Artist Feature · September 11, 2026

Hip Club Groove Return After 30 Years With “Dead Words”

Before Halifax hip-hop had a mythology, Hip Club Groove were helping build the room. Three decades after their last new music, Cheklove Shakil, MacKenzie and Moves are back together.

Northern Dial artwork

“Dead Words” opens with a situation Hip Club Groove never really got to have the first time around: a Canadian hip-hop audience that already knows there is history behind it.

The Nova Scotia group came out of Truro and became part of Halifax's early-1990s music scene at a moment when the city was being watched nationally for guitar bands. Hip Club Groove moved through that same network without pretending rap belonged somewhere else.

The best-known lineup brought together MCs Cheklove Shakil and Derek MacKenzie with DJ Moves. Their 1993 Cool Beans EP was followed by Trailer Park Hip Hop in 1994 on murderecords, the label founded by Sloan. That connection matters because it describes how unusually porous the Halifax scene could be. Hip Club Groove played bills outside a narrowly defined rap circuit and reached listeners who may have arrived for an indie-rock band.

They weren't a novelty inside someone else's scene. The group was making rap while helping establish a local audience for it. Later Halifax artists including Buck 65 and Sixtoo emerged from overlapping circles, and Moves went on to become one of the region's enduring producers and DJs.

Hip Club Groove released Land of the Lost in 1996. After that, the group's members moved into other projects and the catalogue became the sort of Canadian rap history that circulates through old CDs, vinyl, message-board recollections and conversations between people who were there.

That makes “Dead Words” more interesting than a standard reunion single. The gap is about 30 years. Nobody had to make this record to keep an album cycle alive.

Cheklove and MacKenzie return to the microphones while Moves handles the production and cuts. The track lands on Bassments of Badmen 4, Hand'Solo Records' 30th-anniversary compilation.

The important correction is that Bassments of Badmen 4 is a various-artists compilation, not a new Hip Club Groove album. “Dead Words” is their contribution and their first new song in three decades.

It also avoids the easiest reunion trap. The track doesn't spend its whole runtime asking to be congratulated for existing. The group sounds interested in rapping again, which is a much better reason to come back.

There does not appear to be an embeddable YouTube upload for “Dead Words” yet, so here is a look back at Hip Club Groove before the three-decade gap.

Canadian hip-hop history often gets told from Toronto outward. Hip Club Groove are a reminder that scenes were forming elsewhere at the same time, sometimes in strange proximity to entirely different musical movements.

For Northern Dial, that is what makes the return worth more than a news hit. “Dead Words” is current music attached to a deeper route through Nova Scotia rap, Hand'Solo, Buck 65, Sixtoo and the wider Halifax independent scene.