From a Times Square Mickey Costume to XL Recordings: 'Standing on the Corner II' Finally Streams

On September 11, 2025, someone dressed as Mickey Mouse stood motionless in Times Square. Sharp-eyed fans who'd caught an Instagram post from Standing On The Corner that morning knew that handing this Mickey $50 would get you a DVD — the only physical version of "Standing on the Corner II," the experimental band's third album, packaged with an accompanying film of the same name. Anyone who missed it might have later attended a November listening session featuring 89-year-old pianist Bertha Hope, or caught the band's intimate show alongside Styles P at the legendary Sugar Hill Restaurant & Supper Club.

The entire album leaked as an hour-long film, with every special guest credited under an alias, no official links to be found anywhere online, and pirated uploads getting taken down almost instantly. It was a flat-out refusal of the attention economy — and it made "II" a talking point before most people had even heard it. A full year later, on September 11, 2026, "Standing on the Corner II" has officially arrived on streaming platforms, released through the label XL Recordings.

"I feel disgusted by media in a way that's different from when I was studying media studies," says Gio Escobar, a New School graduate who majored in journalism and jazz. "Now that I'm on the other side of media, I can really see how much of it exists just to make money for people who have nothing to do with the content itself." The DVD's closing credits noted the album was "made possible by XL Recordings for $0.00" — and it's that same label that's now bringing it to streaming.

"I'm aware that we're doing this interview right now, and I don't know how much attention it'll bring to the music, but I know I have to make a decision: to work with you, to sell what you're trying to sell," Escobar says. "You constantly have to deal with institutions that basically grew out of the graves of you and your people — that's a choice I've always had to face."

The band's last full-length was 2017's "Red Burns," though they never really went quiet in the years since: co-founder Jaspar Marsalis left in 2019 to launch his own project as Slauson Malone, while Escobar went on to collaborate with MIKE, Earl Sweatshirt, and Solange, who later became his girlfriend. Before officially signing to XL, there was a moment when it seemed like Standing On The Corner was about to blow up — instead, the band pulled back, refocusing on live performance and interactive art, including "Taino Needle Science Institute," a pop-up clinic blending traditional acupuncture with drone music, and "Seven Prepared Pianos for the Seven African Powers," an installation shown at MoMA PS1.

"When we first started putting out music, marketing didn't matter at all," Escobar says. "Now it matters, because we've signed with a label. The landscape's different — once you realize things have changed, you have to raise the stakes, or you get left behind."

Beyond Times Square, Another Kind of Disappearance in a Mural

On the day of the interview, Escobar took me to see a mural memorializing Half-A-Mill — a 1990s New York rapper who shared stages with Kool G Rap, AZ, and N.O.R.E., and died by suicide in 2003. His voice appears in an interlude on the DVD version of "Standing on the Corner II," but that segment won't be on the streaming release. The mural's outline is still visible, though it's already been weathered and worn by time.

After the interview, Escobar sent a long email explaining why he'd brought me to see the mural: "It wasn't just about pointing out how obvious a metaphor this fading image is for the whole community, but about talking through how media strips art from the cultural context that produced it, accelerating the disappearance of local culture and legend." He wrote that myth is essential to any society, and how myth gets passed down matters just as much — things that used to belong to a community, carried by word of mouth, are now being crudely swallowed and digested by a different system of knowledge and value altogether. He compared this shift in context to African artifacts displayed in the halls of Western colonial institutions: "I don't see much difference between a Dogon Kanaga mask becoming a museum piece and a community's legend turning into a Genius.com annotation, or getting casually cited in an album review."

This kind of re-placement of "artifacts" is exactly the memorial Escobar builds for the living and the dead alike. "Standing on the Corner II" brings in Solange, Danny Brown, and Styles P, while its lyrics and arrangements are threaded through with traces of Sonia Sanchez, Frank Lloyd Wright, Aaliyah, Chuck Berry, and even D.C. punk label Dischord Records, the blaxploitation film "Coffy," and barbershop quartet harmonies. The album settles into an underground-rap slow burn on "MAN MAY NOT LAST," veers into post-rockabilly territory on its take of "ROLL OVER BEETHOVEN," carries a Brill Building-style pop arrangement on "GIMME MY GUN," and leans into a D'Angelo-esque murmur on "BABY OH BABY." The whole thing moves at a breakneck collage pace, but what really rewards close listening are the details buried inside — clues tied to this city, to the band's own decades of culture and personal memory.