Over the past decade, the UK artist Jai Paul has cemented his legend by barely releasing any music at all. Ever since he came out with the supremely promising one-two punch of “BTSTU” and “Jasmine” in 2011 and 2012 — and ever since Drake rapped over “BTSTU” — Paul has gone into full difficult-artist mode, and his releases have been few and far between. An album of demos, uploaded to Bandcamp, was swiftly removed, and that was eight years ago. It finally came out, along with a couple of new songs, in 2019. The Paul Institute, the project of Jai Paul and his brother A.K. Paul, released an EP last year. And now Jai Paul has found a fun, nostalgic way to drop a sliver of a new song.

On Twitter last night, Paul noted that “it’s 10 years today since i put out my first single” and that he “just wanted 2 do something fun n say thank u to everyone whos been down from the start.” So Paul has essentially re-created his old MySpace page at this website.

https://twitter.com/jai_paul/status/1384681737368784900?s=21

This new version of Paul’s MySpace page has an audio player with seven tracks, including “BTSTU” and the self-explanatory “100k hits on myspace – thank you.” Most of those tracks have appeared on the internet, in one form or another, over the years. Deep in there, though, there’s also a short new track called “Super Salamander.” The chaotic track opens with a little kid begging for a salamander, and then it crashes headlong into a smeary take on early-’90s rave.

The site also has a list of Paul’s influences — Dilla, Whitney Houston, Pete Rock & CL Smooth — a Hotmail address, and a series of quotes from unimpressed reviews that I think are probably fake. (Paul quotes my former boss Chuck Eddy calling him an “affected little hermaphro-squeaker trying to come off transgressive, or whatever the fuck he’s doing,” which honestly does sound like something Chuck might write.) As The FADER points out, the Reddit user ghost_bubbles has also found that there are two new remixes of “BTSTU” hidden in the site’s source. You can mess around with the whole thing here.