Standing on the Corner are raising the stakes

If you wanted to listen to Standing on the Corner II over the past year, you had to buy the full-length album, complete with an accompanying film, on DVD. But actually purchasing that DVD was easier said than done.

A year ago, on September 11th, 2025, a person dressed as Mickey Mouse stood still in bustling Times Square, which ranks alongside subway buskers and public urination as the most ignorable sights of New York City. But eagle-eyed fans of Standing On The Corner who heeded a single Instagram announcement that morning could hand the mouse $50 for a copy of the album.

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If they missed out at Times Square, maybe they stopped by a listening event that November featuring 89-year-old pianist Bertha Hope, or an intimate concert at the legendary Sugar Hill Restaurant & Supper Club featuring the band and Styles P. What initially seemed like a wild goose chase revealed itself as a patient tour of New York, woven together by the people and places that have shaped the group’s life in the city.

Released as an hour-long music video with pseudonymized features and no digital presence (bootlegged uploads were quickly deleted), Standing on the Corner II was a daring experiment in attention and rebellion against the vicious media cycle, a revolutionary release even before most could hear its music. But today, September 11th, 2026, exactly a year after Mickey Mouse peddled DVDs in Times Square, Standing on the Corner II has arrived on streaming services, allowing the masses to experience Gio Escobar and his ensemble’s grand statement on our shared sacred past and daunting present circumstances.

“I'm repulsed by media, in a different way than when I was studying it,” says Escobar when we meet for an interview. “Now I'm on the other end of it, and I recognize just how much of it really is about generating revenue for people who are selling something they have absolutely nothing to do with.”

Escobar, who attended The New School for journalism and jazz, resents the media the way only someone who deeply understands its machinations could. Culture dies after commodification, he tells me, especially Black and brown youth culture. But the creative process, like life in general, is full of contradictions. The range of influences in his music would have been utterly unthinkable prior to the amassed cultural wealth of the digital era. The album was kept off the internet thanks to audio ID technology undeniably intertwined with the much-feared apparati of the surveillance state. And while the end credits of the DVD read in part, “This has been made possible by a dollar amount of: $0.00 from XL Recordings,” that label is responsible for bringing Standing on the Corner II to traditional streaming platforms.

“I’m realistic about the fact that we’re gonna do this interview. I don’t know how much of this will actually bring traction to the music, but I do know that I have to make a conscious decision to conspire with you to sell what it is you have to sell,” Escobar says. “You’re constantly having to make deals with entities that quite literally were born and created out of the graves of you and your people. That’s just a decision I find myself constantly having to make.”

Standing On The Corner approached Standing on the Corner II with newfound thematic and structural clarity. Their latest album marks the first full-length from the New York experimental ensemble since 2017’s masterpiece Red Burns, but the group has been far from dormant in the years since. Even without co-founder Jaspar Marsalis, who left the ensemble to record as Slauson Malone in 2019, the critical darlings were on a stunning trajectory, working with major players like MIKE, Earl Sweatshirt, and Solange. Even before the band signed to indie stalwarts XL, there was a sense that Standing on the Corner was about to be everywhere.

Then they retreated. The era of collaboration had left Escobar disillusioned with the vicious teeth of the music industry. Standing on the Corner became smaller and more specific, focusing on live performances and interactive arts, including Taino Needle Science Institute, a temporary acupuncture clinic that paired the traditional medicine with drone music from the band, and Seven Prepared Pianos for the Seven African Powers, a prepared piano exhibit staged at MoMA PS1. But the need to create overpowered his skepticism.

“When we were starting to release our music, [marketing] was not at all relevant,” Escobar said. “Now it’s relevant because we’re contracted to a record label. The stakes are different, and when you see that things have changed, you have to raise the stakes. Or you die.”

As you might have gleaned, there’s very little about the music industry that appeals to Gio Escobar. But when he plays the game, he insists on doing it on its own terms. Though Escobar makes his vivid reluctance around self-promotion clear, he offers a sincere kindness throughout our interaction, accepting if not excited about our roles in this capitalist exchange.

When we meet up, Escobar takes me to a mural honoring Half-A-Mill, a New York artist from the 1990’s who rapped alongside the likes of Kool G Rap, AZ, and N.O.R.E. before he died by suicide in 2003. Half-A-Mill appears on an interlude on the DVD version of Standing On The Corner II, though that track won’t be available on streaming platforms. The mural remains recognizable, though faded from years of neglect. After our interview, Santiago emails me an extended comment on the mural, saying in part:

Escobar’s effort to incorporate these “artifacts” is his form of memorial, he tells me, for both the dead and the living, the bygone and the present. Standing on the Corner II features the likes of Solange, Danny Brown and Styles P, but references everything from Sonia Sanchez, Frank Lloyd Wright, Aaliyah, and Chuck Berry, to D.C. punk label Dischord Records, blaxploitation film Coffy, and barbershop quartets. And though Escobar has built his life around a fundamental distrust of the culture industry, it’s clear that his omnivorous appetite for culture defines his artistry.

Standing on the Corner’s ability to create sonic futures has long been rooted in its deep understanding of material pasts, but Standing on the Corner II draws the most explicit lines between the ensemble and its cultural forefathers yet. The resulting tracklist moves fast between sauntering underground rap on “MAN MAY NOT LAST,” post-rockabilly on its “ROLL OVER BEETHOVEN” rework, Brill Building-pop on “GIMME MY GUN,” D’Angelo-esque croons on “BABY OH BABY,” and more. Each highlights an ingenious mutation of the city’s sonic identity, and while the album as a whole looks pretty good in composite, it’s the record’s minutiae, stuffed with decades of the group’s cultural, artistic, and personal lineages, that bears the greatest fruit.