While they're busy working on their new album, De La Soul are releasing 'aRe yoU iN' this week, a forty-five minute work-out mix in conjunction with Nike and iTunes. A few things make this a notable release for the legendary trio: it's a seamless blend of new material that isn't cut up into tracks. Instead, the idea is to create one long track that hits the highs and lows of a projected work out. If it sounds tough, it was.

"It got a little tricky towards the end. The initial stuff was really cool: Nike made sure that we understood we should be De La," Posdnuos tells The BoomBox. "Runners came back with the feedback of 'this really got me going, this song was what we coasted to.' We took those particular songs and then went to the next phase, which was connecting them. Bridging everything. Because it needed to be continuous."

While the jock's feedback certainly helped, the group also got on the workout cycle to figure out if what was happening actually made sense. "This wasn't something we just wanted to do and give Nike some nonsense songs. We really stand behind our music and the quality of our albums, and I really consider this a part of the De La legacy."

With that in mind, 'aRe yoU iN' is easily one of the more eclectic sounding De La releases; with the help of Flosstradamus on production, they're mixing classic funk beats with fast, electronic breaks that would hypothetically work you up as well as slow you down. "At some point within the first five to fifteen minutes you can really pick it up higher," Posdnous explains of the workout intent. "You can get your peaks, you can hit your valleys and go a little lower. It's really formatted to how a runner would run and pace themselves."

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