Shatter the Standards

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Milestones: Section.80 by Kendrick Lamar
A 23-year-old with a co-sign from Dr. Dre made an album about his generation’s addictions. Fifteen years later, the first week’s 5,000 copies look like…
 • Shatter the Standards and Brandon O'Sullivan
Album Review: Visitor by SIENNA SPIRO
On the debut of orchestral soul cut at Abbey Road and Electric Lady, a 20-year-old Londoner writes love as a lease and signs it with the end date…
 • Shatter the Standards and Darryl Keyes
Milestones: It Was Written by Nas
On his 1996 follow-up to Illmatic, Nas hands an entire song to a Desert Eagle, narrates a contract killing from the passenger seat, and opens the whole…
 • Shatter the Standards and Xavier Thomas
Milestones: Peaceful Journey by Heavy D & The Boyz
Heavy D cut it the year hardcore rap hardened, then hid grief and a street conscience inside the dance songs. Peaceful Journey is the widest record…
 • Shatter the Standards and Terryl Jameson
Milestones: Stakes Is High by De La Soul
Three albums deep in invented slang and inside jokes, De La Soul dropped the code on their fourth and said plainly what they thought of a culture they…
 • Shatter the Standards and Miles Everette
Milestones: blackSUMMERS’night by Maxwell
Seven years of quiet produced the most honest R&B album of 2016’s stacked summer, and the most ignored.
 • Shatter the Standards and Imani Raven
Wednesday Roundups #156: 25 New Projects You Should Listen to Now
Listen to new releases from Wyclef Jean, Cory Henry, Joseph Solomon, Nia Smith, Gwen Bunn, Nectar Woode, Rico Love, Devon Gilfillian, Radamiz, Kamaal…
 • Shatter the Standards

June 2026

June 2026 Roundups: The Best Albums of the Month
June 2026 buried the rest of the year in two weeks. Seventy-some records deep, and the drop-off doesn’t start anywhere near the bottom.
 • Shatter the Standards
Album Review: DRY CLEAN ONLY by S!LENCE & tenten
Over a run of tenten beats built from samples, S!LENCE runs dry-cleaning bills, luxury watches, and a brutal New York winter through his verses. It's…
 • Shatter the Standards and Phil
Album Review: BOUNDS by Beedie & Nice Rec
Beedie gives Nice Rec the whole board and turns his scars into the loudest thing in the room. His most gripping writing in years, gilded front to back.
 • Shatter the Standards and Nehemiah
Album Review: Life Is... Fleeting by Lync Lone
Lync Lone writes dread and defiance of weed, money pressure, and Rochester street names.
 • Shatter the Standards and Wesley Durham
Bad for the Morale of the Office
earthsignchels raps her father’s cancer death, crude and tender, and Audre Lorde wrote her mastectomy and her one-breasted body exactly as they were.
 • Blackpolitan and Tunde Albright
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