Release Everything: A Car Ride, An Album, and The People Who Were There For All Of It

It was around midnight on the night of May 8th. We had just finished recording for the night at The Fields and I was driving Anthony back to his house. The album was done. Complete. We had called it, looked at each other, said that is it, mixing time, and got in the car. I do not remember exactly what came on. It was probably my phone. It might have been Mac Miller's Self Care, which would make a certain kind of sense because Shit Ain't What It Seems has a lot of Mac Miller energy in its bones. Whatever it was, it led somewhere.

We started talking about posthumous releases. Whether they were right or wrong. Whether artists would want their unfinished work put out after they were gone. Keanu was in the car and he is still honestly on the fence about the whole concept. He said his piece. Then Anthony said his.

He was casual about it. Not heavy, not dramatic, just matter of fact the way Anthony could be when he had already thought something through. He said something along the lines of if I was in that position I would want everything released. Fuck it, release it all. There is no point in holding onto it.

That was it. Normal conversation. Midnight drive. We pulled up to his place, he got out, and that was the last time we recorded together.

Four days later he was gone.

I was in that car. Keanu was in that car. We both heard him say it. And now I am doing exactly what he told me to do.

Return to Sender drops May 12th. One year. The rollout for Shit Ain't What It Seems starts that day and does not stop until the full album is out [REDACTED]. Anthony told me to release everything and that is what is happening.

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What Makes a Posthumous Release Actually Work

Since we are on the subject I want to talk about this for a minute because I have thoughts and most of them are not polite.

Posthumous releases have a bad reputation and they have earned it. The music industry has a long and disgusting history of labels digging through a dead artist's hard drive looking for anything with a vocal on it, slapping together a tracklist of rough demos and half-finished ideas the artist would have deleted themselves, and releasing it under the guise of honoring a legacy while actually just trying to squeeze money out of grief. There is no quality control because there is nobody left to say no. There is no filter because the person who knew what was supposed to stay private is gone. What you end up with is music that was never meant to be heard being pushed out into the world with a marketing campaign built entirely around the fact that someone died.

That is not honoring anybody. That is exploitation with a sad font on the press release.

And then there is the AI resurrection bullshit which I am not even going to get deep into right now because it makes me genuinely angry. Using machine learning to fabricate new performances from a dead artist's voice is not preservation. It is not tribute. It is grave robbing with better software and I want nothing to do with it.

The good posthumous releases, the ones that actually mean something, have a few things in common. The artist finished the work or got close enough that the people who loved them could complete it with integrity. The people making the decisions knew the artist, understood the vision, and gave enough of a damn to do it right. Mac Miller's Circles is the clearest example I can point to. Jon Brion finishing that album was an act of genuine love and you can hear it. The album feels like a complete thought even though Mac never got to call it done himself. That is what it is supposed to feel like.

SAWIS is complicated because it does not fit neatly into either category and I want to be honest about that.

Anthony finished his parts. His vocals are done. The album is his, completely and fully, in every way that matters. But the features were not wrapped before he passed and that is something I have been carrying. Static Soul dropped something incredible on this album. Keanu and Caiden's parts were not done yet either. So we had to finish those sessions without Anthony in the room, which is a weird and heavy thing to navigate because Anthony cared deeply about every voice on his records. Forty-five takes on two bars meticulous. Getting those feature performances right, making sure they matched the intention of what he built, mattered to me the same way it would have mattered to him.

I think we got it right. I have to believe that because the alternative is not something I can sit with.

What makes me feel okay about releasing this album is the same thing that makes me feel okay about most of the decisions I have made since May 12th. Anthony told me to. He sat in a car at midnight four days before he died, having just finished recording the thing, and said release everything. He did not say release it if it is perfect. He did not say release it if all the features are done. He said fuck it, release it all, there is no point in holding onto it. So that is what we are doing and we are doing it the way he would have wanted it done because the people finishing it are the same people who were there when it was being made.

That is as clean as this gets. And for a fully independent underground label in Lincoln Nebraska with no major label money and no outside infrastructure, I think it is pretty damn clean.

Here is the part that makes the release everything directive feel even bigger than it did in that car.

SAWIS is not the only thing Anthony left behind. He was simultaneously working on an EP that goes alongside the album and had the majority of that done too. Not as complete as SAWIS but mostly there. Beyond that there are loose songs, tracks that were never placed on an album, just existing on a hard drive waiting. And then there are features. Anthony recorded guest appearances for other artists that are currently sitting in those artists' hands and I genuinely do not know when or if those will come out. That is outside my control. But they exist.

When Anthony said release everything he did not know the full scope of what everything meant. I am not sure I fully knew either until I started taking inventory. The man was prolific and private about it in equal measure. He was always working on something. That is who he was.

So the rollout for Shit Ain't What It Seems is the beginning, not the whole story. There is more and we are going to do right by all of it the same way we are doing right by this album. On our timeline, with the same care, because that is what he told us to do.

Anthony "Jinx" Jenkins.

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The People Who Were in the Room

The voice you are going to hear when this album starts announcing itself to the world belongs to Joshua Mackey. Not on the album itself, on the promotional material, the stuff that comes before the music and sets the table for what is coming. He is also on the enemyX album, which if you have heard the Montana Secrets radio ad, the cheesy sensual one with the moaning that sounds like it was pulled from an actual rural Montana adult bookstore that bought thirty seconds of local airtime, you already know what he is capable of. He played that completely straight. I want to tell you who he is so that all of that means something when you hear it.

On May 18th at Anthony's celebration of life, Josh and Mike were behind the bar making margaritas. Anthony's favorite drink. The same recipe they had been working on together for months, the same one Anthony had loved two nights before he died after the last show at the Bourbon Theatre. That is who Josh is. The kind of person who shows up and does what needs doing without being asked and without making it about himself. His voice is on the promotional material for this album because that is exactly what he has been doing for years and it is the most fitting thing I can think of.

Joshua Mackey. Mackey. DJ Mackey. We've called him all three.

Mackey is a professional voiceover artist. He runs Mackey Media Group and has been doing this since 2012. We are not talking about local car dealership ads and wedding videos either. (Although he'll most likely do that if you ask him) His client list includes Hulu, Nissan, Honda, Pepsi, Microsoft, Kellogg's, Duolingo, and a hell of a lot more. Before that he spent seven years at iHeartMedia as an on-air host, production director, and news director, hosting a morning talk show, doing live remotes, covering emergency weather and fire broadcasts, and winning Awards. He built a real career out of his voice and has been running it independently for over a decade. He also spent his twenties DJing, chasing the same instinct from a different angle: control the room, read the energy, and know exactly when to bring the next thing in. He's older and wiser now but he's still good at it. He was the DJ for two enemyX live shows including the Four Winds 2024 album release which was the most theatrically unhinged set we have ever done. Since Anthony passed and enemyX is no longer a thing, Mackey has agreed to be the Sugar Cones DJ going forward. He just keeps showing up.

I met him in 2020 through a mutual friend named Andy who pulled him into a Rocket League group. Me and Mike and Josh started playing together online and hit it off immediately. On the nights Mike worked, me and Anthony would run Warzone with Josh. That became a nightly thing for years. If you know anything about how this label operates you know by now that the 3 AM Xbox party chats were where a lot of the real planning happened. The late night conversations that turned into actual decisions. Josh was in a lot of those. He was not a background presence. He was in the room for a lot of what became real.

We only knew him online at first. Rocket League, Warzone, party chats. He was in Ogallala, about 300 miles west of Lincoln, close enough that in mid 2023 me and Anthony and Jess just decided to make the drive and go stay with him for a few days. Hanging out at Josh's was deep conversations about everything, old fashioneds, watching YouTube, making food, smoking, just being present with each other. Me and Anthony smoked way too many cigarettes. He helped record a track that ended up on the enemyX album on that trip. We went back again in 2024. From 2023 through 2025 he came up to Lincoln plenty of times before he eventually moved here. He became real family over those years, not the kind you are born into but the kind you build by showing up repeatedly.

Me and Mike had a conversation at some point about wanting to make something more permanent work for Josh. I said we could use help at the group home I work at. Mike and I made a plan and approached Josh with it, and not long after that Mike and I were in Ogallala helping load up a truck and Mike was driving a U-Haul out of Ogallala and moving Josh across the entire state from western to eastern Nebraska. He lives in lincoln now. He works at the group home. I think it was good for everybody.

Two nights before Anthony died, on May 10th, we played the Bourbon Theatre. Biggest crowd energy we had ever had. After the show a group of us went over to Mike's place. Mike and Josh made margaritas from a special recipe they had been working on together. Anthony loved them. He had a great night.

On May 18th we held Anthony's celebration of life at the Resonator at Turbine Flats. Big open room, slideshow of Anthony playing on the projector screen, five or six giant poster boards full of photos from his life covering the walls, a little book by the door you could sign. People showed up that I did not expect. Local musicians, sound guys from venues around the city, people who knew Anthony in ways I did not even fully know. It was a real turnout.

Mike and Josh bartended it.

And they made the margaritas. The same recipe. Because Anthony loved them.

I do not have a lot more to say about that. Some things just are what they are.

Josh and Mike both have Killing Field Records hockey jerseys. So does every signed artist on the roster. Player numbers on the back are reserved for artists. I have 00. Anthony had 1. Keanu is 2. Caiden is 3. Josh and Mike do not have numbers because they are not on the roster, but they have jerseys because they earned them. We do not give those out to just anybody. Mike's says Laszerith on the back, his gamertag. Josh's just says Mackey. That is not nothing. That is family without the paperwork.

Anthony knew Josh. Respected him. Considered him a friend even though they mostly existed in the same space through me. He was on those Warzone calls. He was in those party chats. He heard Josh's Montana Secrets performance and thought it was perfect for what we were doing because it absolutely is.

Josh has done voiceover work for the SAWIS promotional material. His voice is going to be part of how this album announces itself to the world. That feels exactly right to me. He was in the room for the conversations where this album got planned. He should be in the room when it arrives.

Mike let us record two of the most important albums in KFR history in his basement while he drew robots at work and called them doodles.

Josh spent years on 3 AM Warzone calls helping plan a label from a house in Ogallala, then bartended the celebration of life of the man we were building it with on May 18th and made his favorite drink one more time.

Neither of them are on the roster. Neither of them have a title. Both of them are completely woven into what this label is and what this album is going to mean.

Legends Are Born Here.

Sometimes they are born in a basement in Lincoln and a living room in Ogallala and a car on the ride home after the last session.

KFR