Within a year of releasing his first two mixtapes, and before he can legally drink, Gradient is back with his biggest and boldest project yet: a full-length studio album featuring a diverse cast of underground hip-hop heavyweights like The Jokerr, The Palmer Squares, Guante, Ecid, and more. But rather than being a simple and scattered assortment of rap tracks, Ambition is a carefully crafted album, unified under the themes of self-empowerment, perseverance, and dedication. Executive produced by Sammy Warm Hands & Odar of Eugene, Oregon hip-hop crew The ILLusionists, this versatile album is sure to have something for everybody. Here's an excerpt from Gradient's liner notes: "This album revolves around my optimism about our collective future in a messed up society. A society where for so many young people, individual self-esteem is undermined, identities and standards of beauty/success are manufactured, unique individuals are stratified into polarized groups based on superficial qualities, and education systems frequently trample (rather than foster) students’ creativity, passion, and sense of self-worth. It’s no wonder why I regularly meet incredible young folks who are crippled by insecurity, who apologize constantly without reason, and who aren’t empowered enough to believe in their own dreams. Meeting these people is devastating. But at the end of the day, devastation isn’t worth much unless it inspires one to take actions which have meaningful impacts. On this CD you’ll hear my devastation, my inspiration, and my action. Hopefully your listening to it (and potentially sharing it) will amount to some meaningful impact, and I won’t have spent thousands of dollars that I didn’t really have on creating a useless collection of sounds. While this is a rap album, I’m not a hip-hop artist. I’m a 20 year-old Japanese-American dude from a small Oregonian river town who attends a private college near a turkey farm in an even smaller Minnesotan river town. I’m a dude who fell in love with an art form created to tell stories of urban African-American solidarity and struggle, and who starting using it to tell his own stories about Pokémon and being proud of being weird. I have no idea what you’ll think of this album. You might find it pretentious, heavy-handed, preachy, corny, or maybe just wack. But if you listen to the whole thing, I hope it’s evident that I believed in every word I wrote. That I felt that individuals can and must channel every bit of the confidence, self-assuredness, and ambition they can muster in order to achieve whatever their individual dreams are (not because we live in a meritocracy with a level playing field, but precisely because we do not). That I sincerely thought that everyone deserves to be believed in. Inspired music has pushed me forward in everything I’ve done, and I hope this music pushes someone too. This album may not be for everybody, but maybe it’s for you. I appreciate you giving it a chance. " For free music: http://www.gradientmusic.com For updates: http://www.facebook.com/gradientmusic For videos: http://www.youtube.com/thomaslikesmusic