>2. The Reflection Eternal sophomore effort would be good and
>have been followed up by now.

Train of Thought is my favorite album of all time (any genre) so the follow-up, a decade later, was set up for disappointment before it was even announced.

But it ended up being even worse than my impossible expectations could've anticipated. The beats were bland as fuck. Too bad too, cause Kwe was spitting on that album and deserved better. He/those lyrics deserved the type of nuanced bangers HiTek laced him with the first time around.

I recognize that it's difficult to replicate the perfect storm of that first album, tho. They were both young, hungry, raw, UBER-talented, unheralded/underground, fledgling artists with a lot to say and wanting so badly to prove themselves. Plus they had the backing of the biggest indie hip-hop label in the country at that point, and plenty of backing from other MCs/artists/cultural fixtures of the time (Chappelle, etc.) who were at their disposal, so it all just fell into place at the absolute perfect time leading to a timeless, classic, flawless album. And by the time of the 2nd album they both had their own individual careers, I believe they were both running labels or at the very least managing other artists, obviously weren't together under one roof like they probably were for much of the time during the recording of the first album, etc.

So with all those new factors in place, in fairness there was really no way they'd ever be able to get even close to recreating that kind of once-in-a-lifetime magic. And I knew they wouldn't. But I hoped against hope that they'd still be able to recapture *some* of that old chemistry, even after all that time, just based on how effortless it seemed to be to them in the early days with their collaborations on BlackStar, Train of Thought, and all their white labels/b-sides/Rawkus mixtapes and whatever else. They were batting a thousand before RPM came out.

That isn't to say that the album is terrible or lacking a single good moment, it definitely had a few. But IMO "In This World" was really the only song that rose to the level of quality they'd mastered previously. But otherwise, by and large it seemed like HiTek had fallen under Dre's spell and his beats were bare and sparse, with too much empty space and not nearly enough rhythm.

Oh well. Now that we're on the subject I wonder if they've gone a decade without speaking to eachother like they did the after the first album lol. Maybe it wasn't a decade but it was multiple years if I recall correctly.

In fact, is HiTek even producing at all at this point ?