Girl Talk goes underground with collaborative rap EP

If you’re a Millennial of a certain age, you probably still add Girl Talk to your workout or party mixes. The Pittsburgh mashup artist , real name Gregg Gillis, put the city on the electronic music map with his raucous, dance-friendly mixes of Top 40 hits and club rap, and often sold-out concerts. In recent years, however, Girl Talk has widened the scope of his skills. In 2022, he released Full Court Press , his first full-length collaborative album featuring another famed Pittsburgh music act, Wiz Khalifa. He also worked with T-Pain and Yaeji on the single “Believe in Ya” and “Real Life” with Sauce Walka. Girl Talk continues this collaborative spirit with Don’t Come To My House Sharing Your Location , an EP created with underground rap artists Michael Christmas and Chris Crack. A press release touts the six-track work, released on Aug. 14, as a “mutated version of a big-budget rap album,” featuring “irreverent wordplay, memorable refrains, inspired sample flips, and nonstop shit talking.” The description comes through in the EP’s pop culture-inspired, tongue-in-cheek song titles like “Garfield Hated Mondays But Didn’t Have A Job” and “Wouldn’t Go To Chili’s With Michael B. Jordan.” “I had been following Michael and Chris’ music for a while,” Gillis tells Pittsburgh City Paper . “I was thinking about working on something with each of them individually. Then I saw them interacting on Twitter, and the idea hit me. They both have very unique and distinct styles, but I thought there was some common ground in the overall tone of their work. I reached out with the idea, and they were down.” Gillis says he met with Michael Christmas and Chris Crack at the Pittsburgh studio ID Labs, where they recorded a large portion of the EP with noted producer Big Jerm. “We kept working on it for a while after that,