This summer Vulture wondered out loud if anyone cared about a Libertines reunion, and the answer (acquired via what is admittedly a flawed polling mechanism) was a resounding yes. So, now we're asking about another British act that's had some success Stateside but never fully caught on: The Streets, a.k.a. Mike Skinner, a cheeky, minutiae-loving rapper who has made two great albums and two so-so ones over the last decade. His American audience seemed to have wilted significantly after 2008's Everything Is Borrowed, which Vulture dismissed then as “[Skinner] in post-crisis mode, droning about existentialism, delivering a semi-nauseating sermon on depression, and worrying about the apocalypse.” But, since, Skinner's gotten back to being a ton of fun: He's palling around with fans on Twitter, dropping amusing in-the-studio clips, and putting out new, possibly-hinting-of-a-creative-resurgence tracks. Here's one of his latest, “Too Numb,” presumably slotted for the upcoming Computer and Blues, which Skinner has said repeatedly will be the last album he releases under the Streets moniker (that's good, because it will allow one of the thousands of rappers surely pissed off about a white guy from England beating them to the rap name "The Streets" to pick it up). Does it bode well?

[Pretty Much Amazing]