Open Mike Eagle is a man of many talents. Right now, I’m way behind on the latest season of the What Had Happened Was podcast, in which Questlove takes OME on a deep dive through the Roots’ history, but it’s so good. Long before podcasting, though, Open Mike Eagle was an underground rap veteran with a storied career of his own. And now, Mike has started a new group with a couple of old friends.

If you’ve been playing attention to Open Mike Eagle’s recent music, a very worthy pursuit, then you’ve probably noticed a couple of names that keep coming up. Still Rift and Video Dave are old friends with Open Mike Eagle — all three are Chicagoans who now live in Los Angeles — and they rap on a lot of Mike’s records. The lead single from most recent Open Mike Eagle project, last year’s Another Triumph Of Ghetto Engineering, was “WFLD 32,” and that one’s got guest verses from Still Rift and Video Dave, as well as Hannibal Buress, another old Mike friend, rapping under his Eshu Tune alias. That’s just one example; these guys go back a long time. Now, Open Mike Eagle, Still Rift, and Video Dave have formalized that connection, forming a brand new rap group called Previous Industries.

The loose, affable on-record chemistry from these three rappers has long been evident, and you can hear it in the first two tracks that they’ve released under the Previous Industries name. Previous Industries have signed with Merge — a rare rap group on a storied indie rock label — and they’ve shared two new tracks that showcase that chemistry, the Child Actor-produced “Showbiz” and the Quelle Chris-produced “Braids.” Both songs are warm, unstructured, and pleasantly dense. Check them out below.

“Showbiz” b/w “Braids” is out now on Merge.