherwise, you should listen to this album. Not as a warning to stay away. As a challenge to engage anyway.
I’ve been following Propaganda for a long time. Before Red Couch Podcast. Before Hood Politics. Somewhere between Excellent and Crimson Cord, back when I joined Patreon specifically to support him and Alma because the work mattered and I wanted to help keep it going. I had him on my podcast years ago. So when I say this album hits, I’m not saying it as someone encountering him for the first time. I’m saying it as someone who’s tracked the evolution from Humble Beast to here.
I’ve said it before: sometimes it’s best not to listen to a Prop album for the first time in the car. You’ll end up pulling over to parse through the words he just spoke. It’s dense. It’s worth it.
This Is Our Fellowship takes its time. Not urgent. Important. There’s a difference. ProducerTrentTaylor built this thing on vintage gospel samples at deliberate tempos, the kind of pacing that demands you stay present. This is not background music. It requires attention. Sometimes those messages need space to breathe. The room to pause.
The structure here is intentional. Gospel samples throughout give this the shape of a sermon. But it’s not preachy. It’s more like a TED talk from an old head — someone who’s been through enough to have earned the right to say something. The title track opens by asking you to soften before the message arrives. Open your eyes. Open your ears. Open your heart. What follows isn’t instruction from above. It’s wisdom from next door.
And while the language is rooted in Christianity and the focus is often on men and boys, the message reaches further than that. This is a letter to anyone who was taught to bury it all and knuckle up. Anyone handed a limited toolkit and told to figure it out. The specifics are Prop’s. The invitation is universal.
Listen along while I scribe my thoughts in a hopefully intelligible manner.
This Is Our Fellowship
The album opens with vulnerability about emotional tools denied in childhood. Prop uses the image of crayon boxes: boys handed the 8-pack when they needed the 64. Limited palette for a full spectrum of experience. “Learning to paint with more colors,” he says. “We made this song cry.” The song becomes the container for what couldn’t be expressed elsewhere.
Who Is You
This track maps the machinery that creates the limitation. Sports metaphors as the first language boys get handed. Toxic masculinity as the downstream effect. Peer pressure as the enforcement mechanism. But also the way out: experiencing the world opened up the language he needed to move past it all. Travel as education. Getting outside the system that built you in order to see it clearly.
There’s a Mike Tyson quote that floats around about not being capable of great peace without being capable of great violence. Prop’s doing something with that here. Hip-hop as a historically “tough” genre creating space for vulnerability. A man who’s never had to be hard talking about softness reads as naive. A man who’s been in it for two decades choosing vulnerability reads as evolved. The credibility of the vessel matters.
Gas You Up (Street) [feat. Danny A. Thomas]
Does exactly what the title says. The kind of song you hear and know it was written for someone else but you can lay it neatly into your own life. That’s the best version of what music does.
Figure It Out [feat. Curtiss King]
Shifts to boom bap and mentorship, a lighthouse for whoever needs it. There’s no blueprint for growing up. Just the invitation to find your way through this world and grow beyond your own history, traumas, and the rest.
And then he reaches into sexuality. This may be uncomfortable for a portion of his audience still in the church, those not deconstructed. But Prop hasn’t been in that lane in a long time. The spiritual undertones remain because that’s foundational to who he is. The institutional constraints? Gone for years.
Not In Danger [feat. Scarub]
Centers on an image that stuck with me: a bear in a cage. A violent entity kept in the dark until it needs to be let out, but on a chain. Prop’s talking about how he got rid of his. Set your anger free. You aren’t in danger. The title becomes permission to disarm. The threat you’ve been preparing for isn’t coming the way you think. The readiness itself is the weight.
Wish You Well
Draws a line: be the storm or the safe harbor, but you can’t be both. Not at the same time. Not to the same people. He doesn’t give preference to either. Both are useful. He uses the imagery of discovering fire for the first time, the beauty that can come from destruction. The problem isn’t being one or the other. It’s pretending you’re something you’re not.
The track is about being self-aware, working to grow, but not forgetting that we’re all working on ourselves and none of us will get out of this alive. Nothing but joy, nothing but peace, no more dying, the sample repeats. Soft funk organs and a sway like a choir.
Burn It Down [feat. Fashawn]
This is the storm. Prop names the whole grid of broken systems: church, school, political, armed forces, police state. All of them. If you aren’t a little progressive, this song is going to step on your toes. He mentions being in his “Jesus and the money changers” mode right before the beat drops. Sanctified testosterone. Molotovs in backpacks. The cleansing fire isn’t partisan. It’s total.
Build
The necessary sequel. The sample slows way down. Prop tells the story of LA during the wildfires, when community members who had every reason not to cooperate put differences aside to help keep their neighborhoods together. Fellowship in action. Not theory.
“The absence of rulers is not the absence of leaders.” That’s a bar.
The people who step up when the structure fails were always there. The broken systems just kept them out of the rooms where decisions happened. The call to political action is at the local level. Let it bubble up from there. You don’t rebuild by replacing one set of rulers with another at the top. You rebuild from the block. From people who actually know each other.
You Got It Chief [feat. Jabee]
Takes aim at people who are incredibly informed in their own wrongness. Folks who have a stronger interest in winning an argument or winning an election than in being right. In doing the right thing. We have a limited number of words in our life. A limited number of breaths. Some people aren’t worth wasting them on.
I Didn’t Leave You
This is where the album becomes an outright indictment of the American Christian church. Plain and simple. He specifically mentions Trump and his disdain for the institution that chose that alignment.
Prop’s argument is direct: Trump consumed the church because he hates what it actually stands for. Found a power structure that, if he could devour, would allow him to gain power at a higher level. Not seeking faith. Seeking apparatus. The church was consumable. Available to be eaten. The institution made itself into food for a man who was never there for their God.
“A little more nuance that comes with a little age / a little less ego, a lotta less rage / a lotta less steeples, a lotta less stage.”
Three lines mapping his whole trajectory.
Don’t It Feel Good [feat. Derek Minor]
Arrives as an exhale after the indictment. Almost universalism in his beliefs now. This is about being refreshed by the presence of the things you enjoy. The decisions you’ve made that have grown you. Derek Minor’s verse draws on the imagery of field versus house — the hard work outside might be more respectable than chewing back who you are to get inside. The institution is the house. Prop chose the field.
You Can’t Name A Day One
Ends the album with a lighter flick. A joint being lit. The childhood memory of figuring out who among the characters in your life would become the through line of friendship.
If you can’t name a person who was there for you in the beginning, you are untrustworthy.
That’s the test. Not what you say about yourself. Who’s still around from the start.
There’s an old phrase: lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas. But Prop flips it. It’s not just who you’re with now. It’s whether you still have the people from the beginning. If you can’t name them, you didn’t pick bad company. You didn’t keep any company. You burned through people. Used them up. Left them behind.
The fellowship this album describes isn’t abstract. It’s specific humans who’ve been in your life so long you can’t remember not knowing them. The joint is the sacrament. The lighter flick is the call to gather. End of the album, we’re back in the backyard from the cover art. The chairs. The handwriting. The casual holiness of just being together with people who knew you before you were anything.
This Is Our Fellowship is available now on all streaming platforms.
John Hughes writes about cocktails, music, and whatever else won’t fit in the main section at Embellish. This review appears in Off-Menu.