Codefendants Reveal “Suckers” Video Ahead Of “This Is Crime Wave” US & European Tour

Codefendants is a music collective made up of hip-hop and punk rock stalwarts Ceschi Ramos and Get Dead vocalist Sam King. The album is produced by NOFX frontman Fat Mike and features legendary rapper The DOC, Bad Cop/Bad Cop‘s Stacey Dee, and Onry Ozzborn of the band Dark Time Sunshine. Codefendants have now dropped a brand new video for Suckers, a song taken from their recently released debut album, This Is Crime Wave. This new video drops just a few days before the band head out on their This Is Crime Wave Tour, kicking off at Bottom Of The Hill in San Francisco on April 14th.

A few years ago, Sam King from Get Dead and his graffiti crew were giving tattoos and making flash art to raise money to help rapper Ceschi Ramos while he was incarcerated. After his release, the two met at the Gilman Street Project in Berkeley, CA. They began recording songs together and soon after enlisted Fat Mike as the group’s producer, and co-writer, as well as contributing his skillful musicianship to the tracks. Together, they formed the ground-breaking Codefendants. Their debut album This Is Crime Wave was recently released via Fat Wreck imprint Bottles To The Ground. The ten-song set is a mix of punk and hip-hop, that also incorporates other sounds and influences. It’s a trip to the dark center of their lives, their worlds, and their pasts, both lyrically and musically, all broken homes and broken hearts within a broken system. 

“This Is Crime Wave has a nostalgia about it that feels familiar to people our age but, in actuality, there is nothing quite like it. It’s the album I needed at 16 that nobody ever created for me. We’ve made a record that feels classic & important for the times but could have been felt 20 years ago and will continue to be relevant 20 years from now. It’s exciting to finally share this with the public & hope people feel the amount of experiences, friendship & caring that went into its creation.” (Ceschi Ramos)

These songs don’t stop at personal experience, they tie everything together, drawing lines between the prison-industrial complex, systemic racism, and American capitalism, as well as the correlation between punk and hip-hop, two sounds that were created on the fringes by necessity and then co-opted by the mainstream. The Codefendents are both a breath of fresh air and a steel-toe kick in the nuts. Impossible to define by traditional standards, they were forged out of a desire to make an album that sounded like nothing else; a completely genre-fluid album.