The Urban Renewal Project: A Big-Band Pulse for the Present

From SXSW to the Java Jazz Festival, The Urban Renewal Project has built a reputation for big-band spectacle with a restless, contemporary pulse. The 16-piece collective stitches jazz, hip hop, and vintage soul into a genre-bending fabric that’s as cinematic as it is streetwise—brass blazing, rhythms snapping, and words cutting through with precision.

Fronted by the powerhouse vocals of Alex Nester and driven by dual emcees Elmer Demond and Slim da Reazon, the ensemble’s hallmark is scale: a face-melting ten-piece horn section that doesn’t just punctuate the groove—it propels it. Their collaborative ethos has earned them a global audience and a string of standout releases, including recent singles “Will to Survive” featuring Vic Mensa and “Don’t Ask Y” featuring Camp Lo.

Now, the Los Angeles-based outfit is setting the stage for its fourth studio album, Love Glory Duty Death, arriving October 24. It’s an ambitious statement in both scope and spirit—an exploration of the forces that shape our choices and define our collective story.

The new single “Money,” featuring Oh No, lands as a kinetic thesis for the record. It’s riveting, explosive, and unflinchingly curious about the power we grant to currency. As bandleader R.W. frames it: “We meditate on every facet of the nature of money—as a symbol of hope and opportunity but also of greed and vice—and in this way, it aligns very nicely with the themes of the album. Is money a blessing or a burden? Glory? Duty? Both?”

That duality—exaltation and responsibility, survival and sacrifice—threads through The Urban Renewal Project’s sound. The horns feel like a public address system for the soul; the verses, a field report from the frontlines of modern life. It’s music built for collective listening, for rooms where bodies move in unison and ideas ricochet long after the last chord decays.

With Love Glory Duty Death, the band leans into its core strength: collaboration that refuses to flatten individuality. It’s a project that honors lineage—old-soul textures, jazz craft, hip hop’s narrative urgency—while sounding unmistakably like now.