El Michels Affair on Vinyl: Where to Start and Where to Go Next
Leon Michels has spent most of his working life as the quiet engine of New York soul. He was still a teenager when he played saxophone in The Mighty Imperials in the late 1990s, he was a founding member of Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings and stayed about seven years, he started Menahan Street Band in 2007, and he co-founded Truth & Soul Records and then Big Crown Records in 2016. El Michels Affair is the project that carries his own name, and it has been running since the first album landed on Truth & Soul in 2005.
The catalog's reputation rests on a happy accident. In the mid 2000s the group backed Wu-Tang Clan members at a run of Scion-sponsored shows, the chemistry held, and Michels went into the studio to rebuild RZA's beats with live horns, drums and tape instead of samples. Two 7 inch singles came first, informally the Shaolin series, and the full-length followed in 2009. Nothing else quite sounds like it: hip-hop structure played by a soul band that treats the breaks as compositions.
Everything since has been Michels following his curiosity. There is a reggae and dub detour with the British singer Liam Bailey, a full album written with Black Thought of The Roots, and a 2025 record of cinematic soul with nobody's catalog to answer to but his own. The run at GOOD TASTE Records covers five albums across both halves of that story, plus most of the 7 inch singles.
El Michels Affair - Enter the 37th Chamber
Fat Beats released this on 21 April 2009, and it remains the record most people mean when they say El Michels Affair. The band works through material from Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, deconstructing RZA's productions into something Michels has described as hard 1970s avant-garde jazz, full of switch-ups, horn stabs and dark room effects. Enter the 37th Chamber is where to start, and we also carry the Crimson Strike pressing, the 15th anniversary yellow and black pressing and a special edition cassette.
Why it's worth purchasing:
- The 2009 Fat Beats album that invented this whole lane of instrumental soul
- Wu-Tang classics rebuilt by a live band, with the arrangements written out rather than looped
- Four formats on the shelf, including two colored pressings and a cassette
El Michels Affair - Return To The 37th Chamber
Eight years later, on 14 April 2017, Big Crown put out the sequel, and it is the stranger of the two. Rather than running at the obvious classics again, Michels picked oddball candidates such as "4th Chamber," "Verbal Intercourse" and "Shaolin Brew," retitled "Iron's Theme" as "Iron Man," and threaded original interludes between them. Lee Fields, Shannon Wise and Lady Wray sing on it, which turns several of these into psych-soul songs in their own right. Return To The 37th Chamber is the deeper dive.
Why it's worth purchasing:
- The 2017 Big Crown follow-up, built on deep cuts instead of the obvious ones
- Lead vocals from Lee Fields, Shannon Wise and Lady Wray
- Original interlude tracks that make it a real album rather than a covers set
El Michels Affair meets Liam Bailey - Ekundayo Inversions (Instrumentals)
Liam Bailey's debut for Big Crown, Ekundayo, arrived in late 2020 with Michels producing. The following summer Michels reinterpreted it as Ekundayo Inversions, and this edition strips the vocals from both versions across thirteen instrumental tracks so the arrangements and the players carry it. Big Crown's own description is the right one: these use blueprints left behind by the reggae pioneers rather than copying their records. Ekundayo Inversions is the headphone record in the catalog.
Why it's worth purchasing:
- Thirteen instrumentals drawn from both Ekundayo and the Inversions reworking
- The clearest look at how Michels builds a rhythm track, with nothing on top
- Reggae and dub approaches applied to modern soul, not period pastiche
El Michels Affair & Black Thought - Glorious Game
Michels and Tariq Trotter, the emcee from The Roots who records as Black Thought, started trading ideas in 2020 and finished twelve songs in a little over half an hour of music, out on Big Crown on 14 April 2023. Trotter called it one of his most personal projects, writing about growing up in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Philadelphia, and the Big Crown roster fills in behind him, with Lady Wray, Brainstory, Son Little and Kirby all turning up. We have the black pressing, the Sky High color pressing and the Blood Smoke instrumentals.
Why it's worth purchasing:
- Twelve songs in roughly thirty-one minutes, produced by Leon Michels, April 2023
- Black Thought's most autobiographical writing, set against live soul instead of loops
- Three pressings here, including a separate instrumentals edition for beat listening
El Michels Affair - 24 Hr Sports
The newest album came out on Big Crown on 5 September 2025, and it takes its look and its mood from old sports magazines and the advertising around them, all aspirational gloss over cinematic soul. Norah Jones, Florence Adooni and Clairo each sing a track, and "Say Goodbye" is the one that tends to send people back to the start. 24 Hr Sports is on the shelf alongside a translucent red pressing.
Why it's worth purchasing:
- The 2025 Big Crown album, produced by Leon Michels
- Guest vocals from Norah Jones, Florence Adooni and Clairo
- Two pressings here, including a translucent red edition
Where else to look
Three El Michels Affair albums sit outside this shelf and are worth knowing about: Sounding Out the City, the 2005 Truth & Soul debut, and Adult Themes and Yeti Season, both on Big Crown in 2020 and 2021. On the 7 inch side we do carry a good part of the singles catalog, including C.R.E.A.M. b/w Glaciers of Ice, Duel of the Iron Mics b/w Bring Da Ruckus, Shimmy Shimmy Ya b/w Incarcerated Scarfaces, Say Goodbye b/w Magica and Anticipate b/w Indifference. If the 37th Chamber records are your entry point, our Wu-Tang Clan guide covers the source material and the solo run it grew out of.
If You Like El Michels Affair
- Wu-Tang Clan: the original text for two of the five albums above, from 36 Chambers through the solo catalog.
- Khruangbin: the same patience and the same love of space, built from Thai funk and dub rather than Staten Island rap.
- The Budos Band: Michels' Daptone-adjacent cousins, heavier on the Afro-funk and the horns.
- Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band: another Big Crown act turning rap classics into instrumentals, this time on steel pans.
- Durand Jones & The Indications: for when you want the vocal side of this sound rather than the instrumental one.
From here, browse the Funk / Soul / Disco and Hip-Hop collections, or see every pressing in one place in the El Michels Affair collection.
