Shatter the Standards

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How Tay Keith Made the Mainstream Sound Like Memphis
Tay Keith made national No. 1s out of a piano figure, a slab of 808s, and a lot of empty room, and left the rapper on top to finish a song he'd built…
 • Shatter the Standards and Murffey Zavier
Album Review: PROJECT X by Key Glock
Twenty tracks of money, codeine, and motion in the same dry deadpan, and Key Glock is good enough at it that even the cuts riding one word go down easy.
 • Shatter the Standards and LeMarcus
Album Review: THE GENTLEMEN’S CLUB by YG
Hiring a hitman to kill a man who turns out to be himself, YG turns the hardest register of West Coast rap inward and writes some of the best songs of…
 • Shatter the Standards and Phil
Album Review: AMA by Ama
Across her self-titled second album, Ama is almost always the one ending it. The breakups are the funniest, meanest writing she has put down.
 • Shatter the Standards and Monica LaSalle
Album Review: The Story of Michael and Tanya by The War and Treaty
The married duo splits each confession between two voices, then arms its love songs with scripture. Their fifth album is their most assured set of…
 • Shatter the Standards and Renée Holloway
Milestones: Secrets by Toni Braxton
Secrets is a grown woman’s album in a year when R&B was getting younger. Braxton went to Babyface and Diane Warren, and the music has outlasted…
 • Shatter the Standards and Cierra Marcel
New Music Drops: June 19, 2026
As new albums and singles get constantly flooded into our radar, look no further than skimming through the release week of June 19th. We know it can be…
 • Shatter the Standards
Album Review: Overture by Glenn Lewis
Love shows up priced, doubted, and half-regretted across Overture, voiced as often from a woman’s side as Glenn Lewis’s own. It is his clearest-eyed…
 • Shatter the Standards and Sydni Carter-Reed
Mixtape Review: WHACK'S MUSEUM by Tierra Whack
Tierra Whack’s first project since WORLD WIDE WHACK runs on homophones and name-flips. It’s her densest writing yet, and the grief sits right under the…
 • Shatter the Standards and Blaise Freeman
Mixtape Review: Resurrection by Chlöe & Timbaland
Across her mixtape with Timbaland, Chlöe runs every romance, from seduction to kiss-off to confession.
 • Shatter the Standards and Brielle Saint-Amour
EP Review: HOWL by Lee Lewis
Lee Lewis builds six soul songs around one affair, from honeymoon to hardened exit. He writes about wanting a man who wrecks him, and you believe every…
 • Shatter the Standards and Tabia N. Mullings
Album Review: Quantum Entanglement by Dreamer Isioma
Dreamer Isioma sings about jumping off the world and begging to be loved in the same breath. Quantum Entanglement turns self-destruction into devotion.
 • Shatter the Standards and Darryl Keyes
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