Kenny Dennis is a sixty-something, deep-fried, real estate lawyer from the South Side of Chicago—passionate about the Bears, mad about the Cubs, and unashamedly dedicated to “drip.” He’s married to a steady partner named Elaine and in love with a woman named Jueles, who supposedly died in a plane crash in ‘93. David Cohn, better known as Chicago MC Serengeti, has been rapping as the alter ego for over a decade; here, he hands him a cell phone and a livestream. Kenny talks into the “chat,” reading comments, showing off his fits to a room full of trolls and fans, letting the stream run as the women on either side of thirty years tear at him from off-screen. His voice stays nasal, blunt, less singing than speaking, the rhymes locking up like deadbolts as the train of thought derails.

In “STINGER”—Kenny’s long single verse where he trades bars with his own memory while driving along Lake Shore Drive—Elaine appears amid grocery bags. She’s built him “a whole cathedral out of coupons and some space,” comes home in the winter with exact change for the rent, the devotion he calls “No fireworks, nah, more like heating vents.” Jueles, however, weighs nothing. She walks back into a Portillo’s counter thirty years after the plane crash she never took, and Kenny almost drops the chili cheese. He can tell that “JUST TURN YOU BACK ON HOW YA BEEN” comes off to the chat as “Chat would say KD’s done crashing out.” He takes her with him anyway, second-guessing his decision from the passenger seat of a winter Grand Prix while she sleeps with one hand resting on his chest. In the freezer aisle later on that song, he’s “stunned and alone,” holding “banquet Salisbury steak like a rotary phone,” then it’s Portillo’s downtown again, him watching Jueles walk slowly through the lunch rush under the fluorescent lights until his knees buckle.

The disparity is the substance of “ELAINE LOVES MOVIES,” beyond quoting Tarkovsky, while he quotes Bo Jackson stats, where she calls an explosion “a symbol for pain,” labels a patch of wallpaper “emotional decay,” continues the letterbox “longer than CVS receipts,” and he eats M&Ms waiting on the mobsters in suits. Watching with her makes him feel smart for one moment and “dumb when I’m missing the point” the next. He rides the brown line in New Balance, reading essays at ten in the morning, trying to catch up. The longing gets more raw on the “DEGREES TO PEOPLE” hook, where he wonders if “Elaine’s still single” and if he’ll ever understand an Orson Welles shot the way she can. By the time the hook is over, the pain has started running-it’s chasing him, beating him up, coming back again.

On “TACO BELL RACING JACKET,” Kenny constructs himself out of objects-—“not real gold, but spiritually expensive” necklace, “Casio calculator worn by a real nerd,” the aforementioned title racing jacket, Oakley shades, New Balance 990s worn for his walk of fame, a pile that turns into evidence of the person until he’s insisting “I’m him, I’m him.” The song shifts; halfway in, Earl Lane informs him that Stallone wrote First Blood, that Rocky arrived when he had his last dollar, was about to give up and take up boxing training. “Just ‘cause you tried doesn’t mean you’re gonna go to the top,” he tells him, then in plainer terms, “Sometimes you gotta calm down, grab a bucket and mop, and go to work.” Each patch on that jacket stands in for a year he persisted while the Oscar went elsewhere.

Online, Kenny plays at being a streamer, opening “YO CHAT!” with “lookin’ grainy” feed, bragging about drip “so advanced, it concern the youth,” fielding a DM from Shaq (“Boom, let’s lock in”), and closing with “No cap, no rap, in peace to Bob Saget.” He plays neediness for laughs, even as he lets the feeling sting: “I got drip from grief, style from pain.” The audience’s reaction shifts quickly to judgment: On “W CHAT GANG,” Jueles comes home with “two shoppin’ bags of limited edition Dior,” takes one glance at the man in his sixties camping overnight for collabs and asks, “Kenny, you’re sixties, why you dressin’ like this,” calling it pathetic as chat types “W fit.” Elaine reacted differently. Smiling from the kitchen door, she’d call him cute, “not cute though warm way,” and photograph him like a movie star even when he wore a tiger-print beret. One person loved him, and the rest just liked the clothes.

Kenny respects the unfamous, and “HEY CHAT” gives him a 1980s Chicago of “third string linebackers, bullpen relievers with mustaches and divorce energy,” a Bears punt returner whose name he’s forgotten but who “called the appetizers snack trays,” a Benny the Bull who moved “like he knew where hidden money was.” He had once met a benchwarmer Bull in Ventura who “had seekh kebabs and bought a toaster oven,” and the encounter “changed my whole understanding of fame.” The underlying contrast is obvious: Back then, a professional might be filling his gas tank without an entourage or a chaperone; now everyone is too curated, “living through the playback” as he puts it on “LSD SUNSET.” That song works the same Chicago seam from a more hazy perspective: lemon ice at the Taste by Buckingham Fountain, an animatronic gorilla that startled children at a 2003 Rainforest Cafe, Harry Caray’s final game at Wrigley. The crowd holds up their phones as a foul ball comes soaring, and it’s caught on a hundred tiny screens, not in mid-air.

And then there’s the 3 AM gas station of “KENNY CONSPIRE” comes at you, Kenny at pump three at 79th observing a guy eating sunflower seeds before ten duplicate newscasters, who are all saying believe me. One president, he asserts, “died in a way that don’t stay dead,” and just gets “updated overnight like an app,” that no one has consented to receive updates for. A grandmother’s voice on FaceTime returns too clean, too fast, as if already loaded. Kenny says America forgot “how to render sadness in low resolution.” He has come to the conclusion that his smoke alarm is chirping out of spite and that the fireworks outside could be drones signaling a blank event.

Jueles maneuvers the rental car with both hands on the wheel through “IWTSIYWL”; the stream has live polling throughout and 52% of the viewers are for “return to Elaine”, one user comments “Elaine deserve better” to 1000 likes while the mods are failing to remove it; Rhino has passed away, leaving Kenny “all emotional” and admitting he misses Elaine “already, ain’t even gone a damn day” next to the woman he abandoned her for. He has asserted he hasn’t changed and “STILL HIM” where this is most apparent; his friends keep appearing through a stream of names—Bloodsport, the Oakbrook gym; Die Hard, the Jewel; his Slayer t-shirts, his Chrome Hearts jeans; friends who have died—until the words blend together and the connection is lost. It is rendered simply and flatly, never stopping to articulate, left behind on a glowing cell phone beneath a Budweiser sign on West Jennings, past midnight.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “STINGER,” “KENNY CONSPIRE,” “LSD SUNSET”

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The Black$hinobi Clan operates on a platform that plays the role of a comic book logline and a Sunday sermon. A band of Asiatic warriors trained in ninjutsu and ancestral power; they’ve been sent to rescue the original people and to destroy the empire of the Devil. Through the album, the one warrior (BlackMugen) trains to be the savior of Satan and crowns himself with the prophecy. Black$aviiior is “the final chapter” to the battle with Satan, one warrior training to be the savior and possible fulfillment of the prophecy. Five Percent doctrine and Nation of Islam run this one; the legacy runs through Rakim, Brand Nubian, and Poor Righteous Teachers, where the Black man is God, and the devil is literal. Anime and martial arts films are the mythos; dragon masks, hypertime chambers, and “Mugen” glossed within the songs as being infinite. It’s weird that the two seem to merge seamlessly; the crack between sermon and anime never shows.

With a shinobi blade upon his back and a dragon mask upon his face, hands and feet wrapped in bandages, Mugen begins “Art of War” fresh from several months of jungle training against lions, tigers, and bears with no weapons. He states everything he’s saying as fact; there’s no hedging anywhere within these lines. His best line is a boast about being able to find flaws, “from as far as ninety-three million miles away; the same distance between the Earth and the sun.” He twists the statement into science and then back into a boast in two breaths. He’s always returning to a part of the thesis from the title song: “It’s been a hell of a journey to get to heaven/Learning that now is the greatest gift/That’s why it’s called the present.” The conclusion of that journey, however, rarely changes. On the war tracks, he’s still murdering Satan, unchaining the gods from their chains, tearing apart the slave master piece by piece, and naming himself the savior once again. It gets boring to hear the same sermon time after time, even for those who’ve bought into it.

On “Da2ndComiiing,” Mugen cycles through rhyme cyphers around the sun, then arrives at, “Indigo child become son of man;” followed by, “Hair like wool, skin the color of brass.” It uses the description of Christ found in Revelation to state that the original man was Black. These samples perform the same job as the rapping. “Born$aviiior” kicks off with a voice that declares that a Black man condemned by a white man is someone to get closer to, and ends with an exchange of the loving every man Jesus for the one who returns with a sword. The strongest passage of spoken word closes “Da2ndComiiing” where the new gangster is born not from the Italian blueprints, but as a new model of community protection and wealth building, the old gangster dying. Satan has an address, and Mugen doesn’t step out of the music to remind you it’s symbolic.

Mugen passes “Diiiv(eye)neFlow” to SHERM STX and AREX and gets two of the liveliest here in return, SHERM trading diamonds for the twelve jewels of life and reminds us that “No weapon formed against the God ever prospers,” AREX diving into a cosmic battle verse so dense it nearly leaves the planet, picturing himself in a hyperbolic time chamber while everybody is copying and pasting. Arkatype and Mugen exchange a round of fighting-game and martial arts wordplay over “$upreme Massacre”—blades in tissue, a roundhouse to gristle, a straightfaced “What’s Sun Tzu to a Shih Tzu?” Over “Magiiic,” the deity V uses an entire verse to describe space, suck stones from Orion’s belt, and gravitate toward fact more easily than anyone else in the room. The pointed one is Erick Purpose on “M(eye)nd of a Warriiior,” whose dropped mystique for street rage (”Fuck police immunity; every cop is a cancer cell”) and who goes after the gospel of good vibes: “All this talk about positive vibes rooted in money/If you don’t see the problem with that, I ain’t money.” The bench is deep, and it’s the guests’ variety of approaches that keeps a long set of war raps moving.

A true test of stamina, “Hieroglyphics,” at six minutes long, is dense with guest verses. What they share is a diversity of approaches. Mugen opens, stating that his words are “like hieroglyphics inscribed on the walls of the pyramids; Built by the ancestors still living within myself.” TYMAY delivers a racing, alliterative chant of internal rhyme that snaps shut: “Creating a history, solving a mystery/Stopping the gossip, changing the topic.” Lord Karu Villain gives an elegiac street verse about chasing waterfalls “on the side where lonely Negroes reside,” finding a dead pile of birds on the ground after a prayer, dropping religious wisdom to kids in the ghetto and questioning whether he is dropping a fable or fact. The sample does not move throughout any of the verses, as it fits a cipher, and at six minutes, it begins to wear thin.

The palette remains steady, purposefully so. Much of this beats feel like heavy, dark space, stripped of light, hard drums over low end thick enough to feel in the chest, KiiiNG MZA handling writing, mixing and mastering and hiding every seam between tracks, even as five other producers contributed. The shading exists on the fringes. Still Do makes “Art of War” hard-wired; eno-obong offers the album’s clearest light on “Da$ource,” and again on “DaChosenOne.” These are islands of brightness on a familiar, shadowed plain.

The armor actually makes the few delicate love songs stick. On “Da10thJewel,” he has a murmured conversation evolve into a love song that retains its celestial vernacular and directs it towards a singular entity-the one who counts only in terms of energy and time, the woman he addresses as the queen of his cosmos, the person reminding him, “True love starts with self/Without that, you can’t love nobody else.” He calls himself a lover of lovers, like Pac. Vows to stick with her to “infinity times ten to the seventy-six trillion power,” and addresses it to a wife not yet arrived. After the slaying of so many demons, his desire for something soft is the only time he puts his sword down.

What the armor was keeping from the world: Grief. The blood is present all throughout the entire record, as kinfolk unable to stomach his ascension, and on “M(eye)nd of a Warriiior” he states simply: “Received more real love from strangers than my own kin.” The cosmic map narrows by the end of the record, towards a family tree. On “DaChosenOne” he lays out Fred Hampton, Tupac, Nipsey Hussle, and Huey Newton as his guides before setting them aside for Susie, his great grandmother, an angel he thanks for saving him during his lowest lows, stating himself as Susie’s grandbaby for life, and ending the track with her voicemail; an old woman asking about him, reminding him to call back, and saying ‘all this love and stuff’. All of the dragon masks and the ninja blades, the record is strewn with, were built to protect the boy who saved that voicemail.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Art of War,” “Diiiv(eye)neFlow,” “DaChosenOne”

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More rappers name themselves fewer times in their careers than Action Figure 973. From the sounds of these twelve tracks, all recorded under the same luchador alter ego and produced by a producer working under the same persona, he doesn’t shy away from twogeebs calling him out by name more than a couple times between lines and ad-libs. Working on the same corner as twogeebs in the DITCD.COM area, also known as Zilla Rocca’s inner circle, the latter is Zilla F. Baby to those in the mix and on the mic. He’ll drop a slasher story, then a corner move, all in the same monotone, all with a low, grimy drum pattern working to complement it. What’s delivered doesn’t give room for the humor to soften the violence—it’s delivered in a flat monotone, which keeps the slasher stories feeling fresh despite the familiar nature of many lines.

What’s meant to be a horror scene occurring long after midnight in “Surprise Motherfuckers,” where “Satan really trapped in here with me” is turned into something like “Jason and Freddy screams,” which eventually becomes paint in the face of the listener (”Your blood spatter, bitch, that’s dire paint”) with no more warmth of emotion behind it than a punchline. Lines like “I was Edgar Allan Poe” bleed into “You Jason Weaver, I’m Jason Voorhees,” and the children’s TV-show related pun and the slasher come almost in the same breath, but still manage to fall in the same beat as the dope (“They was sleepin’ on me, but I was out here stuffin’ pillows with dope”).

“You Got Served” sees an Italian plug, “mob ties,” waiting at the corner every weekend, which he “smack dab on the corner,” raps up to “make a mil’ every month,” with a red, green and white, Godfather-inspired street that “he can’t help but to feel half in love with”. “Is it worth sellin’ your soul? Sometimes it feels a way” follows soon after in “You Got Served,” “Is it worth sellin’ your soul just so you can be poppin’?”, in his warning of what’s to come. He keeps dropping the advice, “What’s a goon to a goblin? Wayne was tryna warn us”, followed soon after by the statement, “I think these days it’s too late, we all may just be goners.” In “Banned From CVS,” the trade-off goes back to the comical with an Omar-like drug dealer stealing medication at the register (“more tablets than the Apple Store”), with every narco who drops on the scene setting off a celebration.

The fear of damnation is the closest thing that has grown to him by the time that he turns on business, and that is something meaner. Most clearly “Preaching 2 tha Choir,” where prosecution has tried to enter rap lyrics into evidence, and the rappers just kept turning over the ammo. He writes “Since the beginning, had us writin’ our rap sheets” and then “They usin’ our art in legal battles” and then “I hope one of them judges get shot” and then the verse closes with “Everybody wanna be hip-hop ‘til it’s time to be hip-hop.” A quiet dropped, his own album gets added to the indictment; “seven years probation for sellin’ pills.” And in “Raid tha Industry,” he pulls off a robbery, where he and Action drain the safe, punchline after punchline, “Made rap an equestrian sport, my mask a Trojan horse.” He flies out rich and abandons them all.

JOHNNYTRA$H barrels into “It’s Time 4 You 2 Die” as mean as he gets, stating his creation of all things Black and American; “I created blues, bitch, I created rock ‘n’ roll/I made hip-hop and soul” and then morphing race into a nightmare: “What’s race? It’s a hole, and it’s time to climb out of it.” The back half brings a twogeebs signature driest threat: “For you, this shit is doomsday/For me, it’s just a Tuesday,” with a title bent; “I’m the Omni-Man of what being ominous is.” Malcolmsef gives over the mic to plain writing on “Sef Interlude 2,” stating, “My frame of mind should hang in the Louvre,” and a final twogeebs line brings in the relationship between drugs and gospel; “Jesus turned water to wine, I turn coke into crack.” The beat of “Underscore” gets lost with its crowd, and Jazzy Lion man gets some good jabs in (“vintage Ralph, not no Pac”), GOMMi J’s line on flipping grams, and three voices with a long hook that extends the song far beyond the ability of its concept to maintain, though twogeebs closes with, as good as “Get put in this New Jersey dirt” is, it can’t fix the overall sprawl of the song.

He is less comical than that, more hung upon a more ethereal, held feeling. He is a darker, tighter, meaner MC on “Nightmares in Edison,” and it shows in lines like, “I put your soul in the sky, you not even rebel,” before his own name turns itself into a monster: “I’m Godzilla, F baby, nigga, who you s’posed to be?” It then switches over into brag mode based on work ethic, listing thirteen tapes deep with pride, “This like my thirteenth tape, nigga, I’m bad luck,” and “my catalog is Kevlar,” Edison taking the place of whatever is keeping him afraid. He also gets a quick jab at Joe Budden on the way out: “gossipin’ like bitches with Joe Budden,” keeping a Pokémon on the cover while he aims all over the place: “They on pussy shit, so I keep a meowth on the cover.”

Hurt is the only one he hasn’t dabbled in until “How Could You.” Rapping accusations to his girl who went through his phone and possibly talked to the feds, he bleeds in the wrestling, “You think I’m out fucking hoes/I’m watching wrestling on TV,” and gives away what the whole thing boils down to, “I love pussy, but not more than money and rapping.” However, the verse that stays with you comes on “Aye That’s My Drink,” where he comes off the corner for a moment to acknowledge what the phone is doing to everyone. “It’s a fast food world, they microwavin’ it all,” he spits, and the screen turns the bright, cheap, unending light, “‘For You’ page dopamine to the brain/This shit is insane, it’s like digital cocaine.” The dope he can’t quit selling, and the phone he can’t quit scrolling, are one and the same product by the final verse. He left the rest of his guys just as he found them, blindfolded with their eyes on the wall.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “You Got Served,” “Raid tha Industry,” “Nightmares in Edison”

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Rapsody, “God Gotta Afro” feat. Karabo yaMorena Choir

A morning spent in front of a mirror morphs into a sermon on its first verse: beads clinking “clink, clink, clink”, afro puffed, rollers like a headdress, and afro shine whipped to a slick polish. By “Cocoa butter on my brown skin like my eyes is” Rapsody is talking us through a Black woman getting herself together as if she is constructing a god. Mr Porter provided the beat, and on it the Karabo yaMorena Choir handles the simple refrain that Rapsody distributes to the room: “God gotta afro.”

She fills the hook with so much Black memory that the verses don’t drift off into affirmation. With only a bar or two apiece, she references Clipse, Diana Ross, “Poetic Justice,” “Like Water for Chocolate,” Andre 3000 as “prototype OG,” Auntie Em, burning bushes, red Kool-Aid- enough allusions to sink a less confident emcee. Rapsody for the most part keeps above the pileup but some sections read like a roll call, with references piling up faster than she can fully articulate any of them. One bar skips beyond product and hair, and into bloodline; that is the bar I return to: “Look just like my momma’s momma’s momma’s momma’s continent.” That’s the afro as inheritance, a line stretching four generations to a place. “God look like me” comes after that, sounding like it finally has the receipt. Her fifth album drops in August. —Phil

YG, “INSECURE” feat. JID & Ab-Soul

It’s nothing new to hear rappers talk about being scared, and for the most part it manifest as a confessional track amidst a suit of armor. On “INSECURE”, YG gives the same admission to three different men and each one fails to live up to it in his own unique way. He sets it up at the beginning of the song discussing how “growing up I thought silence make you solid, but it don’t,” and the song is closed by a spoken word intro to a “Gentlemen’s Club,” where men can talk about things you’d never otherwise hear them speak about (The Gentlemen’s Club is the same title as YG’s upcoming album). Issa Rae’s name is mentioned in both the title and the verses, so it’s clear from the jump what the setup is—a show about having to let the world see behind the curtain.

YG’s verse is the most suspect, and perhaps the most honest in this instance. Every time he tries to break open, he has to resort to the same level of swagger, copping to performance anxiety one minute (“Scared thinkin’ how early I might nut”), and the next threatening to tell the girl he’s speaking to to “hush.” JID takes the route of trying to twist his craft on its head, where normally he’s rapping about all the money he makes with women, here he’s rapping about how “Your bitch could tell you where my inches went” before asking himself, “Am I immature? Maybe.” Finally, Ab-Soul presents the verse that gives the song its name, rapping from the perspective of an “SJS survivor,” who mentions how at six-years-old children would laugh at him and girls “passin’ me by,” and goes on to the most sorrowful point: now that he has success and money he can get any woman he wants “Except for the woman I want, body-wise.” The chorus simply spells out what each man can’t seem to say: “I’m insecure as fuck,” the only instance on the song where the feeling isn’t dramatized through actions.

Ab-Soul gets the last verse and it couldn’t have come at a more perfect time. By the time he’s mentioning a condition and a middle school flashback, the entire swagger on the initial verse is already apparent to the listener as the exact facade he is describing and it explains why one may have to pop “dick pills” before seeing a stripper. —Quinn Baptiste

Nipsey Hussle & Bino Rideaux, “Sacrifices” feat. James Fauntleroy

The battle has already begun when the song kicks off. Bino Rideaux spends the chorus on a woman who “wasn’t never gon’ change” pressing her directly on whether or not she’s for him then writes her out as “ain’t no sacrifices in you.” The first stretch falls on her entirely, and not on him. His is the plea of the man convinced he’s been the only one on this thing with something to offer and that he has taken the whole thing on the chin. Behind it all though is the “Fly as hell, all-black YSL” sung chorus, saving it from sounding like a rant.

Nipsey Hussle is the reason you are sticking around. Where Bino calls out his woman, Nipsey turns it on himself-naming what it is that he does wrong. He is responsible for “broke your heart for these Benzes,” for “Don’t fall in love with no hustler, you know that come with conditions,” for the reason he keeps circling through to the third verse of the song, the realization “love ain’t ‘posed to be prison.” He is like a business man who can’t turn off the logic, even when hurt. “Plant us in fertile soil then plan for the fruit.” The chorus is functional and it does the job. To make a song it’s good enough. It’s across the third verse that Nipsey names all the costs and the stakes and then freezes on a sentiment that he can’t intellectualize. “You ever been so conflicted you scared to make a decision?” After a man so sure of everything else he’s ever had to say, it’s a rare flash of the human being. —Randy

Rick Ross, “Mahogany Caskets” feat. T.I.

Here, you have to salute the work ethic. Some twenty-odd years in playing a kingpin who may or may not have ever moved a single brick, Rick Ross is still showing up in bulletproof trucks and popping out with the chain, forever finding a new luxury item to threaten you with. “Mahogany Caskets” is exactly the Ross you’d hope for, opening on “Stefon Diggs, I need another bitch” and unfolding an entire scheme on the NFL’s Diggs brothers which might be brilliant, or the lamest linking tissue possible, depending on the line; it sounds like he’s enjoying himself, and mostly I am too.

T.I. drops in and effortlessly out-raps the host on his own track, a feature I replayed in order to understand why I enjoyed this so much more; there’s density, aggression, and a focus that you wouldn’t expect at this point, linking the rap game with a “prenup,” talking about “trippin’ since clippin’ my umbilical,” and walking out of a robbery with a man’s teeth in his pocket “as a souvenir”-we take them new veneers home with us as a souvenir. Ross makes his case with flashes, when he drops the flexing for a quick punchline, saying he’d “let a bitch rap” before he’d ever snitch, and throwing in the obligatory “fuck 50 Cent” he seems duty-bound to include in his every outing. None of this is new, and Ross is not trying to make it new; these are just grown men making up extravagant lies on a Nef-U beat, with T.I. as the game’s top performer. —Asa McKenzie

Maxo Kream, “Time Out”

The grief, howbeit, appears from bars one to four, and it never fully departs. Loves of his life are “unalive now” and “addicted to the Adderall and violence, Amy Winehouse.” After the loss of his father, Maxo journey across the globe, to Niger, Lagos, and Ghana, in search of the stable bedrock, seeking his roots. Over a beat by JPEGMAFIA, he writes, as he always does, like a journal page, complete with all the typos, “Time Out” catching him at his lowest, at his most unadorned.

Maxo uses the largest segment of his bars to describe why he will not attend therapy, despite the desire. He notes that he needs “but never make the time” and runs into the wall every stranger becomes-the issue of handing over his own life to someone else who has no chance of carrying it—“I can’t tell a cracka what my niggas kill and die for.” Passed down as it is in the block, the pain is not something one could ever trust a notepad, and a stranger, with; hence, “Can’t share it with no therapist”. The phone rings; it is from Jordan, one of his closest loved ones serving fifty years for murder, who, from prison, advises him to “straighten up and stand on business,” and keep his head down, due to the number of people in his life who still depend on him. When he recalls his suicidal impulses from his lowest moment, he states it flatly and then continues on as one might discuss something that they’ve weathered. It is the final turn that sticks. His support is a collect call from a man doing fifty years for murder, a teardrop tattoo to represent the tears that he allowed himself to shed-to get his head up and his eyes fixed on those who need him. He lets that man talk him out of it, and then relates the experience without a hint of irony. —Kamarion

Rap Albums to Check Out

• Wiki: Ancient History

• Awon & The Other Guys: Solidified

• Hit‑Boy: HITstory 2: Success Is a Dirty Word*

• Jim Jones: The Landlord

• Mickey Diamond & Big Ghost Ltd: Blood of the Lamb

• BabyChiefDoit: Rise Against My Broken Odds

• Dee‑1: The Shift

• Freddy Stone & Q No Rap Name: REAL LIFE VOLUME 1*

• $amaad: Idea of Evil

• Don Gunna: Crack Music 3

• Terry Presume: FREE

• Woo Da Savage: Rap Scholar

• BSG Rambo: Sincerely, Beezy

• ZekeUltra & Savedbyher.: DOGS NEVER DIE

• HeadHuncho Amir: All My Intentions Real

• Big Rush: DILEMA DO OURIÇO

• Lyno Nine8: Flightmode

• lil2posh: Graduation Tape

• Dro Kenji: IT IS WHAT IT IS

• YFG Pave: Niemand

• Tezzus: THE RESURRECTIØN

• Lil Rae: The Godfather 2

• The Musalini: Summer Breeze (EP)

• Lute: Hard to Reach (EP)

• Dom Venice: Paid to Live (EP)

• Bary: Kuba vs Bary (EP)

• Danny Towers: Marina Money (EP)

• MC Serch & Apathy: Millions Of Zeros (EP)

• Shaolin Monkey, C.Terrible & 1010!: Another Battle (EP)

• Rebel Rae: Free the Girls (EP)

• Anysia Kym & Tony Seltzer: Purity (Flips)

• Fly Anakin: (The) Forever Dream’s Night Shift

• DeevoDaGenius & TEGA: Da Story of Tega Brady (Deluxe)

• G Herbo: Lil Herb: Lil Heroin Edition

Other Songs to Check Out

• Ludacris: Real Hustla (feat. GloRilla)

• Polo G: Weight On My Shoulders

• Kid Ink: No Play

• Pell: Thru the Lines (feat. Kota the Friend)

• DAMEDAME*: FIRE BURNIN’ THRU THE RAIN

• BlocBoy JB: Get You Some Money (feat. HoodRich Pablo Juan)

• Raz Fresco: THE BLIND / BORDERS

• Sonnyjim & Da$h: $Cramble

• DJ Muggs, T.F & NEMS: Power Tools

• ANKHLEJOHN & SwuM: AURA FARMING

• Magic & Bird (Andy Mineo & Wordsplayed): FIRE FROM ABOVE (Maxi‑Single)

• Erick the Architect: No Doubt (I’m In Love)

• DijahSB: The Signs (feat. Kwncy)

• Tay‑K: Everywhere I Go / Erupt

• Molly Santana: Can’t Touch This

• Toosii: yesterday

• Mike D: True Colors

• Parallel Thought & Fatboi Sharif: Parallel Paradox

• AKTHESAVIOR: BLESSINGS

• Larry June: The Machinist

• Dezzy Hollow: JOOGIN’

• Jay Exodus, Big Gates & Jay Worthy: Scared Money

• Open Mike Eagle & Kenny Segal: Unfinished Concrete Initials (feat. Hemlock Ernst)

• Jay Cinema & Sefu: Amethyst

• Joey Purp: Merch That (feat. NEZ)

• Kaden Jordan, DJ Mykael V & TJ Carroll: IMAGE

• Kiran the Nomad: For What It’s Worth

• midwxst: DON’T TRUST

• 2slimey: lobby

• Armani West: basketball

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A music industry degree at Loyola is a road into the business. Then the world went on hold, Satya Hawley from Oakland came down to New Orleans, and never left after it. The city had somehow sunk into her the way four years of classes couldn’t. Through those confined weeks, she teased open journal entries from years ago and wrote back to the kid she’d been, a child in the Bay in a yellow house where the loving and the hurting were the same kind of air that filled the room. Produced by Colin Linden, cut in Nashville months later, the pages became her debut record, sung in a voice that remains low and conversational—closer to a private confession.

A live band drives “Project 10” relentlessly; it shoves and heaves instead of sways, and the rhythm section races away from and under what Satya’s saying from inside the shutdown, from high up enough that she’s afraid to even look down: “Who’s gonna hold my hand/If I hit the ground?” And it sounds like how you’re likely to talk about dissociation once the shock wears off, when loving the present day becomes indistinguishable from wishing you’d never been born. “Deep as the sea, darkest at night,” she keeps repeating against the chorus; even though she’s sinking, it continues pushing from below.

In “Yellow House,” the setting appears as a catalog of the things she can’t forget: “Yellow house, lemon tree, wooden floor she laid face down/Yellow house, dead birds, pill bottles missing from the cabin,” she sings low, over guitar and drums that loom close before they release into the final passage. She’s already come to a decision: “I’m not going home again, I won’t.” “Seven” tones down the music and turns that same straightforwardness onto her own kid self: “Honey, how could you have known?” she sings to the seven-year-old building walls after one man leaves and another follows. And by the chorus, she’s swearing herself to that child that she’s not the leaving kind, and she keeps the promise in that same steady and level tone.

With “Circles,” Satya extends the furthest, beginning with a dark guitar figure that develops with slide, organ, keys and reverb to extend beyond where the others stop. She has declared this the track that “opened the album’s world,” and the build supports that: it’s a return to the same wound, a speaking through of a pattern by acknowledging the terms. “I tried to find you in your own mind/But tiptoed around each dark corner,” she sings, and the breakthrough is the refusal to continue sinking into somebody else’s chaos: “Reciting your circles, but this time, I intend to swim.” That hallway she dreams of in the bridge bleeds right into the next track, stripped to nothing else. “Interlude (At Tal’s House)” is barely a song, a phone recording she kept of herself speaking into the bedroom of Tal Ariel, leaving the flaws of the capture as part of the whole, still nothing but breath and words. “Every other day, I dream of a hallway/Hold on to your words, and I’ll pray you’re okay.” Just the singer, and the size of the space in which the capture occurred.

Two aren’t hers. Slow and worn out on the vocal, Satya folds into “Fruits of My Labor” rather than competing with Lucinda Williams, who sang the track she says she heard in a New Orleans bar. The mention of a lemon tree-“Lemon trees, they don’t make a sound/‘Til branches bend, and fruit falls to the ground”—is the same one she had previously given a mention of in her own title track, which explains why it doesn’t feel borrowed on her cover. The Grateful Dead’s “Box of Rain,” which her grandfather used to love, comes in warmer and more swelling, a smooth heave she uses to express a lineage of devotion: “A box of rain will ease the pain and love will see you through.” It’s part of the family and history that Satya has been singing about throughout. She also sets two languid, settled covers back-to-back, amidst a set that is already patient and slow; the same patience that suits each selection individually wears out over the course of two selections in succession.

The warmth becomes a weakness, though the songs progress. A lot of the same tempo, the same low register: if a listener is trying to find an energetic contrast, she won’t hear it until the tracks become small again. The return to breath in “Heaven’s Cry” is much appreciated. The melody opens up, taking on more weight. Her vocal clears up and rises through the entire range—even as it describes exiting a house that has become threatening: “I’m learning to crawl, looking for solid ground.” At one point, the hush lifts and the climb she’s singing about actually makes its way into the music.

She wound up in New Orleans after dropping out, and “Cicadas” returns, all warm and dark and made from rain she recorded on site, then slipped underneath her track. The voice shifts from exhilaration to a deep calm: “The one that I call/When there’s good news, when it’s bad, too.” She is giving thanks to all who lifted her once she made it out; the friend who tracked her across the US: “Ran across country, she followed me there/Crying in her arms, brushing up my hair.” The girl who stayed in the yellow house was determined to avoid going home; this is the one that she built and built in the sound of rain, and she still takes it with her.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Yellow House,” “Circles,” “Cicadas”

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Meanwhile, the other controversy was almost forgotten—the one that surfaced in every editorial, that reappeared like a cold sore on the lips of certain commentators: Michael Jackson had supposedly betrayed his race by changing his skin color! This trial for racial betrayal fed another that never stopped being prosecuted, often by the same people: his music was nothing authentic, it peaked in artifice. It was the height of a deplorable process of bleaching. Many, since his death, have set themselves up as defenders of “real Black music,” denouncing left and right the “fraud” or even the “musical schizophrenia” of the King of Pop. But do these purists actually know what river they’re navigating? Do they have the slightest idea of the strength of its current, or of the eddies that churn it? Wouldn’t it be wiser to simply skip stones with pretty pebbles on its surface or fish from its banks?

This river does not spring from a single source, does not follow a single course, though it empties into a single estuary. This delta—vast, branching, fertile—let us call it… Michael Jackson, since it is indeed toward the frail performer of “Billie Jean” that the waters of this long and fascinating musical history converge. In his book Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop, William T. Lhamon Jr. describes a daily scene at the Catherine Market, one of the main trading posts in Manhattan and likely one of the very first cultural crossroads of the young American nation.

We are in the eighteenth century, and amid the fish stalls, freed slaves set up a small wooden platform called a shingle, on which they dance to entertain the locals. When the show is good, the dancers are paid in eels. These dances all share African origins. They crossed the Atlantic in the holds of ships carrying forced labor to the plantations. They probably lost some of their meaning along the way, but none of their essence. All of them seek to make light of an unstable condition, to transcend the despair it produces.

These dances are far more than dances: they are prayers, symbolic acts of deliverance. One is called the market step: legs apart, you raise one foot then the other while waving your arms. Another is called the wheel step: one foot stays nailed to the ground while the other advances so that the body makes a full rotation. A third is called the run step, and it is rich with instruction. The dancer runs in place while creating the illusion of moving forward. Reading Lhamon’s description, it is clear that the run step is none other than the ancestor of the moonwalk that Michael Jackson made world-famous.

In 1820, these dances begin their real career in the shows of troupes that crisscross the country under the name of minstrels. The most famous troupe in 1843 is the Virginia Minstrels. The run step is known at this time as the Virginia essence. Dancer Cholly Atkins would recover this step in the mid-1960s and pass it on to one of the first groups signed by Tamla Motown, the Temptations, for whom he served as choreographer. And it was probably by watching the Temptations onstage or on television that Michael Jackson—a fan—picked up the basic elements and later exploited their potential, bringing them to that dizzying perfection, that improbable fluidity we know. Nothing is entirely new under the sun. And rivers never flow without return.

The 1820s and 1830s, from which the first accounts of these dances come, are also when an astonishing tradition begins to take shape in the United States: blackface, whose offspring is the minstrel show. In his biography of singer Emmett Mille—a star of the genre in the early twentieth century—writer Nick Tosches describes the phenomenon: “A form of entertainment in which (white) men blackened their faces, mocked the attitudes and behavior of Southern Blacks, and performed what was presented as the songs and music of those Blacks.” Blackface performers used burnt cork for their makeup, though walnut stain and even shoe polish are also mentioned. The mouth was drawn with chalk, the outline of the lips exaggerated.

Initially confined to Manhattan, these shows were quickly embraced across the entire country. The famous run step was one of their staples. So were coon songs—comic songs performed in broken dialect—and ragtime, a musical style with a choppy rhythm. All of this entered the theaters of major cities by the end of the nineteenth century, often accompanied by other attractions, such as pickaninny acts. Pickaninnies were Black children who tap-danced on sidewalks to earn pocket change. They were rewarded with cakes rather than money—hence the name cakewalk given to certain dance steps. Children don’t like eels, as everyone knows.

The dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who began his career at age 5 on the streets of Richmond, Virginia, would become the most famous of them all. He would go on to headline the Apollo Theater in Harlem and, in 1938, share the screen with Shirley Temple in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Shirley Temple had started her career at age 3; Judy Garland at 2. Michael had no trouble identifying with these child performers. He started at 5, like Bojangles Robinson. During the Jackson 5’s first filmed audition in 1966, he was 7 years old and tap-dancing like a real “pick” (short for pickaninny) from Harlem or Chicago. In Moonwalk, his autobiography, he does not tell us whether his father, Joe, gave him cakes when he danced well. We do know, however, that he received belt lashings if he had the misfortune of making a mistake.

Minstrels, coon songs, blackface, ragtime, pickaninnies—all of these attractions would become the marrow feeding the skeleton of American entertainment. Into them would flow the lament of the blues rising from the cotton fields, the choral singing of gospel from Baptist churches, and the polyrhythm of jazz from the speakeasies of New Orleans. Out of it all would come the crooner style first popularized by Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallée, then by Frank Sinatra after the Second World War. In 1927, director Alan Crosland brought The Jazz Singer to the screen—the story of a cantor’s son who becomes a jazz singer, played by Al Jolson in blackface. It was the first feature-length talking picture.

In turn, vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley (the mecca of songwriters and music publishers in New York at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth), music hall, and Hollywood musicals—particularly those featuring dancers Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, Michael’s idols—would recycle the blackface tradition by adapting it to mainstream taste and new forms of mass media. Though elevated to the rank of institutional entertainment, distanced from its source, corrupted and recast, this transposed tradition nonetheless retained the attributes of Black genres.

The blackface show would later be denounced as a racist burlesque by the African-American intelligentsia and the country’s progressive minds. This was the era of the Civil Rights Movement, of James Brown’s “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” of the Black Panthers. Yet as Nick Tosches reminds us, the blackface minstrels were not all white: “Many of those who caricaturally blackened their faces were Black.” The Black performer had begun to imitate the white performer who was imitating the Black performer, in a reversible gesture mixing parody and fascination. Here lies the origin of all crossovers. The identity of American entertainment would thus play endlessly, tirelessly, right up to the present day, on this permutation of Black and white identities. In another book, Love & Theft—Blackface Minstrelsy & the American Working Class, Eric Lott, professor of English at the University of Virginia, sees in blackface the emblem of a “transracial desire” and “less a sign of absolute white control and power than a sign of panic, anxiety, terror, and pleasure.”

This elusive, serpentine movement running through the history of American entertainment—passing from Black to white and back to Black—evokes that of an eel, like those used to pay the dancers at the Catherine Market. It resembles in every way the irresistible manner in which Michael Jackson undulates onstage during the moonwalk, as though fleeing downstream, frightened. “Must one always flee to survive?” Lhamon wonders, echoing Richard Wright’s novel Native Son, in which Bigger Thomas, the young Black protagonist, has no option but to flee a society where no place seems meant for him.

Michael Jackson would have to literally invent his own place in a world for which he had become, far too early, a lucrative attraction. He holds himself in balance there, on the tips of his toes, the way he punctuates a sequence of moonwalk steps. He maintains himself between different worlds as hostile to each other as they are drawn to one another: Black and white, childhood and adulthood. He stands still, a tightrope walker on the wire of time, at the crest of genres and races: that is his true kingdom. This gesture combining assertion and indecision conveys everything precarious about him, just as it illustrates the uncertain nature of relations between communities. As long as he maintained himself this way, on the tips of his toes, Michael would remain untouchable, beyond sanction. It was when he broke that balance that the troubles would begin.

After the astronomical success of Thriller, he would lock himself away in an impossible elsewhere, turning an amusement park—Neverland—into his home. Little by little, his face would freeze irreversibly into a pathetic and grotesque expression that was no longer that of a blackface mask, or a whiteface mask, but the surgical realization of a fantasy at once childlike and Promethean: the desire to belong to a species other than the human one. His betrayal, then, was never racial. In a definitive wink, in the video for “Say Say Say”—his duet with Paul McCartney—he appears in blackface makeup, proving “the undeniable cultural lineage in which he belongs,” as sociologist Sylvie Laurent writes.

A lineage that is definitively mixed. In the July 25, 1926, issue of the Miami Herald, a review of the concert given by Emmett Miller at the Capitol Theater is published alongside a photo showing the singer in blackface, dressed in a black suit and black tie, a white shirt, white gloves, a white hat with a black band. More or less the outfit Michael wears in the “Smooth Criminal” video sixty-two years later.

There are countless stories where you can no longer tell who is Black and who is white. In 1928, Miller performs in Evansville, Indiana. The city council sends an employee to meet him at the train station. But this man, convinced that Miller is Black, cannot find him. In November 1955, Elvis Presley goes to the Apollo in Harlem to see Bo Diddley, Etta James, and Howlin’ Wolf perform. When he steps out of the taxi, despite his greased pompadour, his tight black pants, and his pink shirt, nobody recognizes him. For the Harlem crowd waiting in line at the entrance, there can be no doubt: the man singing “That’s All Right (Mama)” on the radio—a hillbilly cover of bluesman Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup—can only be Black. His voice is that of a Black man. And as Michael Jackson sings in “Black or White”: “It don’t matter if you’re Black or white.” When you see him rise up on the tips of his toes in the “Billie Jean” video, you can’t help but think of Elvis in one of the iconic scenes from the 1957 film Jailhouse Rock, where he, in a convict’s costume, swivels his hips before freezing—knees turned inward, arms spread wide.

Michael would absorb all of this, just as he would absorb Little Richard’s hysterical singing—the high-pitch voice at the end of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” or “Man in the Mirror,” for instance—Sam Cooke’s velvet voice, and James Brown’s acrobatics, which he studied hidden behind the stage curtain at the Apollo Theater when the Jackson 5 were opening for the Godfather of Soul. As Quincy Jones put it: “Michael is a sponge.” His luck was to have grown up and evolved in a milieu of inexhaustible resources, where every treasure was within reach; to have been immersed very young in an extraordinary melting pot and to have fed on it. His strength is that he denied himself nothing.

From the Jackson 5’s earliest days, he operated in multiple registers at once. On “I Want You Back” and “ABC”—their first hits in 1969 and 1970—he is the offspring of the Temptations and Sly & the Family Stone, themselves the heirs of Ray Charles and James Brown, and this at a crucial moment when soul was transforming into funk. After the group signed with Motown, Berry Gordy immediately threw him and his brothers into the deep end. The Jacksons toured with the Temptations and the Supremes. With the former, they perfected synchronized choreography and layered harmonies. That Michael insisted on paying the funeral expenses when David Ruffin died in 1991 and Eddie Kendricks in 1992—the group’s two principal singers—proves how much he remained indebted to them.

The debt to Diana Ross and the Supremes is of a different nature. Appointed godmother of the Jackson 5—even though Bobby Taylor, formerly of the Vancouvers, was the one who discovered them—Ross would house Michael at her home in Los Angeles after Motown left Detroit to set up offices in California. In his autobiography Moonwalk, Michael describes Diana as “my mother, my lover, and my sister all combined in one amazing person,” which would fuel no shortage of speculation. When he recorded “Dirty Diana” for the Bad album in 1988, Diana’s supposed role became even murkier. What remains is that for this child—then about ten years old, from a poor and provincial background—the proximity of this established star would have a considerable impact, both musical and psychological.

Diana Ross was not merely a star at the peak of her popularity when she took little Michael under her wing. She was the most glamorous of them all, the one Berry Gordy had predicted would be his “secret weapon.” Diana Ross personified down to her fingernails and false eyelashes the crossover philosophy dear to Motown’s boss. Softer than Aretha Franklin, prettier than Nina Simone, she embodied Black seduction placed in the field of vision and hearing of white audiences. With flawless songs—“Stop! In the Name of Love,” “I Hear a Symphony,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” all produced by the songwriting trio Holland-Dozier-Holland—the Supremes helped break Black music out of its enclave. It would no longer have to pass through the tired subterfuge of white artists covering soul and rhythm & blues hits. With the Supremes, soul now rivaled pop and rock, the Beatles and the Stones. The sound of this music may have changed, the way it was presented too, but certainly not its soul. The Jackson 5 would not only confirm the advance but push that advantage even further.

Entrusted to a collective of songwriter-producers (The Corporation), they would become the perfect antidote to the rise of Black radicalism at the end of the 1960s. Cute, funny, irresistible, they quickly changed status—from young wolves riding in the wake of the Supremes and the Temptations to full-fledged stars, regularly invited onto television sets. Soon they would even become a cartoon. All of this arrived in a maelstrom where everything was ripe for blending: the sounds, the costumes, and the modes of communication.

In 1970, during a television special devoted to her, Diana Ross invites the Jackson 5 as their godmother. During this appearance, the group would literally crash the phone lines. Michael, 12 years old, opens with their hit “ABC”—fitting, since the network shared the same name. Then, having secured his traditional audience, he runs through a string of songs popularized by Frank Sinatra: “Night & Day,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” and “Young at Heart.” The smoothness of his voice is such that he wins over the adults. Little girls now want him for a sweetheart, little boys for a best friend. Mothers want to adopt him. From that point on, he would be and remain this little master of crossroads and confluences, this sorcerer’s apprentice turned magician who, for thirty years, would circulate every sound around him, from the most charming to the most aggressive.

This perfect young man who suddenly transforms into a demon in Thriller—a romantic crooner mutating into a rocker crawled out of the crypt—is his best projection. Less for the hidden side of his personality that the film might reveal than for the symbol it offers of his exceptional ability to harmonize everything and its opposite in his music. His voice, like nectar, could seduce the darkest soul. It did not fail to pierce the steel of the hardest heart. As Berry Gordy summed it up: “He studied the greatest to become greater still.” Michael Jackson is indeed the King of Pop. Who would say otherwise?

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Corridos tumbados thrives on male bravado—the big names and packed rooms all belong to men who’ve earned bragging rights. MXKA works on the romantic, softer side of the genre, singing about love and the long process of moving past it. MXKA was born in Oakland and grew up in San Leandro. She does most of that in Spanish—she’s the daughter of a mother from Mexico City and a father from Louisiana, with English only entering the equation when her emotions demand it.

When she wants someone, she wants forever. “Cositas” opens with her describing the flutter she feels when he’s around, how the world stops for a moment, then she escalates to the much more serious “Tu destino es mo desde que nací” (Your destiny has been mine since birth). That’s a bit of a high bar for a guy you get butterflies around, but she means it. “Tu X Yo” also calls for permanence, but she can’t seem to decide if he or she makes the first move: The hook repeats “quién va primero, tú o yo?” while her English comes out to admit “You got me in love with your body.” The shortest thing here, the sung sketch “Algo En Ti,” catches the feeling one step before that, falling for a voice before she even has a name to give it: “No se tu nombre/Pero si es tu voz” (I don’t know your name/But I know your voice). A minute of wanting and then it’s over.

She keeps on surprising men and keeps collecting on it. The man in “La Vuelta” thought she would fall for him, but she didn’t, and she tells him exactly that: “Pensaste que yo iba a enamorarme, pero no” (You thought I was going to fall in love, but I didn’t). Then she drops the phrase that holds the whole stance together: “Las malas no caemos así fácil” (Bad girls don’t fall that easy) and judges his exit as a power move: “la vuelta, amor, se te volteó.” She’s not trying to rescue anything; she just shrugs him off with “La neta, me vale madre/Si te vas,” then explains that getting over him was as easy as a celebrity divorce: “Te olvidé fácil como Beli a Lupillo” and gives her coordinates: “Del Bay a LA,” the East Bay kid taking up territory traditionally belonging to men. “Tattoo” reverses the possession; she’s the indelible mark he can’t remove: “Pegada como tattoo/Asi te quedaste tu,” half a boast and half a warning: love easy come, easy go. “Xclusiva” swaps hurt for pure brag, an evening out in “Fendi, Balenciaga” with an ex waved off with “Pero yo las baddies ya no estamos puestas para el,” and JM4C replies to her bilingual flex with one of his own. It’s the most joy she allows herself at a man’s expense, one who is no longer in charge.

Her quietest songs inflict the most pain. Guitar strums and violin plays under “Cómo Te Va?” as she tells an ex and admits the coldness of an empty night, “La noche es fría sin tu calor,” and accepts her share of blame, “Y si te fallé, no fue la intención.” She attempts a majestic image and lets it fall to pieces, lovers falling down “Como dos torres” before the line trails off into “se desvaneci.” Here, her singing becomes more open, more pleading, less guarded than it is in the flex songs. “Fantasmas” is the worst wound, an injury of love that doesn’t heal, “Las heridas en el amor no tan fácil sanan,” and a ghost that won’t disappear, “Y tus fantasmas me visitan/Por las noches me gritan.” Here, she lays down a rule: no second chances, “Los chances no se dan dos veces,” and she sings it with a quietness that is somehow more compelling than a shout.

Desire receives its own language, a more straightforward and physical one. Here too, the regional influences begin to thin. “Nectarine” desires the other person owned and to own in return, “Sabes que te pertenezco/También soy consciente/Que me perteneces,” then plunges into a repeated hook, “Juicy like a nectarine/Break you off a lil piece.” The song is both sensual and mobile, but the guitar-and-brass identity fades. In this context, the song is more like standard bedroom R&B than the other regional tracks on the album. “Mi Confesión” delivers the confession more effectively: the Spanish admission and the English want are not split between verses, but combined within one melody. “Esta es mi confesión/Te pienso sin razón/Y ya no lo puedo negar” immediately morphs into “Touchin all on yo body/Kissin all on yo body” in the same breath. These two songs are both easy to listen to, but sound like they could belong to a hundred other singers.

Then there’s “Afraid Of,” a song from a separate breakup. In English, it sounds slower, colder, and the hurt has completely transformed into a threat. “A liar hates the truth,” she sings to him, and unlike in her other breakup songs, she doesn’t let him off the hook, but follows him out the door and ruins everything, “I’ll make sure that I/Kill the dreams you had/Get you back.” A few bars of Spanish in the middle, “Hoy es tu despedida,” deliver the sentence. The danger is palpable, and she sings it more aggressively, with more venom, than in any other song on the album. It’s the only track that fights against the album’s overall tone, and it ultimately loses a bit; the revenge feels almost a size too large for the song to contain.

Her best moment is “Me Cansé,” where she finally turns the mic over. She is tired and through with the pursuit, with chasing and backtracking: “Me cansé/De buscarte una y otra vez/Ya no vuelvo a caer en tu red,” cries the hook.

“Me cansé de llorar, y llorar, y llorar, y llorar.”

When Low Clika takes the other mic, where she had conviction, he has remorse; he wants to be the one who puts it right: “Y creo que ese puedo ser yo,” implores he, “Sabor a MXKA/Que me provoca.” It is the male corrido singer she has been singing about the whole time, but when he gets the mic, he’s going to lose the fight. She sounds worn, definitive. He is still trying. She is gone.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Cómo Te Va?,” “La Vuelta,” “Fantasmas”

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In the 1975 episode of Good Times, a cash-strapped James Evans endures a debutante ball by constantly having his leg pulled by his daughter’s wealthy boyfriend’s dad, who can’t stop referencing the housing project the Evans family is living in. Backed into a corner all night, James tells him, “Now, I busted my butt a lot of years to get out of here, and I made it. Now, you make it sound like success is a dirty word, brother.” Hit-Boy pulls this dialogue to the start of HITstory 2: Success Is a Dirty Word, his follow-up project under the moniker he established when he became everybody else’s hit maker. Fifty years later, the sentiment holds up for the producer he borrowed it from.

He takes this further on the project’s title track, with him in therapy describing whether or not he’s in good spirits as depending on whether he’s tallying streams or relying on his actual friends. “I turned my heart into a rollout, I turned my pain into a pitch deck, how the fuck I sold out?” he raps. There are plaques on the wall and cracks in his spirit, and, with no acrobatics, he delivered each sentence in his flat, unimpressed tone. His group chat overflows with yes-men while his true friends fall quiet, and though his family tells him that they’re proud of him, they barely look at him when he’s in their presence at home.

During breaks in threats of “Clash!,” he flexes: “I treat the bank like it’s Hometown Buffet, my pockets so bloated,” then offers a rare, true producer brag: his computer isn’t even capable of housing all the hits that he’s made. Working like pgLang and cooking with his squad, the initial cash to create this came from waiting tables. Setting aside reflection, he’s talking shit. “You want to be the king? Nigga, do you want the burden?” he inquires on “Talk Nice to Me,” an instruction record that highlights how everyone seems to be gunning for a throne they can’t handle, but few are gunning for the idea of it. On “Franchise Boy,” he is the franchise boy in a white tee (like Dem Franchize Boyz’s “White Tee” track), someone who once programmed on a Triton.

Quavo carries “Do It” on melodic ad-libs Hit-Boy wouldn’t touch, and the guests all do, making room to breathe within one man’s composition. Jazze Phizzle hosts “S&V” on the slurred, playing to the room instead of the rhyme. On “Friday,” Dom Kennedy glides on the Cali-relaxed with the album’s hardest line dropped almost casually-he doesn’t trust a soul since his daddy died. The most profound on the album is “Doin’ a Look,” with Ty Dolla $ign crooning the chorus like Brown feels today, Hit-Boy slipping in the line about men who lost lives in Rialto apartments, with Ab-Soul finishing by drenching the pavement in a bottle of Louis XIII for those who died.

Over a bombastic bass, “High Speed Chase” is pure luxury and bad-bitch posturing, a layup for a man capable of so much more. “Love Story” slows down the proceedings for the closest thing the album has to a relationship track, although it still sidesteps the entire premise. Girls, he concludes, don’t want love, just a love story; he works in silence while the Lambo engine does the heavy lifting. Neither of the two comes close to the title track.

“I showed my daddy the world, and he went back to jail,” he rhymes on “National TV,” which features one of his more subdued deliveries before he delivers it more simply: “That shit fucked me up for a minute, it hurt my feelings.” He feels life is a scripted series from which he’s barred from TV; a voice cuts in asking, barred from what, he’s on national TV. The same pain resurfaces under “New Money,” with him placing his grandfather in Harlem and himself in Fontana, declaring no one will treat him like Alpo in the city where he first made beats, allowing one humble line to sneak by the braggadocio, admitting that he’s absorbing too much damage and prays through it all.

On “Stitched Lip,” he wakes early to program himself while the others are being programmed, and Chase N. Cashe is by his side once more since their starting-off point in Atlanta. Once more the producer within the rapper will resurface; for “American Pie,” the biggest boast to himself will be that he produced his own beat (right after bragging that he got his own publishing like MJ and Prince), and on “Watch It Come True” (his James Fauntleroy-assisted closer), the vulnerability comes out in its thickest dosage; sleepless nights spent crafting the drum patterns, his father, Big Hit, coughing blood, seven years spent by himself fighting generational curses—“I’m signed to myself, I came from off the corner.”

From the JP Morgan conference room to top-tier hotel rockstar suites that don’t even make him aware of the next room, he raps “Can’t Ignore It.” Everything he had declared his intention for, he has already acquired. All he does is win now, and it’s not enough, and the songs that stick will be about the price.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Success Is a Dirty Word,” “National TV,” “New Money”

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This week is definitely turning into an R&B showcase—a bit of a soul protest record for grown folk, a busking-bench intimacy, and two about the sort of love you just know you need to break free from, while still going back for more. Get into it.

Eric Benét, “Who’s Gonna Save Us?”

After ten minutes trawling Eric Benét’s social feeds, it becomes clear this four-time Grammy nominee with two recent No. 1 Adult R&B songs believes the only way to get ahead is to tell the people running the country what you really think of them. The posts are scathing. The food supply, the Epstein files, who the country gets to send to war and who doesn’t. “Who’s Gonna Save Us?”, produced by Camper and released by Benét’s own JBR Creative Group, translates that rage into a brand of slow-burning soul he’s been crafting since the late-90s, a kind of soul that’s as direct and church-bound as possible. He delivers the title question as one he’s already answered for himself.

The verses are where Benét really unnerves, in a satisfying way. “The people suffer from disease/You know it’s from the food they eat,” he begins, then lands a couplet the whole track rests on, “They found a cure for cancer/But that ain’t no good/Cause business won’t do well without sickness in the hood.” It’s a conspiracy theory that, delivered in the mellowest baritone in modern soul, makes you want to crawl under the covers. This isn’t a shouting match; this is a lullaby being sung toward your dread, as he explains it as gently as he can. The second verse focuses on recruiters: “The ones that sent them, they would never send their own.” The track turns again, mid-way through, into a near Curtis Mayfield call-and-response, the familiar call to arms of “people get ready” bubbling up through the chorus like a half-forgotten hymn. Benét’s answer is anything but warm. No one’s coming. “If we don’t, you know.” —Phil

Mai Anna, “Baby Blue”

There’s a specific genre of songs that psych you into being brave before you have decided that you’re brave, and I’ve had this one stuck in my head (since she teased it with a Tiny Desk submission years ago) trying to figure out exactly how it does it. Mai Anna and co-producer Solomon Fox create “Baby Blue” from a pile of clichés about seizing the day that should completely collapse under their own corniness and somehow do not. “You only live one time/You only live once so/Imma take my chances,” she says, and stacking the lines, “Not once but twice and three times,” somehow turns a Valentine’s Day slogan into a declaration of faith to herself.

Then she stops bluffing in the chorus: “Wake/Wake up and feel the love/Put on your favorite shoes/And dance all around your room,” she commands, and the direction to waltz alone in your bedroom is such a small and unglamorous thing that it somehow feels like the only true statement here. But I’m stuck on the next image: “Im in the rain in my church clothes/Got to breathe with my eyes closed/So wherever I go/I know I’ll be home.” This picture of a grown person standing in the rain in their church clothes and trying their best to get it together with their cap off, who then declares that home is a state of mind rather than a physical location. The title seems like a reference to the ache-baby blue is a fresh bruise-but Mai Anna sings like she’s already been over the hump and she’s just looking for company on the other side. —Mina Abdel

Lala, “Do Better”

Is there a theme in R&B that lasts longer than the lover you shouldn’t get back with, and Lala’s “Do Better,” produced by good.will, does nothing if not luxuriate in just how great it feels to make the bad choice. “My friends told me to do better/I should’ve known but you’re clever,” she starts, and she’s already lost the argument she’s pretending to have in that second line alone. The story of the whole train wreck can be told in just five words: “Not trusting/Just friends to/Good lovin’/To just fuckin’.” No lead-up, no apologies, just the simple, inevitable slide from one to the other, like naming the stages would stop her from having to go through them.

What’s truly appealing about this is how she’s not at all ashamed about being the instigator. “Have to admit, I like when you chase me,” she says, leaning into the part of herself that craves the danger. She collapses in the very act of talking about her commitment to the break up, “When you got me alone, I fold and I fold into your arms,” the double-fold says all a verse about self-control would. And the chorus is absolutely unconcerned with the glaringly obvious hypocrisy (“We can break up-up to make up-up/And then wake up and do it again”), before she seals it with the least innocent booty call-line of the year: “Let’s keep it simple/You got my location.” She knows this is a mistake. She’s telling you where to find her anyway. —Jamila W.

Debbie, “Weight On Me”

Two weeks ago, when south Londoner Debbie gave us “Weight On Me” on COLORS, in that stripped-down, pastel room in which any slight vocal vulnerability has nowhere to hide, she sang like the breakup had just happened that very morning. The song is the pure, unadorned physics of being rejected, “Look how you left me/Bags on the floor/I don’t sleep anymore/Living on empty,” she wails over Luis Navidad’s arrangement, each sentence heavier than the last, the title landing less like metaphor and more like flat fatigue.

What elevates this above the ten thousand other heartbreak tracks in the space is how honestly she copping to needing him back- “Push you away, need you again/Wearing your t-shirt,” and that detail is everything to the song: the object that grief holds onto, the souvenir of this thing at its worst. She takes one good swing at the most obvious piece of advice you get when you’re distraught: “They say time is a healer/It’s not healing me now, with my head to the ground/I go deeper and deeper,” she sing-screams, and frankly, not since Jorja Smith’s early singles have we heard a new UK voice make this much with so little. —Ameenah Laquita

Mychelle, “Sunday Afternoon”

Before a label took notice, Mychelle had been singing on the streets of London for four years, practicing a trick that all the good ones have figured out—how to be utterly vulnerable and yet seemingly pay it no mind. “Sunday Afternoon,” her new single out now on FAMM, is a song about realizing when you want something the trick fails completely. In her own words, the Stoke Newington singer, early in the track, bluntly lists her limitations: “Vulnerability doesn’t come easily to me/I can’t lie I’m scared/All my friends keep telling me/I really need to put myself out there.” It’s the oldest of the love song tropes, and she delivers it with the tone of a confession she’d rather not be performing on her record.

But what saves the track from being anything like an inspirational meme is that she names precisely the thing that frightens her. The reality she longs for, that she continues to outline here, is not spectacular. It is “to dance with someone on Sunday Afternoon,” it is “to tell someone how my day went so they can tell me how their day went too,” it’s mundanely domestic, and in that way is therefore more dangerous to risk than something extraordinary. Her self-awareness about her dodges, too, is clear. The people she holds close are “just a placeholder until it’s all worth it,” and she’s aware enough to understand that that’s really how she makes sure she’s not worth it to anyone. The core small heartbreak of this song comes at its end, with her retracting what she just put out: “Right now I don’t think I’m ready/Right now I know I’m not ready.” A busker learns to keep a crowd at arm’s length and calls it performance. Mychelle finds herself doing the same to the one person she may have truly wanted. —Imani Raven

R&B, Soul, or Blues Albums to Check Out

• Blxst: Labor of Love

• Jessie Reyez: A Little Vengeance

• Eloise: My Man & Me

• Melvin Riley: No AI

• KELS: Dirty Blues Princess (EP)

• Good Girl: Sugar Honey (EP)

• Luh Kel: Love Me, Love Me Not (EP)

• Claire Brooks: Book of the Cure (EP)

• Rebel Rae: Free the Girls (EP)

• Carla Prata: It All Leads Back South (EP)

• Elujay: A Constant Charade (Deluxe)

• 2BYG: The Yearbook: Second Semester

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Other Songs to Check Out

• The-Dream: Tampa (feat. Usher)

• Jacquees: Lick Back (feat. Juvenile)

• JHart: Memories

• Asha Banks: Come Down

• 4Fargo: Posted Alone (Remix) [feat. Ty Dolla $ign & Honey Bxby]

• Cheyanne: Angels

• Kaylee Ameri: Better Than Digital $ex

• Orrin: Pretend

• Dylan Chambers: I’m Already There

• Gnoir: Safety 1st

• Ama Louise: Love or War

• Khal!l: MY FEET

• Sonny Tennet: Innocence

• Indigo Mak: Truck Driver

• Pere Navarro: You Know (feat. Braxton Cook)

• Quinn Oulton: Circles

• Kalisway: Not So Sweet

• Cherrelle: This Time

• pastels: Pastels World

• Ryan Trey: Need You (feat. Lecrae)

• Zacari: Real Life

• H3rizon: Future Self

• Ambré: Go to Hell

• Yellow Shoots: WALL STREET

• PJ: To the Ones

• H3adband: Move Your Body

• MYST: Dynamite

• Justelle: Keep It from You

• Noah Guy: GREEN VOWS (A COLORS Show)

• Parisalexa: Wrong Generation

• Nick Hakim: I Can See

• Vandell Andrew, Jah Born & Jordache Grant: Tasty

• Kendra Morris: If I Called You (Acoustic Version)

• Roy Woods: Trust and Believe

• Yazmin Lacey: Sweetest Season

• Davion Farris: Frontin’

• Ash Minor: Okay With Me

• Ryael: Changes

• Biirthplace: LOST FAiTH

• Dave Hollister: Voodoo Magic

• Gemaine: Less of You

• DAMEDAME*: FIRE BURNIN’ THRU THE RAIN

• Oranj Goodman: Drama

• Jabriel: Wanna Be In Your Skin

• LARIICA & Isaiah Kaleo: kiss in public

• Flyy Armani & JULY: ti ti ti.

• Pino & ZaeFyeHunnit: Move

• Nanette: Ask for Nun (Freestyle)

• ZURI: Satisfied

• Ria Sean: You Want It

• SICKOFTHEINTERNET: H.I.M

• Reign Judge: Wouldn’t You Like to Know

• Andye: Centerfold

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After only just over a year, having three albums in a year under the same producer can surely strain any partnership to breaking point. The three-album run that Big Ghost have just completed sticks to the same one soul-and-gospel lane and one raw voice for the whole duration, without ever venturing into any form of melody. That voice is that of Mickey Diamond, one of the most fertile underground rappers that Detroit has produced this decade, and one thing he does on this last chapter, which he mostly sidesteps elsewhere, is to argue. Scripture permeates the vernacular throughout; communion, stigmata, holy water, the lamb’s blood all refer to money, loyalty, paranoia, grief, Mickey mid-flex is always questioning aloud the veracity of anything, and everything said.

The question marks arise loudest on “Communion,” where Mickey states a commandment and immediately questions the integrity of it. “Thou shall not take another man’s life,” Mickey states before immediately throwing out the part missing from the catechism: “What if he had it coming? Can I ask for forgiveness?” Mickey isn’t sure that you can promise something without meaning it, and that it can count as repentance. “Promise, but I don’t mean it, does that pass for repentance?” The verse continued until he reached a question to which there is no easy response: “They painted Jesus white, so how are we the chosen people?” This arises out of the honest bewilderment of one brought up within a faith attempting to square it with the reality of a world that dictated it to him.

It becomes a full argument over the people making money in the name of God on “Lamb’s Blood,” when his argument is redirected from The Almighty to the people who are gathered under His name. Mickey opens the track with, “I’m not one of those guys that know the Bible by heart.” He then goes on to present Sunday School teachers with questions they may struggle with: Who created hell if God created heaven? Why were we handed free will, then why are we surrounded by sin? Why were we made to suffer four hundred years of slavery? And then gets down to the more tangible questions: “He can drive any car, why the pastor need a Benz?/Why the pastor never broke? Why the pastor house so big?/Eight bedrooms, they don’t even got no kids.”

For all the questioning, Mickey never escapes the street concerns that necessitated those questions. “Cold Sweats” begins on a guy waking “cold sweating and screaming” to find a devil sitting on his back; it cuts to a street shooting that caught the wrong man on the wire; it continues with the witnesses who take ten grand and still testify; it’s followed by a verse about a buddy who’s doing life; the hook delivers the gospel, plain and simple: “In the end karma catches up to all.” “Break Bread” transmutes the familial notion into a warning; “Keep the wolves fed/Hunger lead to bloodshed,” the hook cautions before a full prison sentence enters the story, a kid who’s still young when he goes in, who gets out old, whose girl’s gone and the visits stop; the lesson his mother imparted on the way in is recalled. He delivers a final word that’s arguably the simplest here, “Do something different with your life.” He just says it, flat out; that one point in the album where the writing stops pretending to do something and just speaks.

By the back stretch of the record, the armor comes off completely. “Erick’s Sermon” is a direct ode to his father, centered on a recorded phone conversation where Mickey tells his half-asleep dad that he’s written a song about him in the form of his naming it after the EPMD rapper/producer; in the verses Mickey unpacks every defense he’s raised up throughout the record: “My father walked a crooked path so I could fly straight;” “So as your only son I vow to never let him down.” He explicitly names him at the close, Erick Robinson, lest there be confusion about who this all means to him. And “Holy Water,” several cuts prior, contains the moment it’s most difficult to shrug off. What begins as a prayer of thanks ends on Mickey’s recounting of his infant son finding his gun under the sofa and firing it off, of the shot grazing his own head before bouncing harmlessly off the wall, of his kid who should have died. He relays it as fact, matter-of-factly, without Bible verses or sermons to buffer the story, as a father still processing the narrow margin by which he escaped killing his own child.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Communion,” “Lamb’s Blood,” “Erick’s Sermon”

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So many singers make a breakup album as if you can pull the ingredients out of the men, the rooms and the different heartbreaks. Not this one. This one takes one man, one love, one long argument, and turns it over and over from every angle with Eloise, a London songwriter who’s spent her few EPs refining her feelings smaller and smaller. Here she goes into the heart of a relationship that was already more than half wrong, tracing its arc from adoration to bitter contempt to whatever it is that makes two people stick together for an unnaturally long time. She names his problems for him early on, and she stays.

On “My Man & Me,” the charges against the man come long before the argument for him. He’ll take her hand, and then let go of it; she’s pretty sure that he makes her unhappy; he tells her he can never love her the way he loved a woman called Amy, and when she asks him why he can’t, he says, “Well, can you blame me?” She has good reasons to leave, but instead she calls him “the best man I know.” Eloise sings it all over the gentlest waltz-like sway-warm, easy, her voice dipping around the chords as much as landing on them. Her tone sounds more loving than bitter, and that makes it work. “I’m living off his nerves, ain’t no doll at first glance,” she admits, and then says, “but I think you’re more than I deserve.” “How Lucky” keeps the same sentiment from a slightly different perspective, the gratitude arising from the memories of men before him, of the “men who were boys/Who would sleep as I cried.” The small, unglamorous detail is key: he told her she looked pretty drinking wine and with her pink hair while drunk, and it was more believable.

Eloise keeps wanting to grasp the physical and the unglamorous. “Where We Lay” takes place in a room gone subtly wrong: wallpaper peeling, cards that “don’t quite read the same,” flowers that “ have seen better days.” “I am a mess,” Eloise just says. Slim Gabriel matches her with arrangements that are warm and close, and that does absolutely nothing to brighten the picture, instead putting the smaller strokes in sharp focus. “You Turn Me On” swings the other way just as directly, a brisk, flirtatious song based around freckles and stretch marks, “You show me/That you don’t let anyone else see” and around skin on skin. She’s in no way dressing up her body; her freckles and her stretch marks, the wet hair and the bitten lip stay exactly as she saw them.

Self-pity would be the obvious route to take, and Eloise pretty much bypasses it by turning herself in. “Dramaqueen” is a confession in question form, “I’m a drama queen, and I feel shit/Is that such a crime?” is sung in a half-shy, half-proud, teasing voice, over a taut, strutting beat. She fesses up to being “easily offended,” to starting the fights he finishes, then lays it back on him again, “take it or leave it, my love.” “You, He” takes it further into love; she runs two ways simultaneously, one lover in her arms, the other sitting, “on a pedestal/Acting out the daydreams I live through.” She refuses to claim the two are equals, one of them lights her soul on fire, the other, “just keeps it warm,” the true line that anchors “You, He” in honesty: “We both know I’m a liar when I say I’m torn.” She holds the man on the pedestal at arm’s length, tells herself she doesn’t love him, and knows nobody will believe it.

Worn to a bare whisper in “For You,” the woman still has the damage handled by herself. She was patient, she was docile, she let him lie to her, and then states the obvious: “You fucked me up, but I guess I let you.” The chorus tells of a woman whittled away and pushed underground, then she keeps coming back to the same ugly portrait of him as a “filthy habit” and herself hanging on “for one more hit.” A much lighter pop melody carries the song and makes the wounds that much colder. The stripped piano of “Before the ‘Why’” clears the air, and “Why Can’t You Love Me” asks directly, down “on my knees,” as she remembers “the night we smoked in my bed,” and “burned a hole in the sheets.” The waltz spins beneath her, same as the question underpins the whole tune, but it never resolves; By the time she sings “When you say it back, I know it’s not true,” she has already answered it herself.

“No more drinks on a Tuesday at our favorite bar,” begins “Horse to Water,” and the sentence itself builds towards the decision being voiced. She’s going to miss “the drinking and smoking ‘til two/And all of the sex and the fights that ensue,” and on the chorus, she draws the line: “You ain’t the boss of me,” she declares, and flips a well-worn saying to mean, I’m trying my best, but you won’t ever do what I want, leading a horse to water shrug of resignation over a song with a little extra snap to its beat. “Love Don’t Grow” doesn’t get wrapped up in theatrics about the end; she imagines a Saturday night when “we drink ‘til we fall back in love” and “fight the whole night” then trails through the town where it concluded, a “crime scene,” the park bench “where we first said it should end,” the alley where she first told him she loved him and he walked away.

And with a love you’ve decided not to pursue? “Resisting Your Love” is written into that resistance, piano, strings and a woman talking about her body, which continues to vote for it anyway, out of doing what it desires. She looks for “the best in somebody,” decides it’s him, and then ceases doing it because “I just don’t know how to stay away.” When he finally talks back, it only hands her a more pointed version of the same question: “You chose to show your cards at the end, telling me you felt it all too—now what do we do?” “You Will Remain” strains to move on, pulling on oceans, rivers, wind, lilacs, “a silver box,” where the closer writing leaves the peeling wallpaper behind, where “Where We Lay” would have seized upon the grime. The more potent goodbye is the one she can’t finish: As resisting, she remains at a distance, her body in full rebellion and sworn to not falter.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “For You,” “Why Can’t You Love Me,” “You, He”

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Awon doesn’t do hype. He tells of a drug bust’s disintegration, his friends laid to rest, platters of oxtail and peach cobbler with the same steady, understated delivery that defined his come-up from Brooklyn to Newport News, Virginia. His authority doesn’t come from decibels but from how he crafts a phrase, from its cadence. The Other Guys lay down one murky, bass-laden track and stay invisible behind him.

The street, to Awon, feels like an epilogue, the narrative pre-scripted. On “Lots of Pockets,” the man who seems to have everything loses it all. Madeline, his girl, pilots a black Caravan down I-95 into Maryland. His operation runs out of a number of abandoned buildings. He’s pulling in enough clean cash to sign an up-and-coming rapper out of Houston as executive producer without leaving his desk. Madeline is eventually found dead under an Uzi, the payoff at the docks is an ambush, AND the love of his life has turned on him. The man drops his gun. “So went the glory,” Awon says flatly. He turns the camera on himself in “The Embrace.” Twelve years old and reading obituaries; fourteen years old and selling; a teen Nino Brown playing hide-and-seek through buildings where users fell asleep forever. All set to a hook which completely subverts the usual boasting: “I didn’t embrace the streets, the streets embraced me/It’s not crime, it’s the way the streets raised me.”

Underneath the narrative lies a body count, and Awon makes it strikingly clear. In two verses, “Ice Rink” details the day he walked through it, dodging bullets, being harassed by cops demanding his name and if he has a piece, tucking jewels into his pants on his walk home from school in the land of power brooms, a native of the land with no power. He name-drops the Willie Lynch myth, then the knee on the neck, then the first-class flight where they check a Black man’s ticket twice and still expect him to be polite about it. The white tee on “New Notes” carries it all. It’s a gas station shirt, a work shirt—“A sign of dignity on the poverty line,” he calls it. It’s the same shirt on the dealer with the Rollie, the prisoner, the deceased. The hook is a running eulogy list in his phone; the latest was for a friend shot dead last week. He goes to work in the same shirt and goes to his burial in it.

The most tender lines Awon writes are composed on his feet, in his kitchen. The three verses to “All My Love” are cooking and all the people who cooked them, opening with a grandmother humming gospels over candy yams and peach cobbler in a project oven, moving to a Crown Heights stove where his mom stirs cornmeal into cou-cou base, mackerel in the stew, flying fish, rice and peas with oxtail, tamarind balls eaten like candy on Park Place. This food is never just food. All the food served pulls back the dead or departed to sit in their seats. Grandmother is dead, and the space remains open, mom’s kitchen remains bare, his homies are in jail or in the ground, and his lost ones rise as the allspice hits and the flavors sharpen enough to sting. The third verse lands on the simplest form of the statement, food as love infused, Jesus feeding a host on five loaves and two fish, a plate honored at a table for folks long departed.

Money, here, is going both ways, and Awon navigates this without any illusion that the paths will cancel. The bad is “Bonus Day”—a blue-collar bonus gets you a tip at the counter, and a drip for the kids, and the car breaks down, the gasket is the same price as the bonus, and AAA is called, and the dinner plans are canceled. Rob Cave takes the third verse, another rapper here, rapping as hardship itself in a stickup, demanding all the dough and the ice and the spirit while informing the man he’s robbing that “Every diamond is some carbon that survived the pressure test” and that the hand he’s robbing gave him his entire world to begin with. The bright side is “Mid Century Modern Aesthetic”—lobster tails and a wife and an organically eaten diet, a home he’s filled with a lifetime of found objects, so she understands both Coltrane and Funkadelic. The flex gives way to intention in the second verse as his six-year-old is a brand-aware genius heir to over a million in savings and a back catalog to carry.

When Awon stops rapping his narratives and speaks directly, his writing is at its most arresting. The most direct of these are “To the Sky”—written to his son who has special needs-and the three years Awon is sober, presented plainly and close to the ground as the story of parents who learn to read a grip and a hold in lieu of words, the hook on a sentence that no words were spoken and the work was done on a smile, a hold. “The reason they can’t fly is ‘cause God gave them little wings”—that line lingers, and he thanks his wife for schooling him on it. Raising the lighting on that, and on “Snickerdoodle,” the love poem Awon stumbled into while in a written rap and confessed is the only occasion he could admit to a wedding ring that no longer fit, two breaks in the dark, low ground the duo create under just about everything else. Held on this one, heavy floor for so long, a few of the tunes are of one color upon first listen, and it takes a second pass for the lyrics to pull them apart.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “All My Love,” “Bonus Day,” “New Notes”

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In November 2005, the MTV crew crammed into a Manhattan barbershop, owned by the producer Cory Rooney, to watch Busta Rhymes have fifteen years of hair shaved off his head. Those dreadlocks had been on his head since he was seventeen, a senior at Uniondale High; he had grown them in December 1989, the month he had signed the paper that put his signature on his first record deal with Leaders of the New School, and he later said on camera that the moment he signed the contract was the day he had stopped combing his hair. Underneath the locks was a Caesar cut, short, and a face that had taken off twenty or thirty pounds of Busta. His new deal had afforded him a new body. The new deal was with Dr. Dre.

Trevor George Smith Jr. was born in Brooklyn in 1972, raised in East Flatbush and rapping by his early teens. Leaders of the New School phase yielded two albums nobody really remembers, besides the fact that one of them featured Busta on A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario,” where an 18-year-old pushed past Q-Tip and Phife Dawg and made a posse cut into a career. His solo career has now produced six albums over the course of a decade—The Coming through It Ain’t Safe No More—but, at least commercially, he lost Elektra after one, and he lost J Records after two; by early 2004, he had been through three label systems without a #1 hit, then Aftermath came calling.

Aftermath in 2004 was the most dominant hip-hop label in terms of commercial appeal. Eminem was fresh off The Eminem Show; 50 Cent was basking in the residual glow of Get Rich or Die Tryin’; The Game was about to release The Documentary. Signing a thirty-two-year-old Brooklyn veteran who hadn’t had a hit in three years appeared to be anointing a legend. Instead, it meant that, almost two years later, the wait at Record One in Sherman Oaks continued. Dre doesn’t put beats out on a schedule, and this album wasn’t on one, either, as Dre only produces on his own schedule, once he’s happy with the sound, so the album was promised eighteen months before it even existed.

Busta’s body is present on the cover before the music is. It’s a bare tank top, with veins protruding down his arms, his chest sliced, his jaw set. The album must prove whether the newly sculpted Busta Rhymes is really Busta Rhymes over the first minute, at least: a piano figure that walks along the line where waist height would be comes down from Mark Batson and Dr. Dre, no rush on any beat in it. Q-Tip, on his second turn on this song, “Get You Some,” still slides into the track on the beat as he had done on “Vivrant Thing,” sweet, with a breath of a sly tone, the oldest man on the track sounding the youngest. Marsha Ambrosius sings with the tone of exhaustion as she watches people leave a room. For once on an album opener, Busta has stopped sprinting—his rasp continues to stack syllables, but the pace under the rap is brand-new.

The first single was “Touch It,” built by Swizz Beatz, centers around a one-bar loop under a robotic filter (clearly taken from Daft Punk’s “Technologic,” which itself sampled some Italian progressive house). Busta fills the verse primarily with boasts about his own existence, and it works; it went gold on downloads before the album was widely purchased, and its remix featuring Mary J. Blige, Rah Digga, Missy Elliott, Lloyd Banks, Papoose, and DMX to the original looping beat was the staple club track in New York throughout the summer; nobody at radio thought twice about how content—free it was, and for the most part, I’m with them on this one.

Stevie Wonder opens “Been Through the Storm.” He has already started on his highest singing by the time the track proper starts, laying his voice over the gospel piano figure from Sha Money XL and Black Jeruz while Busta has yet to open his mouth. The first bars that Busta writes after walking into the mic are an accounting of his losses: the lives he’s lost in his old neighborhood, his downward spiraling career that was so deep he thought it might end him, and a decade of bouncing between record labels that had no idea how to market him. This is the first time on one of Busta’s albums that he has sounded tired while being entirely transparent about it, and taking that up right after Stevie makes for half of his work.

Nas’s contribution of the evening on “Don’t Get Carried Away” arrives already half-checked out (the way Nas sounds whenever the beat actually connects), and Dre’s beat here, string section loop that sounds like a chase scene from a giallo film, allows Busta to rap all around him; it’s his cleverest moment on the album. In “You Can’t Hold the Torch,” featuring another return by Q-Tip and Chauncey Black on the sung hook, it’s simply two veterans lecturing the youth on a flow that still nobody has bested for fifteen years. Their confidence and the underlying weariness actually sell the boast of authority.

Will.i.am’s contribution on the song with Kelis on vocals has really only dragged down the album’s average by nineteen years now, and in interviews, Busta has stated that he wished he had put “I Love My Bitch” on a different album-one that was better suited for a rapper who tends to keep his romantic affections at arm’s length, which is actually still possible, just four tracks down, on “I’ll Do It All,” where LaToiya Williams proves that one can make more of a sparse piano melody than Kelis can on an entire beat made by will.i.am and a sung hook passed back at her.

On “Legend of the Fall Offs,” a low piano figure taken from Return to Forever’s “Do You Ever,” and a digging percussion sound are put together, the source of which still remains a mystery. Busta has put himself in character as Death itself, speaking to a rival that is no longer alive (or relevant): his first-ever use of a whisper was on this track. It’s unheard of from his Leaders of the New School days, from the Extinction Level Event albums, and even from Genesis. A skit, placed after Busta’s verse, finds his buried foe pleading for his life from within the grave, dirt continuously falling around him, the piano never stopping. He steps off the mic for the final few bars, but delivers them to us over the body:

Rick James was already deceased for two years by the time this album was shipped to stores, so “In the Ghetto” is a duet recorded 25 years apart. DJ Green Lantern and Dr. Dre found the main vocal for this song, an acapella from James’s 1981 hit “Ghetto Life.” They added a snippet from his 2004 BET Awards performance, where he glares at the audience and mutters a line that had become a Chappelle Show joke months earlier, and the audience responds as he continues to sing the same line, half a step before his coffin, taken away a little over a month later. Busta takes that phrase, turned to a boast on his own song’s outro, against the 1981 original, the two samples unaware that they will eventually end up sharing a grave.

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Patrick Morales raps as Wiki and has spent a decade turning New York sidewalks into fodder. A woman’s voice opens “GTFOH” mid-sentence, as people are apt to do once they already know the end of the story. She is dissecting a love affair, turning the baffling elements of the past into what suddenly makes sense, and then has presented you with the entirety of it as ancient history and asked for someone else to weigh in. What he gleans from her isn’t romance. It is a city that is pricing him out of the neighborhoods that raised him, and he picks at the pieces like found footage, looking for the point where it all went wrong.

His voice is more abrasion than a sales pitch. Nasal and fraying, half-spoken and half-jabbed, it comes out like a conversation caught three sentences in, before he’s become aware he has an audience. On “GTFOH,” he has declared himself a tragic poet most recognizable to bodega cats and stoners before immediately knocking that bullshit down: “The grind is just a jump, I can’t fuck around, it’s over for sure,” he declares, and then can’t help himself but throw “Can’t do it again” into the second half. “Right Away” pushes forward in this similar way, list after list of things he can’t do: “Can’t drive, can’t cope, can’t hide, can’t run,” before he lets the chorus talk him up before he’s even convinced. On “One Time,” he has counted his lives and then wondered, “Was I even winning when I’m winning?,” spit “Fuck capitalism” in the same breath as he admits he’s advertising on Instagram, talks himself through his own verses in the second person. Pat is the audience for half these songs, talked off of ledges as ‘Pat,’ told to hold it together and not cry.

The park is the only place in New York you’re allowed to enter without a card. A voice clip from some film about a man who could never leave work (He had to be there every morning at the same time, could never take a vacation) sets the stage, before “Park” turns into this lazy, sunny track of place after place: Seward, Tompkins, Riverside, Jackie Robinson, Central, Marcus Garvey, Prospect, St. Nick’s, names that all blur into a walking tour he can do asleep. “What it say on your paystub? You welcome to enter,” he points out; “same to the faces with their names on the benches.” He’s playing badminton with monks and has lost four hours without meaning to. Has put his watch away. Has worked the whole shift and slept on the bench.

Benches remained open; apartments did not. “Bloom” starts with duendita circling the word rent until it loses its shape, with a landlord and tenant that can’t afford to, repeating the same line back to each other before she’s already singing about home disappearing and not recognizing where she is anymore. Wiki takes the city personally, asking why they’re going to tax him on his own block as taxis turn into Uber Eats, and how, for eight hours of work, he buys less and less of the block every year. He tells his friends he’s leaving, leaving for good and for far away, since his application to the block is being rejected, and admitting he’s fried, wants a softer life. “IHNY” runs the same love/hate of the city back through its history-Lenape land before Broadway, the wall on the block before the stock exchange, coke in the eighties and hip-hop as 70s medicine-before verse two drops into a second-grade classroom on 9/11, with Uncle Jackie at the end of the day walking through what he saw, what he couldn’t save, while Wiki stood blank behind the kitchen counter.

“Bourbon” starts with the hangover and stays with it. The chorus slow-reads the damage, the bourbon in the breath, the ache in the chest, the smell of pee on the benches, and asks, “Is this the end?” He swore never again, and actually meant it this time, but by day two, he’s already back in it—genetics catching up, Gram’s on his mind, and the question of whether he’d be better off dead voiced aloud and left unanswered. The verse spins in circles until it stops spinning; one morning, he crawls out of bed like he’s crawling out of a grave and thinks one more drink, but pours the entire glass out instead. The pain goes down the same way the liquor does. “Shit changed,” he says flatly; one glass and a morning he didn’t expect to see.

Whatever’s weighing him down in “All in the Lining” isn’t bling. Not a chain, he says, not a Cuban link, not a Jesus piece, not even something he could pawn; “It’s way more dense/Feel the weight of the world every time I’m sayin’ a word.” Your Old Droog comes in on the second verse, switching up the grain of it, chesty where Wiki is nasally crooked, bragging he never had to lie for his content and dropping CDs in plastic like Gram’s couch before a toast to his dead dog. The same resonance appears in “Marm Era” when a kid dribbles a ball up the UWS and bounces off Big Dog’s chest and also on the block, and when the pen becomes the only thing that helps him get it out—otherwise he’d just yell, he says. The closest thing he has to a mission statement and the flattest thing he ever admits saying: he’s not here for the fame, he’s here to change your mind.

But it’s not all this glowy. “Something New” lightens it up and gives us SALIMATA, who takes Wiki’s tentative advances and just cuts right to the chase and says that it’s time for him to do a nice bit more than just cuff her; it’s a soft track with some slight lightness next to the other songs. “7 Deadly Sins” has the thinnest sound of any track; it’s a simple listing down of vices while touching on the one bit of commentary with any teeth, which is how appalling it is that the public swallows any amount of excess when people have nothing. “Had Your Fun” has the heaviest feel of the three, as Wiki has his moment after having been left and laments how he only counts his friends’ medals when you compare what you’re given at the end to your achievements. Though they’re separated and stand next to each other, they reside in the same gray area between what’s not quite boring, and that’s the part that gets a bit dull and has the ear drifting. It’s not so much that there’s something particular you can point out about each song, but rather the room the three share has the same monotonous atmosphere.

By the end, he has really made a full circle to exactly where he was, 28 and cynical and watching through the smog looking for a star he can’t quite see. “Ancient History” makes a jab at him, with the yuppies thinking he’s stoned, because he walks everywhere, hates every damn upscale coffee shop on his side of town and mentions that he has been doing this since elementary school, with everyone else living their lives like they’re taking over an empty set. “Old Gods” touches on the same suspicious inquiry, but instead it touches on kingly crowns and jewels mined for some of those sitting on high; the bards all wrote wars, and Wiki ponders how much actually occurred, and was there really ever a king out there in the battlefield, or was he sitting way in the back somewhere, for the clout, on a horse.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Park,” “Bourbon,” “Ancient History”

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The opening voice on Labor of Love is doing no singing at all. Over stripped-down keys, dry and right up close, Blxst lays out the argument he’s here to make: Love is just something you keep showing up to do, something you’re there for even when you’re there wrong, even when you’re there tired, perfect or not, as long as you aren’t there on your way out. The South Central singer, rapper, and producer who composed and performs all of these tracks himself, and on the follow-up to 2024’s I’ll Always Come Find You, he pushes a bigger, harder word onto this recurring theme. Devotion has always come easily for him. The title wagers that it’s not supposed to, that there’s an actual cost that should bring, and the core, unresolved question lingering over it all is whether he can make it sonic or if it’s just a more polite way of saying the smooth assurances that came so naturally to him.

Blxst keeps arriving at the same declaration, by a slightly different door each time. On “Outside,” a man staying in is the whole love story; he turned down the club for someone worth more than it is, a spot held in case she somehow forgot, and “Waking up to you don’t get boring.” On “Why,” the woman he’s speaking to is his singular reason for stopping his search, “You my why/Yeah, you my reason why.” On “Something Bout It,” the words are there to dismiss any fight as just another thing they can conveniently forget, because “All we need is outside.” They’re all warm, well-rounded, and easy to slip into, and each just loops the reassurance of the one before, the low end and clean production holding up as they keep insisting he isn’t going anywhere.

When he’s forced to truly sing through an actual disagreement, the writing tightens up. On “Ruin,” the rare love song with more than one person in the room, not one lone guy smooth-talking his way into peace of mind, Blxst admits early on, “You say I start off with the hurting, my fault/My bad, I’m certain I do,” and then Sasha Keable takes it on and refuses to allow the admission to suffice on its own, “Don’t make it/Seem like we ain’t both in the wrong,” before handing it back to him and posing the rhetorical question: “Isn’t it so ironic you put this pressure on me?” Two characters pulling at the same knot give this track a tension the solo reassurances never manage. “Just My Type” thrives on the opposition, the day-glow tenderness and the late-night need smashed together in a single breath, “Love you in the morning/Fuck you late at night,” the guy ready to make a runner’s exit picturing himself waking up with a wife. “Is That Too Much” presents the familiar plea for a sake in Osaka, a passport, some quiet, but a sampled voice at the end turns the entire query upside down with the simple question: “Is that too much of the Black woman to ask of the Black man?”

Outside the bedroom, Blxst works harder. “Work” goes back to a father who Blxst admits is “far from a deadbeat,” the kind who “loved his kids and never was hardly home,” whose “middle name was his job” “Work was his middle name,” he raps, and the rest of the song is him trying to do the inverse without ever becoming that man. “Can’t imagine my kids not in the same house as me,” he insists on the heredity that terrifies him (“The apple too close to tree”), so he speaks the countermeasure out loud, over Cheyenne Wright’s “After midnight, never leave me,” “Generational curse, let’s put a reverse to it.” Love is what you do for someone unable to reciprocate yet. “Right Back” echoes this worry quietly. Blxst counts who remained, “I can count on one hand who the last ones left” before listing who it is he is raising for, “I’m raising two kings, God gifted me hope.” While the love songs address a lover asking them to remain, these songs ask Blxst.

Lori Perry sings the hook for “Day After Day,” an old vocal about working through difficulty, “Down on my luck and up against the wind,” and it’s the only place where Blxst seems beaten down rather than fluid. He sounds like he is calculating losses, “L after L ‘til I won with it”, but then confesses the victory never fixed the “floor beneath him” “I made it out/But back to square one, God, what is that about?” Big Sad 1900 goes on the second verse, colder. He sounds like a brother lost in the sky who will not question God and a mother he intends to right with; pain is what “made him who he is.” “He Can” responds to all of this grief later with pure nerve; a man who “bottled up my life, let it out in the booth/They pay for my pain” and put together the rest “Brick by brick.” When he asks, “If not me then who?” the confidence he possesses carries the weight of all that he was already burying in the earlier song.

On “Home”, the fear has blood relations. Blxst spans further on this one song than any other; “Still a eastside baby,” he walks back to the block, circling around one memory; a drive-by “Flashbacks to five, remember they drove by/Shot up the whole crib.” He is instantly drawn back into that doorway by the sudden, deafening blast. He watches it affect his son: “I feel for my son, he show me the same face/The one when you realize your innocence ain’t safe.” He is not addressed to anyone here, but a father observing his son experiencing a fear he felt at five; a father hoping that the “palm trees and the ghetto bird” in the hook outlast it.

Solid (★★★½☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Right Back,” “Work,” “Home”

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Most breakup albums aim for the dirtiest thing the singer could possibly say, and then say it. Jessie Reyez just keeps going back for the worst and then recoils. On A Little Vengeance, she performs like a person who knows where all the bodies are buried but would rather make sure you know that she’s consciously electing not to exhume them. She sings and speaks, slips into a rap cadence where a statement needs some muscle and across all of it, maintains a mental tally of everything she could do to the man who wronged her and chooses not to do them.

The clearest illustration is “DUSTY,” where she iterates each piece of leverage she holds over the ex and announces, line by line, that she will not use them. “You lucky I don’t hit your wife and tell her that you still reach out,” she sings, then “You lucky I don’t leak those pics that you still got the nerve to send.” The threats are specific, and the mercy conditional. Then she comes through with a definition exercise that determines what kind of man is dusty. “If he asks what you bring to the table, he’s dusty/If he uses the word ‘high value,’ he’s dusty.” On “MADAME JOYCE’S INTERLUDE,” she lets her guard completely down for a story about the one time she didn’t hold back her leverage, going through his phone and changing every suspicious woman’s number by a digit so they’d no longer reach him. “I would say that was art, that was strategy,” the interviewer states. The switched digit lands more impactful than anything subsequent she attempts for peace. By “SALT” the threats held in reserve have a name: she has a fuck you list, and she says she will be petty until she has to have it beaten out of her.

The cadence does most of the work of sorting the emotions. When she is accusing, her cadence will constrict, and the singing will loosen in the throat to something much more conversational. “N.Y.F.F.” is a chant built out of a kiss-off; the hook: a flat four-word dismissal “Don’t call me, I ain’t your fucking friend.” The song’s strongest diss, though, is the one that sounds almost reasonable: “But you’re allergic to the truth/Like the truth just ain’t your shoe size.” By the end, she is already writing him off as a missed call and his women as “Pinocchio them hoes” (contempt added like a garnish). “99%” places this same disgust onto a grid and counts up its grievances: “One, boy, your ass lied too much/Two, all we did was fight and fuck/Three, you don’t believe in therapy.” The melody loosens when the anger does.

When you’re her target, there’s nothing to hold over a wound that you inflicted on someone else. On “EVERYBODY CRIES SOMETIMES,” she states the price on its face and keeps it as plain as possible: “Hollywood paid me, but that bitch cost me a lot,” “My favorite ex has me blocked,” “blessed in this life in every aspect but love.” When there’s no threat to give and no one to humiliate, the language becomes like reporting, almost bland, but that only serves to make it stronger. Pushing that sentiment further back to when she almost went over a balcony on her first trip to LA on “SALT,” then outward to a line that feels like a theory for her own artistry: “Creativity is a curse, it gon’ follow you to the hurse.” On “FUCK YOU JESSIE,” she constructs it as a party where everyone’s fake and her brother isn’t talking to her, her aunt convinced the Illuminati has taken her soul, until her therapist interjects with the one instruction she can’t follow: “Save some of that love you got for yourself.”

It’s in the field of jealousy that she stops holding back. “WHEN YOU HOLD HER” is her most exposed song, focusing on the same question she can’t stop asking of the ex who left: “When you hold her, do you wish that she fit in your arms like I did?” She declares that she was “Never loved enough to be the other woman,” confesses that she deleted all of his photos, and calls herself a “kamikaze passenger.” The bridge makes up for the charade of a clean break: “Every time we say goodbye I know that’s a lie ‘cause I’ll see you later.” Muni Long sings from the other side of it, as the ex who can’t seem to quit her in “AIN’T U TIRED?,” declaring that he can’t “copy paste my love.” Reyez writes the interior of the triangle and Muni Long its corners, and neither gives him a moment’s peace.

Where she starts losing her grip, “SYNESTHESIA” exchanges the breakup narrative for a come-on that’s supposed to cross the senses. The guest artists contribute to the gimmick, D Smoke, for instance, stringing together images that sound pretty, but mean nothing: “You look like rain drops/You taste like symphonies/You sound like butterscotch.” “LOVE & MONEY DON’T GO” offers the opposite problem, stating its concept too obviously to do anything with it beyond the title: “Seems like there’s no time for love/And money, money, money, no love.” Both tracks are listenable, but neither holds the power of the threats, and after a front-half that calls everything out directly, these vague songs feel like a held breath released too early.

God runs under the grievance the whole way. On “CRUMBLE,” she watches a man drop something precious and dubs it “like watching Babylon crumble.” By “N.Y.F.F.” she’s made up her mind that “I see why God didn’t want us to go and eat the fruit,” and on “SALT,” she gives up the debate altogether: “Who am I to argue the design of god?” It’s on “EGO ATROPHY,” the longest, most weary-sounding song on the album, that she runs out of steam and asks god to keep her “close to water, keep me close to God,” resolving that “when I let it all go/I’ll find a way to make my peace.” The song is closed by a spoken sample from a Bob Marley interview about how life is always stronger than death, and life is his only true wealth. It’s the only time someone other than Reyez has the last word on an album about her heartbreak, and she cedes it to a dead man who had lived longer than her and who speaks about staying alive.

The weapons she refuses to brandish against him find her anyway and turn on her. In “iBREAK,” she’s awake at 1 am to his call, then confesses, “I break, I break it all for your love,” and cycles through the arsenal she celebrated in the breakup anthems to find it ultimately useless against her own memory. “UR HEARTBEAT (WHO DO U THINK ABOUT AT 2AM?)” goes all the way: “I don’t wanna move on/Just wanna finally learn your weapons,” then cuts the pretense: “Like it’s platonic, but I want u in my bed.” It turns out the power she held over him, and the scar she has left upon herself, is the same hand. The closest she ever comes to contentment is to whisper to herself, alone in the dark, that she still wants him in her bed.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “N.Y.F.F.,” “DUSTY,” “WHEN YOU HOLD HER”

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Most break-up songs are predicated on the exit. The door is closed, the lesson learned, the singer exits to a more liberated life. Kelsey Lu, the cellist and composer who scored films and occupied a Blue Note residency in the long pause between albums of their own material, keeps writing the reverse. Handed a clean break, they won’t take it. The choice repeated throughout the songs on their second album, the one not to break away, but to stay inside the grief and making that choice sound something akin to devotion.

“Reaper” enacts that impasse in all its dimensions. A nearly eight-and-a-half-minute-long song, Lu sings at a figure of Death like it is a negotiation and then refuses the job of intermediary: “You are the reaper left to decide/What you want, baby?/I’m not your guide.” The sin is passed back and forth, so Lu sings earlier on, “Can’t take a sin from a sinning man,” later on, “I took a sin from a sinning man.” The cure does not take. The singer says of taking pills, “Lifted, I feel nothing now,” and lights a match, “to watch it burn, but the pain still stayed.” Amidst this, the song falls apart, drums rise and fall, fade in and out, altered, a guitar floats in like distant noise (Kim Gordon), a saxophone hangs in the smear (Kamasi Washington). It ends with the song turning on Lu’s own voice, “You knew better/You’ll know better,” a half-memory, half-prophecy over the last, fragmented music.

What is staged on “Reaper” as an argument that two subsequent songs call an everyday habit. “Running to Pain,” Lu’s pop gesture, built on a steady drum-machine pulse, contains the honest description of the impulse-running back to the hurt, knowing it is the place you are going, with the confession that “It keeps me sane, I can’t refrain.” Lu calls this practice in this song the simplest of names: “Finding solace in motion.” On “8 52,” the same impulse sounds quieter, the bottom end a murky drone, and the confession is sweet: “I love to hang on/To all the pain.” In another moment, there is a fleeting flash of insight Lu doesn’t pursue, “I should’ve known me better than I did before you came into my life.” Knowing better hasn’t stopped it, though.

Shrink the scale from mortality to one person, and the uncertainty continues. On “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” the bassline stays grounded as the vocal weaves the heated question into loops, a question Lu cannot answer: “How do I know it’s enough? Is this enough?” The reassurance they hope for here comes back, again, twice: “I know it’s uncertain ‘cause nothing is certain.” On “What Can I Do,” that tension is shaped into the tightest pop form Lu attempts here, a heart “chained to you” with no further room to maneuver, hoping their listener “read between the lines/And through the quicksand of my eyes.” Both songs build a connection toward an abyss, and both admit immediately that the abyss might just be the normal state of things.

One track has no words written by Lu at all, and it’s the track where the grief is furthest from a personal experience. “American Sonnet” features a Wanda Coleman poem set for piano and cello, and the calm of that beginning does not last; static seeps in and a lop-sided kick begins to push against the stillness from the wrong side. Coleman’s imagery is corporeal and apocalyptic, “Mountains of flesh raging toward/Rapturous seas” and the lone line of violative intimacy: “Mother, your tongue plunders my mouth.” By handing the words to an entirely other poet, Lu lets the grieving expand from lost lover to something older and harder to define.

A father figure haunts the gentler songs. “Comfort” moves slowly and padded, Lu’s voice sunken deep within the mix, and the solace it requests continually bumps against the people it can’t trust: “Can’t trust in a man/Who tries to act like my father,” the legacy is rather “the sins of your Father, a bloody scene.” Even the simple request (“Oh, comfort, I’m trying to find you”) is situated beside “In the cradle of fire.” “Better Than That” takes the uneasiness further, letting it fly apart. It opens in near silence, and then crowds in-fragments of shame and defiance piling on top of one another and not quite landing—“See the rock in my hand,” a “Rusty refrigerator that never worked ‘cause it was too full,” a blunt challenge: “Look into my eyes and tell me that I’m lyin’.” Sampha surfaces briefly halfway through to echo and fill the vocal. It’s the messiest song on here, and the fragmentation occasionally gets ahead of what the song can support. Yet, the underlying defiance still holds: “Ripped the curtains off the blinds/Let the light in,” a clean line piercing the wreckage.

After eight songs of hanging on, finally, “Cutting Off the Head of a Ghost” opens into the biggest, clearest space Lu creates anywhere, the distortion so it scrapes the edges to keep the lift from ever truly feeling weightless, and what the song does is sever, not remember, one last time: “Knew you wouldn’t last once I met you/So I had to let you go,” Lu sings, and the words of devotion return, but warped: “Keys of life make peace with parting seas.” The others look backward to the pain; this one decides not to wait: “Not waiting ‘til I’m dead to come and find you.” The head comes off the ghost in “stuttered eyes falling,” and the writing reaches its closest possible resolution.

Why any of this is held at all becomes clearest on “Only the Lonely.” A skipping drum’n’bass pulse throbs beneath but does not drive, blending into the haze so that the rhythm pushes and the feeling does not. The song’s core message: “Only the lonely could feel like they know me.” The pain is kept for a reason. It’s the only thing here that still remembers the speaker, the only companion left that won’t abandon. Lu recalls the lover in meticulous detail: “You were my smoothest crime when I’d let you in,” “hot sweat in the air,” and yet arrives at the cooler-stated conclusion: “I disagree with the way that you loved me.” The loneliness survives the lover, becomes the closest this song cycle can offer toward home.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Reaper,” “American Sonnet,” “Only the Lonely”

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Four kids who grew up around a Detroit choir decamped for the east and began street-performing the loudest, liveliest rooms in the city—Bethesda Fountain, Times Square, the marble floor of Grand Central. They knew before they were signed that a song stands or falls on the way voices nest against each other, and Abraham, Angel, Israel and Momo Boyd carried that subway apprenticeship with them to Infinity Song and Roc Nation, a decade ago, and the method hasn’t changed. Voices first, the band stays a half-step behind. So much of the sound lives in the low and low-mid range that nothing turns sharp, so the drums never have to be pushed to avoid muddying the harmonies, which stack up and talk to one another. The group feels most present with something real stakes inside that blend, and more of it than typically survives in the family-harmony genre bin.

The songs that stay with you, though, are always about the leaving, and the person left behind, and the songs here just keep letting them bleed into one another. “Michigan” is all water—lakes that love the singer back, “But not as much as the rivers do,” under the surface a worry that the state, itself, is already gone, and “It was a kindness to us all/To leave the last place we were kids,” and nothing now feels “The way it was in Michigan.” “Sayonara” takes that loneliness west, and leaves the singer stuck, worldly rich and homeless, grass nowhere greener, until the whole saga boils down to one plea, “Can you leave the porch light on?/ I want to come home.” “Running Away” brings that ache to another person who is always keeping “an arm’s length/Of distance between us.” The bridge cuts: “I was the shoulder you leaned on when you cried/Now I’m the corner you’re trapped in when you lie.”

Money makes the group real, and it makes it self-conscious. “All of My Friends” hums on the dissonance between how life looks and what it costs: a “separate check at a restaurant,” thrift-store clothes “you couldn’t tell by the way I wore it,” a train ride that bests friends with black cars, a doorman the singer recognizes. The hook, “All of my friends think I’m rich,” and the line below it give the ruse away, then a couple of bad decisions from “living under a bridge.” The harmonies bloom into something warmest, most communal, right under the admission, “I don’t let them see me sweat.” And then, one song goes so flat it has nothing to catch it: credit score, 553, announced aloud.

Most of the time, the band sticks to that low, rounded pulse, but a couple of songs rely more heavily on it. “Hurricane” is the song that unleashes the bass; the drums are more urgent, and the whole thing is body-shoving in a messy two-step, with the leads passing around the microphone until the chorus settles on no one voice at all. The song spells out infatuation as a storm you would never, ever choose to escape, claiming the “eye is where I feel safe” only to push past it in the bridge: “I would rather drown in the memory of love/Than entertain the notion of giving you up.” “Blossom” lands at the far end of this scale. The mix turns easy-listening warm, and the vocal arrangement has as gospel slowness, the rhythm section giving the singing voices a level surface on which to set down its suitcase. It’s also the place where the writing is the meanest—a break-up song designed to send the recipient into his new life remembering who it was that carried him: “And when you’re reaching for the sun/Just remember who it was/That held you close/It was a storm.” They hold that last word until the singer takes it: “I am a storm.”

Target a song, and the writing gets quicker. “One Foot Out” is a clear command at someone commitment-averse, and the lyrics cut down to meet the urgency: “Why don’t you say it like it is? Tell me something real,” they demand, and the chorus puts the line in: “If it’s not right now, it’ll never be again.” “Stranger Danger” is much funnier and more frazzled; someone talks to them and then walks her to the train, interrupting her favorite song, and the chorus spits taunts back over her shoulder: “So deluded, really stupid... Kinda ugly, please don’t touch me,” and then the bridge pivots to lay bare the fear underneath the jokes: “You could be a killer on the run... You could try to put me in your trunk.”

The water and weather images appear in nearly every other song, and the most compelling ones keep it physical-those first rivers and lakes. They break down when a song hands over the metaphor entirely. “Deja Vu” is the song here that feels the lightest and moves the quickest; it’s a premonition for a new boyfriend that has seen it all before: “First, you’ll say you love me/Then you’re gonna leave/You’ll think I’m special/For only a week.” It states the cynicism rather than suggesting it, and it pushes that single idea into the lengthy cessation, “Till there’s no time/Till the sun won’t shine/Till the world ends.” It’s this even distribution of warmth that fails them; the soft glow lights up both the slight and the substantial, so “Deja Vu” sounds almost as substantial as the others.

The song that most clearly points forward is “Break Out,” the brightest and most open song on the album, the only one where the band permits the dynamics to soar. It builds on a quiet confidence that he will still get the prize, despite the lag time: “Sitting in the dark ‘cause you know I’m hibernating,” before the payoff, “Coming to the light/Open up my eyes/It’s time.” The kids who busked Grand Central until a crowd gathered around now have a major label record made entirely of those tightly woven voices. “Break Out” is the walk out into the sun: “The world has been so gray and blue/Since I have known you.”

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Michigan,” “All of My Friends,” “Stranger Danger”

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NMD (06.12.26)

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Albums / Deluxe / EPs

• Myles Smith: My Mess, My Heart, My Life.

• Olivia Rodrigo: you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love

• Yes: Aurora

• Goose: BIG MODERN!

• Tori Kelly: God Must Really Love Me

• Blxst: Labor of Love

• Infinity Song: INFINITY SONG

• Jessie Reyez: A Little Vengeance

• Bebe Rexha: DIRTY BLONDE

• Kelsey Lu: So Help Me God

• Wiki: Ancient History

• Awon & The Other Guys: Solidified

• Eloise: My Man & Me

• Ambrose Akinmusire & Mary Halvorson: Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings

• Hit-Boy: HITstory 2: Success Is a Dirty Word*

• Jim Jones: The Landlord

• Mickey Diamond & Big Ghost Ltd: Blood of the Lamb

• BabyChiefDoit: Rise Against My Broken Odds

• Melvin Riley: No AI

• Dee-1: The Shift

• Freddy Stone & Q No Rap Name: REAL LIFE VOLUME 1*

• $amaad: Idea of Evil

• Baauer: U

• Don Gunna: Crack Music 3

• Fruit Bats: The Landfill

• R8: Dawn Chorus

• Jon Spencer: Songs of Personal Loss and Protest

• Mekons: Horrorble (Mekons vs. Tony Maimone in Dub Conference)

• BIG|BRAVE: in grief or in hope

• Horse Lords: Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!

• Josh Conway: Plum

• Meltt: Pathways

• Ruth Garbus: Profound

• Sublime: Until the Sun Explodes

• The Bobby Lees: New Self

• Alex Amen: Sun of Amen

• Terry Presume: FREE

• Dagny: Dancefloor Erotica

• Woo Da Savage: Rap Scholar

• BSG Rambo: Sincerely, Beezy

• CFCF: L.U.V.

• Embrace: Avalanche

• Genghis Tron: Signal Fire

• La Sécurité: Bingo!

• MONO: Snowdrop

• ZekeUltra & Savedbyher.: DOGS NEVER DIE

• Bandits On The Run: Rough Magic

• ISMAY: Half Truth

• HeadHuncho Amir: All My Intentions Real

• Johnny Orlando: Songs for Young Lovers

• Kaaris: BYAKUGAN

• Big Rush: DILEMA DO OURIÇO

• Lyno Nine8: Flightmode

• lil2posh: Graduation Tape

• Dro Kenji: IT IS WHAT IT IS

• YFG Pave: Niemand

• Timey: Tutto passa

• SOO DO KOO: gary

• Tezzus: THE RESURRECTIØN

• Lil Rae: The Godfather 2

• Kodak Black: Kodak the Blessing

• KELS: Dirty Blues Princess (EP)

• Good Girl: Sugar Honey (EP)

• The Musalini: Summer Breeze (EP)

• Lute: Hard to Reach (EP)

• Dom Venice: Paid to Live (EP)

• La Cruz: EL NENE, Vol. 2 (EP)

• Bary: Kuba vs Bary (EP)

• Äyanna: If You Must Know (EP)

• Danny Towers: Marina Money (EP)

• MC Serch & Apathy: Millions Of Zeros (EP)

• Hutch: On the Edge of the Earth (EP)

• Luh Kel: Love Me, Love Me Not (EP)

• Egobreak: The Haunted (EP)

• Claire Brooks: Book of the Cure (EP)

• Shaolin Monkey, C.Terrible & 1010!: Another Battle (EP)

• Rebel Rae: Free the Girls (EP)

• Anysia Kym and Tony Seltzer: Purity (Flips)

• Fly Anakin: (The) Forever Dream’s Night Shift

• DeevoDaGenius & TEGA: Da Story of Tega Brady (Deluxe)

• Elujay: A Constant Charade (Deluxe)

• 2BYG: The Yearbook: Second Semester

• G Herbo: Lil Herb: Lil Heroin Edition

• Faouzia: FILM NOIR (fin)

Singles / Maxi-Singles

• Andrea Bocelli, David Guetta, EJAE & Megan Thee Stallion: DNA

• Trevor Jackson, Smino, Luke Borchelt, Sadie Rose Van & The V.C.U Black Awakening Choir: Gotta Be Us (Be the People)

• Ayra Starr: Tornado

• Eric Benét: Who’s Gonna Save Us?

• YG: Insecure (feat. JID & Ab-Soul)

• Rapsody: God Gotta Afro (feat. Karabo yaMorena Choir)

• Nipsey Hussle & Bino Rideaux: Sacrifices (feat. James Fauntleroy)

• Alissia & Anderson .Paak: Can’t Get Enough

• Fousheé: Drive

• The-Dream: Tampa (feat. Usher)

• Jacquees: Lick Back (feat. Juvenile)

• Lala: Do Better

• JHart: Memories

• Tay Iwar: Say My Name (After Hours)

• Asha Banks: Come Down

• 4Fargo: Posted Alone (Remix) [feat. Ty Dolla $ign & Honey Bxby]

• Cheyanne: Angels

• Kaylee Ameri: Better Than Digital $ex

• Orrin: Pretend

• Dylan Chambers: I’m Already There

• Gnoir: Safety 1st

• Rick Ross: Mahogany Caskets (feat. T.I.)

• Maxo Kream: Time Out

• Ludacris: Real Hustla (feat. GloRilla)

• Polo G: Weight On My Shoulders

• Kid Ink: No Play

• Pell: Thru the Lines (feat. Kota the Friend)

• DAMEDAME*: FIRE BURNIN’ THRU THE RAIN

• BlocBoy JB: Get You Some Money (feat. HoodRich Pablo Juan)

• Ama Louise: Love or War

• Raz Fresco: THE BLIND / BORDERS

• HUGEL: Body Drop (feat. Big Sean & Scott Storch)

• Sonnyjim & Da$h: $Cramble

• Khal!l: MY FEET

• Sonny Tennet: Innocence

• Indigo Mak: Truck Driver

• Pere Navarro: You Know (feat. Braxton Cook)

• IAMNOBODI: REVELACAO

• Quinn Oulton: Circles

• Kalisway: Not So Sweet

• DJ Muggs, T.F & NEMS: Power Tools

• Cherrelle: This Time

• ANKHLEJOHN & SwuM: AURA FARMING

• pastels: Pastels World

• Magic & Bird (Andy Mineo & Wordsplayed): FIRE FROM ABOVE (Maxi-Single)

• Debbie: Weight On Me

• Ryan Trey: Need You (feat. Lecrae)

• Erick the Architect: No Doubt (I’m In Love)

• Sango: St. Claude (feat. Hasizzle)

• Zacari: Real Life

• H3rizon: Future Self

• Ambré: Go to Hell

• Yellow Shoots: WALL STREET

• PJ: To the Ones

• H3adband: Move Your Body

• Rebecca Black: Speakerphone

• MYST: Dynamite

• Mai Anna: Baby Blue

• DijahSB: The Signs (feat. Kwncy)

• Adéla: Red Bottoms

• Lauv: Don’t You Know

• Griff: In the Name of Healing

• Backstreet Boys & PAW Patrol: Bottle Up

• Train: Pennsylvania Turnpike

• Ari Abdul: ENAMORED

• Kate Hudson: California Dreamin’

• David Archuleta: Love for Free

• Stephen Day: Back In My Bed

• aron!: Shiny Stockings

• Suki Waterhouse: When I Get Drunk (I Want You Boy)

• Rose Gray: Club to Your Arms

• Tay-K: Everywhere I Go / Erupt

• Jacob Gurevitsch: Just Another Love Song

• Molly Santana: Can’t Touch This

• Toosii: yesterday

• Bloody Civilian: SpaceFuji (feat. Terry Apala & BOJ)

• Mike D: True Colors

• Justelle: Keep It from You

• John Carroll Kirby: Valentino

• Parallel Thought & Fatboi Sharif: Parallel Paradox

• AKTHESAVIOR: BLESSINGS

• Noah Guy: GREEN VOWS (A COLORS Show)

• Parisalexa: Wrong Generation

• Larry June: The Machinist

• Nick Hakim: I Can See

• Dezzy Hollow: JOOGIN’

• Ho99o9: Power In Numbers

• Show Me the Body: Eat for Peace

• Alicia Witt & John Paul White: Thank You

• L’Rain: soulless cycle

• Jay Exodus, Big Gates & Jay Worthy: Scared Money

• Mychelle: Sunday Afternoon

• Open Mike Eagle & Kenny Segal: Unfinished Concrete Initials (feat. Hemlock Ernst)

• Jay Cinema & Sefu: Amethyst

• Joey Purp: Merch That (feat. NEZ)

• Kaden Jordan, DJ Mykael V& TJ Carroll: IMAGE

• Vandell Andrew, Jah Born & Jordache Grant: Tasty

• Kendra Morris: If I Called You (Acoustic Version)

• izabalien: camera

• Roy Woods: Trust and Believe

• Yazmin Lacey: Sweetest Season

• Kiran the Nomad: For What It’s Worth

• midwxst: DON’T TRUST

• 2slimey: lobby

• Armani West: basketball

• Echstacy: 3 Pack

• PlaqueBoyMax: Thong Song

• Kanye West: GEMINI SEASON

• Tory Lanez: Anything (Lost Tapes 2016)

* = Music not released on streaming platforms. Remember that we don’t always get everything right, as many releases and announcements come through at the last minute.

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Happiness is so hard to capture in writing, and God Must Really Love Me does a long job trying. The good news is established before the first track is up. A marriage that stands, a healthy son, and a God she gives praise to both. Tori Kelly, gospel Grammy recipient in 2019 and married to André Murillo in 2018, built most of this around the demands of a new baby; some of it was written on a tour of Europe in summer 2025. She writes best with some concrete presence: the locked door, the delivery room, a son’s eyes that could look like hers. When there is nothing in the room but happiness itself, she sings the happiness straight and lets the harmonies do the filling.

The sound of the album stays in one room throughout: warm low end, drums drawn back from any rigid pocket, stacked background parts that cite gospel without taking each song all the way into worship. The intro is small, contained, and quiet, her tone widening into clear elevation, more argument than tune. “Dive,” which she wrote while she was seven months pregnant, swells with a rounded, modern-pop beat, her vocal runs dancing on top of the rhythm, not cutting through it. Tokyo, the bright, airy shift the album sorely needed, the beat nimble and her phrasing more compact, faster, more liberated, sounds like it caught a different air.

Introduce a difficult circumstance, and her writing grows tight. On “Control,” she can’t find the house key, lights out, “Sweat on my eyebrow,” and just “trying to get my baby to eat.” The verse runs on background anxiety until the chorus rescues her. “Somethin ‘bout the way You take the weight off of my heart/Put me back together when the world tears me apart,” she sings with tighter, more clipped drumming than on nearly any other track, and the surrender, a relief instead of a doctrine. “Pray for You” deals with the same subject in reverse. Someone has thrown mud on her, and her reaction, instead of being a fight, is to bring the dispute to God. “I had a talk with God the other night,” she sings at the start, before settling into prayer and keeping her distance. “I wish you well, but from way over here,” she sings on the bridge, “See, I’m just protecting my own atmosphere” This is her kiss-off, perfectly composed.

Nowhere does she sound as afraid as on “Bird.” Set to an austere arrangement stripped almost of bass, leaving the voice stark, she delivers worst-case scenarios one after another: past her prime, the well run dry, “What if you leave like my dad did,” “Wonderin’ what they gon’ say over my casket,” a child whose “Eyes look just like mine” tangled immediately with “But what if I can’t provide.” The hook responds with an upward climb, “I’d be just like a bird, so high,” but the relief sounds wished for rather than earned. “Fly” elevates the same impulse into bright pop-gospel, the hook swelling to include a “You” whose “Pride won’t ask for help.” By the end of “Bird” she has talked herself most of the way down, half-believing the part about how the birds never worry.

Her two best swings come with a shift in the song’s structure. “Hurts So Good” uses a waltz time, a jaunty three-count that trips and recovers, supporting a story of loving someone past good sense. “You and me like fire, we light up/Then burn it all to the ground/But we’re still standing somehow,” she sings with a loosely teasing phrase in the devotional-like songs’ steadiness. “Too Much” opens with a tape snippet from the delivery room, counting her through and a voice announcing “We’ve got a boy.” The body of the song presents motherhood with the ground dropped out, a “I’m scared I’ll mess it up” sitting right next to “Knowing that you’re growing too fast.” She lets it sit alongside a warm birthday message dropped into the track of someone telling a small kid he’s the prettiest thing there ever was.

The middle section is a lot more sedate, and the writing feels less active. “Mine” states, with plain assurance, “I may not have everything/But I’ve got a song to sing,” “At least I know that it’s mine,” and the feeling is a familiar enough real one. But it arrives pre-arrived at, with nothing in its way. “Without You” says, “This life ain’t nothin’ without ya,” as a truth that is spoken, not found. “Bliss” pares away the fairy tale and house on the hill and chase for money, ending with “If I have you, I have everything”—a destination without a journey. This isn’t a flaw necessarily. “Name of Jesus,” the plainest song here, gets this from being only a few words on the beauty of the name, the genre and expectation of worship holding it up. The most human few seconds on the soft side come at the end of “Bliss,” a discarded outtake where a voice cuts her off mid-take with that “sounds so good.”

The most direct reading of what she’s looking for is in “Smooth Landing,” in which she finds herself in a space suit, bobbing away from home. “Houston, hey, from the rocket ship,” it begins, and you have an astronaut in love with her vehicle who has flown too far to want to be out there anymore. The things she is reaching back toward are very small and very precise, lying down in bed to “Watch Him paint the room with sunlight” to “Stare right into my baby’s eyes.” It is one of the contentment songs that does the most to establish the room and place before standing within it; the sunlight and child, and long, long trip home.

Solid (★★★½☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Control,” “Hurts So Good,” “Too Much”

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