Translator’s Note: Written by Minako Ikeshiro for bmr (Black Music Review) in an May 2001 magazine issue number 273. Originally written in Japanese; translated into English for publication. All rights reserved.

The massive success of The Writing’s on the Wall propelled Destiny’s Child into supergroup status. But having scored hits with “male-bashing songs” and weathered two lineup changes, they are now as much targets of criticism and ridicule as they are the talk of the town. Just before the release of Survivor, what does Beyoncé, the hardest-working woman at the center of it all, have to say?

“Being strong and positive is what Destiny’s Child is about.” How’s that for an opening statement? After being stood up four times, the interview that finally materialized was a ten-minute, Beyoncé-only session. A far cry from the early summer of 1999, when an entire day had been set aside for Japanese press. “No, No, No, Pt. 1” was the hit, and the self-titled debut album had reached gold in 1998. “We want to get it to platinum so badly,” she’d said at the time, eyes shining. As of March 2001, The Writing’s on the Wall has sold over ten million copies worldwide. It hardly needs emphasizing, but they are no longer just an R&B group; they are a supergroup representing America. They’re discussed in the same breath as Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera as part of the teen sensation wave.

I asked Beyoncé to analyze the key to their success.

“To have sold over ten million copies worldwide, I feel very fortunate. I’m happy, I’m excited, and I’m astonished. I also think it’s the result of working our hardest. We can feel ourselves progressing.”

In that time, you’ve gone from R&B idol group to national superstars. You also seem to have grown from “girls” into “ladies.” Are you enjoying where things are now?

“Of course. We debuted when we were fifteen, and now we’re eighteen to twenty. And I think it’s wonderful to be able to share our experiences with others through writing and producing. I tried my hand at producing on ‘Jumpin’, Jumpin’‘ and ‘Independent Women Pt. 1,’ and I did a lot on this album too. If you listen to the album, you should be able to hear that we’ve grown. If you want to know us, listen to the new record. We’re singing about things we’ve experienced with family and friends, things from being on tour.”

If there’s something difficult behind the success, what would it be?

“It really is incredibly tough. We’ve been working nonstop and haven’t been home, and for the next two months there’s no time off at all. I’m grateful for the success, but there isn’t even time to savor it or spend the money we’ve earned. We travel the world, but the schedule is so grueling there’s no room to look around. Sometimes that makes me sad, but it’s still much better than never having the chance to go anywhere. When I look at the big picture, the downsides are nothing.”

The big picture. Every single cracks the charts. They sweep the Grammys and every other award. They grace the covers of the biggest magazines. They’re called “the next Supremes.” The first single from the previous album, “Bills, Bills, Bills,” and the third, “Say My Name,” became the defining pop songs of 1999 and 2000. Then, as if to seal the deal, “Independent Women Pt. 1,” the theme from the blockbuster Charlie’s Angels, became a massive hit. That song must have been a crucial turning point, proving the new three-member Destiny’s Child could hold their own.

I’ve been running through all this like a record-label press sheet, but to be honest, as one of many Destiny’s Child fans and observers, there’s also a part of me that thinks, “What’s the deal with the current lineup, though?” LeToya and LaTavia were great too. When different members suddenly appeared in the “Say My Name” video, I felt a pang of resentment. And yet, the sheer coolness of the three of them kicking their legs up in the “Independent Women” video was undeniable. Every time it came on TV, I stopped what I was doing and stared at the screen. “Undeniable.” That’s probably the prevailing feeling toward the current Destiny’s Child, who radiate an overwhelming brilliance even as they take fire that borders on outright bashing.

Which makes it hard to harbor negative feelings toward Beyoncé, Kelly, and Michelle, who are apparently nineteen and twenty years old and working like draft horses with no time to sleep. Hard, but it’s also true that there are elements, starting with the repeated lineup changes, that can’t help but be taken negatively. So even though it feels like tabloid reporting and I’m reluctant, let me briefly address that side of things. The current members’ account of the lineup changes was covered extensively in Vibe, so I won’t repeat it, but the departed members’ perspective appeared in Sister 2 Sister, a magazine with its own tabloid leanings, so I’ll summarize. According to LeToya and LaTavia’s interview in the June 2000 issue, they didn’t quit; they were fired, and they learned of it in writing at almost the same time they saw two new members in the “Say My Name” video.

Their conflict wasn’t with Beyoncé and Kelly but with management, specifically Beyoncé’s father, Mathew Knowles. “The finances were opaque, and every time we pushed for a review of the contracts we’d signed at age nine, it became a problem.” As for LeToya, she had reportedly “been told she was fired five times,” suggesting the relationship had seriously deteriorated. Before its debut, Destiny’s Child had a female manager named Andretta Tillman alongside Knowles; the debut album carries a dedication to her. After Tillman passed away from bronchitis shortly before the group’s debut, Knowles took full control of the group, and Beyoncé’s mother took over all styling duties. Losing Andretta Tillman may have been an especially unfortunate turn of events for LeToya and LaTavia. That said, it’s also true that Knowles had been organizing training camps and looking after the girls as a trainer since they were in elementary school (as mentioned in our previous interview), and Kelly told MTV, “Mr. Knowles sold his house and cars to support us before we made it.”

During our previous interview, when I’d spent an entire day with the group, there were moments when LaTavia and LeToya lost focus. When I relayed to Beyoncé my impression that “there seemed to be a gap in professionalism between the members who left and the two of you,” she responded:

“That’s exactly right. A lot of people said the same thing. My and Kelly’s professionalism was different from theirs. We’re willing to make any sacrifice for success. I’m not going to knock anyone else’s approach, but we don’t need to get dragged into it, either. You can do whatever you want, but I don’t want people around me who aren’t motivated. Or people who think negatively. A lot of things happened, but people still accept us, and we keep selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Everyone approached this album with the same level of commitment, so I can say our situation has gotten much better. A weight has been lifted off my shoulders, and I can focus on the creative side, producing and writing. Other producers must find it easier dealing with the whole group through one person rather than separately with each member. You can hear it in the music; it’s much more cohesive. And in our performances and interviews, you should be able to feel that everyone has the same level of professionalism.”

A forceful statement. She arguably didn’t need to speak this harshly about departed members, but considering the ferocious attacks Beyoncé endured on the internet and in magazine letters pages during the departures, her drive to defend herself isn’t entirely incomprehensible. Farrah, who was in the group for only one stretch, also spoke to Sister 2 Sister, saying, “They changed my name (her real nickname was, of all things, ‘Destiny’), made me tan so Beyoncé would stand out more, dyed my hair. It was really painful.” But regarding Farrah, the current members offered a blunt assessment: “We felt like Farrah wasn’t quite clicking, but we had bigger things going on. She wasn’t committed to the work, and she didn’t make an effort to improve. She went from being a supermarket employee to a superstar, so I get it, but still.” In a group whose motto is winning at all costs, apparently there is no room for anyone who complains.

In any case, the new Destiny’s Child puts Beyoncé front and center. You could say that having the most talented member also be the most beautiful invited all kinds of trouble, and you can also imagine that being childhood friends created a familiarity that made it harder to function as professionals. On The Writing’s on the Wall, every member had writing credits; this time, no names other than Beyoncé’s appear. Her increased focus on producing stands out, though when it comes to other producers, she says, “They just send tracks, so I don’t really know them.” Rodney Jerkins, who helped drive the previous album to massive sales, wasn’t available for scheduling reasons and doesn’t appear this time. In his place, Anthony Dent, Cory Rooney, and others from the same production company are on board. Dwayne Wiggins is the only name that carries over from the first album. Hit-makers who previously contributed, such as Wyclef Jean, Missy Elliott, R. Kelly, and Timbaland, are all absent. In a producer-driven R&B world, that’s a bold move, but it also reflects the fact that the group’s name itself is a more powerful selling point than any producer’s.

I asked Beyoncé about the new album.

“I think last time’s success was partly due to working with new producers, so this time I asked some new people for a few songs. I wrote on both albums, so there’s continuity in that sense, but I wanted the sound to feel new again.”

With such a hectic schedule, how did you find time for the music?

“That was really hard too. I was recording while shooting a TV drama, and there wasn’t a single time I could get into the studio two days in a row. The recording took fifty days, but I was juggling other work and couldn’t focus every day. I had to keep switching from actress to writer to performer, and that was tough. The drama was MTV’s remake of Carmen, with me in the lead. The other members would come to set sometimes too. What makes us completely different from other female groups is how much we support each other. When one person has a job, the others give full support. For example, Kelly did a solo track for the Down to Earth soundtrack, and she personally asked me to produce it. You almost never see members of other groups doing that for each other’s solo work.”

“Brown Eyes” is a gentle love song. Is it addressed to anyone in particular?

“I was in a relationship before. I don’t have a boyfriend now, but when I write love songs, I try to recall the feelings from that time.”

The last album dealt with various relationship situations, especially with a lot of tough talk aimed at no-good men. Did you cover different topics this time?

“The last album definitely had a lot of songs about bad men, but we don’t hate men, and we’re not bashing men in general. We just don’t like bad men. This time there’s other stuff too, songs about surviving difficult situations, love songs. I tried to include a more sensitive side of Destiny’s Child. We’ve shown the strong side plenty, so I wanted to do something new.”

The title Survivor has an intense ring to it, but there’s no question it will be the litmus test for whether the new Destiny’s Child is the real deal. Based on the eight tracks I received before the interview, Michelle’s husky, low voice blends effectively with the similar-ranged voices of the other two, and the early signs are promising. Michelle has said she “aimed to be a team player from the start,” and she seems to have been the right fit for joining a group whose identity and status were already fully established. Beyond Beyoncé, Kelly has shown interest in acting, and there’s talk of solo albums for all three, so the Destiny’s Child offensive looks set to continue for a while.

Over the past year and a half, while conducting interviews with various artists for this magazine, Destiny’s Child was the group that came up the most. Everyone from Kevon Edmonds to India.Arie mentioned them by name. Being on that many lips is proof of how much attention they command, and regardless of individual opinions, when you look at the full landscape across genre and race, it can only be a positive that R&B has produced an icon this powerful. Personally, I’ve grown even fonder of Kelly, who is easygoing and straightforward, and I want to root for all three of them, Kelly and Michelle included, to “survive” as superstars.

Denying the current Destiny’s Child is, indeed, a difficult thing to do.

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Between LNDN DRGS records with Sean House, full projects with the Alchemist, Harry Fraud, DJ Muggs, Roc Marciano, DāM-FunK, Curren$y, and Larry June, and then a sprawling double album last fall, the Compton rapper Jay Worthy has been releasing music at a pace that would embarrass most label rosters. Everything independently, everything through GDF Records. He turned down Warner, Universal, and Mass Appeal. Nobody wondered who’d be on the next one anymore. They wondered if it would say anything the last five didn’t.

The guest list answers that, partly. Seven months after a double album stacked with DJ Quik, Ty Dolla Sign, E-40, and Conway the Machine, Once Upon a Time: The Soundtrack swapped the marquee for the underground. Shyheim and Method Man rep Staten Island. Rome Streetz carries the Bronx. A$AP Twelvyy flew in from Harlem; Boldy James came from Detroit. Mozzy holds Sacramento down. And Novelist, of all people, showed up from London, a UK grime MC on a Compton rapper’s record who doesn’t sound like a novelty. Every guest says where they operate. Those cities bleed into the verses, and the record ends up covering more ground than most rap albums twice its length.

Shyheim shows up to a wake in a two-piece Gucci suit over a Teflon vest on “Same Song,” and you remember what he looked like before he raps a single bar. He promised he wouldn’t go to any more funerals, but this was a day one. He’d say names but there are too many to count. Then Worthy does the counting. “Gangsters don’t live that long, it’s still the same song.” It was written by somebody who had been standing at those gravesites. 9th Wonder handed Worthy a beat warm enough to pull something personal out of him on “I Can’t Relate.” He went from Greyhound buses to first class, from Dorchester Hotels to Beverly Hills. The house was bought cash. DJ Quik rode shotgun in his car. He names the labels that wanted to sign him, one by one, like he’s been saving them. “2night” opens with a spoken comparison to Max Julian’s first scene out of prison in *The Mack* and Rudy Ray Moore trying on linens in a limousine. Then Worthy gives his actual coordinates: West Roy, Central, and Rosecrans. A South Asian kid from Vancouver who showed up in Compton at seventeen, joined a Piru set, and ended up buying condos in the Palisades. The Blaxploitation references aren’t someone else’s memories for him; they’re closer to autobiography.

Method Man opens “Visions” fighting his inner demons, his inner circle pushing for an intervention. He slept in his car but he never slept on his repertoire, and his closing “Wu-Tang forever, y’all” feels earned, not contractual. On “IF I,” Rome Streetz compares himself to Damian Lillard: “Shoot it from the logo then spit in your face.” That bar outpaces anything Worthy spits on the entire record. Boldy James on “Rosie Perez” says the only time he ran was from the hooks. And A$AP Twelvyy’s verse on “Mail Order Bride” goes somewhere nobody expected: his uncle could’ve been a star, his auntie won a beauty pageant. “Cinderella turned tragic, it’s like half my homies bastard.” He tells you to handle the projects like Buckingham Palace.

So what does Worthy himself do without the guests carrying? He catalogues: “Checkmate” had Payroll Giovanni yelling “independent bosses, we don’t trip about the fame.” “The Big 3” has Le$ saying “the mackin’ is back.” “I Wish” has Worthy shopping in the Palisades and eating thousand-dollar plates. “Kalifornication” has him courtside with Baron Davis. Watches, foreign cars, women, independence, shuffled in different order each time. “No Price” goes somewhere darker. Worthy raps about a woman he pimped in Portland, calls her Snow White, says she brought back seven thousand dollars her first night. Two bars later he says the best things in life cost no price. He doesn’t hear the contradiction, or he doesn’t care.

Yellowdawg (born and raised on Compton’s Westside, grandparents bought the house in 1959) calls Worthy “a genius” and “a one of one.” A full album with George Clinton gets brought up as proof. The testimony is real, and it fits a man whose greatest skill might be getting the right people in the room. Worthy can do that better than almost anyone working independently in rap, especially since the guests keep outrapping him.

Solid (★★★½☆)

Favorite Track(s): “I Can’t Relate,” “Visions,” “Same Song”

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For a few years in the mid-2010s, the writing collective Full Circle placed songs with Chris Brown, Monica, and Keri Hilson without anyone outside the publishing world noticing the writers’ names. India Shawn, one of the collective’s four members alongside her sister Jazmyn Michel, had the voice to sing everything she was penning for other people, and the industry filed her accordingly: she got called “Little Sister,” a nickname from one of her own compositions, and spent a decade singing background for Harry Styles, Anderson .Paak, and Daniel Caesar. Her 2022 album Before We Go (Deeper), produced almost entirely by D’Mile, was the first time her name stood alone on a project that felt like a real bid for attention. Subject to Change, her fourth EP, picks up where that record left off. Six tracks, the same producer, and Shawn telling men what she needs.

What she needs tends to come wrapped in candy. “Marmalade” asks him to bring that marmalade, knock on her door, come get a taste of her candy world. On “Cotton Candy Blvd” with Lucky Daye, she maps the whole flirtation like a drive through a neighborhood that only sells sugar—Sweet Lane to Sticky Avenue to Cotton Candy Boulevard, each block sweeter and dumber than the last. But “‘Til Infinity” breaks from the pattern to ask for something harder to package:

“Decide who you are to me
Tell me tenderly the things held so deeply inside.”

And “Rain On Me” swings right back to material pleasure: VVs on her wrist, mai tais in the summer, somebody who spends it all on her and makes her feel worth the spending. The candy language stays consistent, and when the tracks that use it are sharp, the sweetness carries actual flirtation. “Cotton Candy Blvd” is very sharp. When they’re less developed, like “Marmalade,” the metaphor starts doing work that a stronger melody might’ve handled instead.

D’Mile produced all six tracks. On “Rain On Me,” an acoustic guitar strums against a fat, thumbed bass while Shawn sings in a breathy half-whisper above both; the drums are so pulled back they’re practically furniture. “Cotton Candy Blvd” is built wider—Lucky Daye’s voice doubles hers on the hook, and the two of them pass lines back and forth like they’re finishing each other’s drinks at a bar neither one plans to leave. “‘Til Infinity” strips down to voices: her harmonies fold over each other on the word “infinity,” bending the vowels until the whole chorus sounds like it’s humming itself to sleep. D’Mile’s got back-to-back Song of the Year Grammys and an Oscar, and he produced Before We Go (Deeper) too. He’s been making this sound with Shawn long enough that the arrangements feel worn in, not engineered—more like a room she already knows how to move through than one she’s visiting.

Everything shifts on “Kill Switch.” Shawn tells someone that whatever they just said was bold, dangerously dumb even, and the refrain shuts the conversation down before it starts:

“Don’t wanna pay with the dark
Losing what we should keep.”

She’d rather end something good than watch it rot. “Multiplicity” goes further: the guy wanted everyone, planted a garden when he started with a seed, and the space got too crowded. The hook just lists pronouns, “her, me, you, she,” a headcount she’s done calculating. After four tracks of open arms, the EP closes on crossed ones, and these two cuts are the tightest things on the project.

Half the EP had been public for almost a year before the project arrived: “Kill Switch,” “Cotton Candy Blvd,” and “Rain On Me” all dropped as singles across 2025 and 2026. The remaining tracks, “Marmalade,” “’Til Infinity,” and “Multiplicity,” are the new material, and the latter is tighter than the other deep cuts and meaner than anything else here. “Started with a seed, but you planted a garden,” she sings on the second verse, and the line says something the rest of the EP only implies, that the same woman asking to be loved in abundance on “Rain On Me” has been down this road enough to know when the abundance includes other women.

Favorite Track(s): “Cotton Candy Blvd,” “Kill Switch,” “Multiplicity”

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Sometime in 2000, a radio station turned the most chaotic girl-group saga in pop into a punch line, and the bit was simple. Destiny’s Child that kept losing members was basically the CBS reality show Survivor, and the question was which one got voted off the island next. The joke stuck because it was accurate. The group had burned through four members in less than a year, left behind two lawsuits and a management scandal, and still had albums to sell. Beyoncé Knowles heard the bit and did something nobody at that radio station expected. She wrote a song called “Survivor.” Then she renamed the entire album after it.

That joke was aimed at a specific disaster. LeToya Luckett and LaTavia Roberson, original members since the group’s formation as Girl’s Tyme in 1990, were replaced in February 2000 by Michelle Williams and Farrah Franklin while The Writing’s on the Wall was still producing hit singles. The swap happened via music video, which is how Luckett and Roberson found out. Both filed lawsuits claiming Beyoncé’s father, Mathew Knowles, who managed them, had been favoring his daughter and Kelly Rowland for years. Franklin lasted five months before she was gone too. And the trio that walked into the studio to make Survivor was held together less by shared history than by the wreckage of the old lineup.

Beyoncé co-wrote virtually everything and produced all of it at twenty years old. Rob Fusari co-produced a handful, Cory Rooney and Poke & Tone and Damon Elliott split others, but the editorial hand belonged to one person. Rodney Jerkins, who had produced “Say My Name,” submitted tracks that didn’t make it. Beyoncé said she only wanted to record a handful, but the label kept pushing for more, and none of it was planned. Rowland and Williams sing leads on sections throughout, but they’re singing words Beyoncé wrote over production Beyoncé approved. That arrangement would have its own name two years later, when she titled her solo debut Dangerously in Love.

Columbia pulled “Independent Women Part I” off the Charlie’s Angels soundtrack and slotted it onto this tracklist after the single had parked at number one on the Hot 100 for eleven consecutive weeks. Too big to leave off. Shoes on my feet, I bought ‘em. Clothes I’m wearing, I bought ‘em. Rock I’m rocking, I bought it. Just an itemized receipt for a life without a man’s credit card. Every object named is an object a boyfriend used to buy, and the women are daring someone to miss the difference.

Beyoncé wrote the title track for the people who wanted them dead. “You thought I’d be broke without you,” she sings, and lists what she bought since they left. “You thought I’d be helpless without you,” and lists what she built. Luckett and Roberson viewed the title track as violating a non-disparagement agreement from their departure settlement and filed a second lawsuit. All litigation settled in June 2002. A song that went to number two on the Hot 100 for seven weeks was also, briefly, a legal exhibit.

Rob Fusari co-produced “Bootylicious” and later disputed Beyoncé’s songwriting credit, saying he conceived the track around a sample of Stevie Nicks’s “Edge of Seventeen” guitar riff. Mathew Knowles’s response was blunt. “People don’t want to hear about Rob Fusari, producer from Livingston, N.J.” The credit dispute got buried; the song went to number one. “I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly,” Beyoncé sings, Kelly and Michelle behind her, and the women whose bodies had been tabloid property since the lineup scandal sound like they’re enjoying themselves more than at any other point on the album. The Nicks sample gives them a rock-radio aggression their previous singles never had.

The same trio that made “Bootylicious” also made “Nasty Girl,” a song that scolds women for wearing too little clothing. “Look at that girl,” they sing over a stuttering beat, pointing at women in clubs who dress for attention and calling them classless. Destiny’s Child dared anyone to handle their bodies on “Bootylicious” and then policed somebody else’s wardrobe here. Their version of female empowerment has conditions, and they include a dress code.

Beyoncé wrote at least five different songs on this album about how attractive a man is. “Fancy” is a getting-dressed song that stays in the mirror for three minutes. “Apple Pie a la Mode” swaps dessert names for sexual content with the subtlety of a greeting card. “Sexy Daddy” tells a man he’s attractive in the plainest terms. “Happy Face” says a man makes her smile. “Dance with Me” asks a man to dance. None of these have the architecture of the singles or the writing of the singles or anyone seemingly invested in them past the first run-through. She wrote and produced them anyway, and her instincts are good enough that even the throwaways have shape.

Two years after Survivor, Beyoncé titled her solo debut Dangerously in Love, the same name as a ballad she’d co-written here with Errol McCalla Jr., and she kept the song for the new record almost intact. Listening back to the original, the vocal is already a solo artist testing the water while two other women harmonize behind her. Elsewhere, Mark J. Feist produced an R&B rearrangement of the Bee Gees’ “Emotion” that pulls the melody away from its disco origins, and the harmonies across all three voices are some of the cleanest anywhere on the LP. One conventional ballad could belong to any R&B group working in 2001.

It closes with a gospel medley dedicated to Andretta Tillman, who helped form the group when its members were children in Houston. Tillman booked their earliest shows and coached their harmonies before any label knew their names. Lupus killed her in 1997, a year before “No, No, No” hit the radio. All three women grew up in church, and closing a pop album with straight gospel was a choice almost none of their commercial peers would have risked. After fourteen songs about independence and men, the album ends in a sanctuary. Tillman never saw any of this happen.

Survivor debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 663,000 first-week copies, the highest first-week total for a female group in the SoundScan era. Over ten million copies worldwide. Metacritic gave it a 63. “Independent Women Part I,” “Survivor,” and “Bootylicious” are as big as anything released in 2001, and they’ve held. The tracks between them coast on goodwill and Beyoncé’s instincts. She was twenty, and she was already making the decisions that would define the next twenty years of her career. Rowland and Williams sang whatever she gave them, and it sold like they were equals. Everyone involved knew better.

Above Average (★★★☆☆)

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In April, physical notecards started showing up in TDE merch orders. “Everybody wants to see you crash out, fall off, and burn out for their entertainment,” they read. “I just want to see you smile.” The handwriting was sloppy and the sentiment was sweet, and it promised the kind of album people expect after a rapper survives the worst years of his life in public. Isaiah Rashad delivered something else on It’s Been Awful: sixteen songs naming every substance he can’t quit and every person he let down while using. The notecards were a misdirection. The album is a relapse diary.

The phrase “profit over love” appears on “The New Sublime” and returns on “Happy Hour,” both times mid-verse, both times dropped like an errand he forgot to feel bad about. We’ve heard rappers talk about money ruining their relationships before, but Rashad skips the argument. He just knows what he picks when his family needs him home. On “Happy Hour,” his doctor warned him the substances had been damaging his heart, and he still rapped about chasing money and amphetamines and affection in a single blurred craving. Then his mama cried, and it wasn’t enough to bring him home. He put it that plainly:

“What do I despise more than myself
And all that I’ve become?”

That question closes the song, and honestly, it’s the kind of line that would feel cheap from most rappers. But Rashad did not attempt an answer.

His mama doesn’t want drugs in the house. She said he had a death wish after he’d gotten so drunk he called her from his car, smoking to the Isley Brothers all night. Her tears didn’t drag him back. The sister went to jail. Three kids stood at shows while he described pouring liquor in the shower, and his sons heard him say he was trying to be a better example—then admit the last time he claimed sobriety, he’d been lying. I lost count of how many family members get named, and he spares exactly zero of them.

Rashad was twelve years old on “Act Normal,” in the back of a room on a Macintosh, and somebody asked him if he wanted to see some nasty shit. His daddy kept a stash behind a locked bedroom door. The entire family, he said, turned out to be sex addicts. His mama was in love with her best friend, “dodging those feelings.” He delivered all of this over a sluggish Southern groove (the kind of beat you’d play at a cookout, which makes the content worse) and then asked a question I don’t think he expected anyone to answer: “What is love when I don’t trust a boy or a girl? Act normal.” He was eighteen by verse two, fucking for sport, running from love, and the line “the rapper is a porn star” like that was just another fact about his week. He was talking about how exposure warps you starting from childhood, and he wouldn’t coat it in clinical language. It happened, and it made him this.

Rashad offers to be someone’s boyfriend on “Boy in Red,” and if that doesn’t work, he offers to be their girlfriend. He says both with equal ease, identical invitation to stay the night, one chorus floating over the top. SZA’s verse flipped everything: she’d been drinking, she was pissed, she was tired of him disappearing with his boys and coming back horny. “Ain’t you tired, my poor friend?” she asked, and that exhaustion landed harder than anything on Rashad’s side of the song, where he’d already said what he was and kept going as if the conversation would sort itself out eventually.

The sobriety talk circled without arriving anywhere. “The New Sublime” warned that romanticizing Percocets might trigger a relapse. “M.O.M” went don’t do a line, then two bars later went pop two, wait, don’t overdo it. “Scared 2 Look Down” put it at quitting like the eighth time. “Do I Look High” admitted methamphetamines had been messing with his mind. “Ain’t Givin’ Up” counted rehabs. And on “SUPERPWRS,” he stacked confessions without resolution: how he made it through the bullshit, he had no idea; how he got sober then messed up then clean again, zero explanation; whether he loved the same on substances, that one he left open too. Rashad genuinely lacked an answer and decided to release the record anyway.

Midway through “Cameras,” Rashad stopped rapping entirely. You could hear him talking to someone in the studio: “Niggas be making shit just to get out my fucking head... I’m talking to myself now?” He laughed. Then he asked everybody (and it sounded like he was asking himself too) to try being lighthearted for a minute.

KTC produced half the tracks and Julian Sintonia left marks on ten more, and that production pairing gave the record a continuity that the lyrics might not have held otherwise. Crystal meth confessions and love songs and freestyles, all sitting next to each other. But one run on “SUPERPWRS” stayed lodged after everything else faded: Rashad told someone that if he didn’t change his ways, it was over. “Damn,” he said, “you don’t wanna be my friend no more?” A few bars later: “Say I’m never going back, but then again, I don’t know.”

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Do I Look High,” “Act Normal,” “Happy Hour”

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The album cover is a photograph of a guy leaning against a brick wall at his job, lunchbox in one hand, pack of cigarettes poking out of his jeans. Looks like he just clocked out, because he did. The factory was Weber Aircraft in Los Angeles, where Bill Withers installed lavatories in 747s for $3.50 an hour. When Sussex Records released Just As I Am, he was 32, a full decade past the age when most soul singers had already burned through a first contract, and the jacket note he wrote for it didn’t promise anything. He thanked his label and his producer “for allowing me to present myself to whoever is kind enough to listen.” That’s not modesty packaged for marketing. Withers had spent nine years in the Navy, worked assembly lines at Douglas Aircraft, IBM, and Ford, bought a guitar at a pawnshop after seeing Lou Rawls play a club, and paid for his own demo tapes out of pocket on a wage that barely covered rent. None of it was a pose. He genuinely didn’t know if anyone would care.

Clarence Avant at Sussex heard the demos and assigned Booker T. Jones to produce. Jones had just left Stax and was living out in Malibu. For the band, he pulled Donald “Duck” Dunn and Al Jackson Jr. from the MGs, added session drummer Jim Keltner, Flying Burrito Brothers bassist Chris Ethridge, Motown percussionist Bobbye Hall Porter, and Stephen Stills on guitar—Stills was filling the spot Steve Cropper would’ve normally had. Withers drove to the studio straight from the factory. Jones told Rolling Stone in 2015 that Withers showed up in old work boots and a beat-up car with a notebook full of songs, then pulled him aside and asked, “Booker, who is going to sing these songs?” The answer was him, and he hadn’t figured that out yet. Four sessions were planned; funding problems cut it to three, spread across six months. The musicians heard each song once and played it. Jones arranged everything (strings, keys, guitar) and kept the whole operation short and clean, out of Withers’ way.

Half the songs on Just As I Am clock in under three minutes, and none of them waste a second pretending to be bigger than they are. “I’m Her Daddy” is about a father who just found out he has a six-year-old daughter nobody told him about. He asks whether she’s pretty, whether she sleeps in a room of her own, whether she shows the babysitter his picture and says “That’s my daddy.” Then his voice catches: “You should’ve told me, Lucy.” Withers doesn’t milk it—just reports what a person learning this news would actually ask, in the order they’d ask it. “Hope She’ll Be Happier” does the same thing with a breakup except there’s no bitterness at all. He doesn’t blame her, doesn’t beg. Just concedes the lateness of the hour is making him seem sadder than he really is and hopes she does better with the other person. You believe him, too, which is the strange part. “Sweet Wanomi” and “Moanin’ and Groanin’” are both about wanting somebody, but one whispers about satin pillows and a woman covering her mouth when she yawns, and the other just comes out and says what the first one was polite enough to dance around.

Radio made the album’s biggest hit by accident. Sussex released “Harlem” as the A-side single; “Ain’t No Sunshine” was the B-side. DJs flipped it. Two minutes and four seconds long, the song barely has a second verse. Withers repeats “I know” 26 times where lyrics were supposed to go—he’d planned to write an actual passage and never got around to it. When he offered to fix it, the session players, people with decades of professional recording behind them, told the factory worker to leave it alone. So he did. Twenty-six repetitions of “I know,” and it says more than a finished verse would’ve. “Grandma’s Hands” runs just as short, and every second of it counts: her hands clapping in church, handing out candy, reaching for him when his mama couldn’t settle him down. Withers grew up in Beckley, West Virginia, raised by his mother’s family after his parents split when he was three. His grandmother was his whole world, and he doesn’t say that anywhere in the song. He just tells you what her hands did, and you get it.

Jones and Withers tucked two covers into the middle of the album. “Everybody’s Talkin’,” Fred Neil’s 1966 track made famous by Harry Nilsson in Midnight Cowboy, gets rebuilt under Jones’ arrangement as a chest-out soul strut about ignoring other people’s noise, and it barely resembles the original. “Let It Be” goes even further. Jones brings in the organ and a gospel-style tambourine and turns the whole thing into a Sunday service, Withers singing McCartney’s words like they came out of a Pentecostal hymnal. Both are cuts by white writers, and Withers and Jones just took them and made them theirs, no apology, no winking about it. After Just As I Am, Withers never covered anybody again. He told a New York Times interviewer in 1972 that too many Black artists got conned into recording standards by white songwriters who collected the publishing while the singers went hungry, and every song on Still Bill was his own.

You can hear how wide this album swings just by comparing the first track to the last. “Harlem” sketches seasonal life on a block. Summer nights too hot to sleep and too broke to eat, a radiator that won’t heat in winter because the landlord doesn’t bother, Saturday night parties and Sunday morning churchgoers crossing paths with heathens stumbling home. Then Withers turns to the crooked delegation shaking donations out of the congregation to send the preacher somewhere holy, and he warns them not to give that lying crook their money. “Better Off Dead” puts you inside an alcoholic’s last afternoon. He drank away his family’s savings, pawned their belongings, drove his wife to tears and eventually out the door. The priest came, and there was crying and praying and promises to quit, but none of it stuck. She’s gone with the kids. “I must die by my own hand,” he sings, “’cause I’m not man enough to live alone.” A gunshot ends the track. A debut on a small independent label, by someone nobody had heard of, and the last sound is a trigger pull.

Only one track on the album sounds like its singer is having fun. On “Do It Good,” Withers is grinning. If you wanna kiss a funky beagle, hitch a ride on an eagle, read a catalog from Spiegel—go on and do it, just do it good. Part spoken-word, part party starter. Fish was made for hooking, grits for cooking, eyes for looking. Halfway through, he drops the act and talks directly to whoever’s listening, referencing the album cover, introducing himself as a first-timer who’s never done this before. That nervousness is real. He wasn’t playing a character. He was just some person at a microphone, half giddy and half scared, talking to people he couldn’t see.

In October 1971, Withers received two letters on the same day. One was from Weber Aircraft, offering his mechanic’s job back at $3.50 an hour. The other was from Johnny Carson, inviting him to sing “Ain’t No Sunshine” on The Tonight Show. The single reached No. 3 on the Hot 100 and won the Grammy for Best R&B Song. Withers took firmer control after that—self-produced Still Bill, wrote “Lean on Me,” scored three million-sellers before a legal fight killed his Sussex deal and Columbia spent years trying to sand down his edges. He walked away from music entirely in 1985, at 47. Spent the last 35 years of his life out of the public eye in Los Angeles. When Stevie Wonder inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015, Withers called it “an award of attrition” and said he didn’t think he’d done bad for a kid from Slab Fork, West Virginia. He died on March 30, 2020, at 81.

Masterpiece (★★★★★)

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NMD (05.01.26)

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Albums / Deluxe / EPs

• Kacey Musgraves: Middle of Nowhere

• Various Artists: The Devil Wears Prada 2 (Music from the Motion Picture)

• American Football: LP4

• The Black Keys: Peaches!

• Melanie C: SWEAT

• Curren$y, Wiz Khalifa & Harry Fraud: Roofless Records for Drop Tops: Disc 2

• Isaiah Rashad: It’s Been Awful

• Lil Tjay: They Just Ain’t You

• Asake: M$NEY

• Durand Bernarr: BERNARR.

• Jarrod Lawson: Just Let It

• Taj Mahal & Phantom Blues Band: Time

• Oteil Burbridge & Lamar Williams Jr.: The Offering

• The Nth Power: Never Alone

• Farma G & Relense: Nearly Nothing’s Enough

• Oddisee & Heno.: From Takoma with Love

• duendita: existential thottie

• CK the Spitta: Strictly 4 the Underground

• Bally Baby & Hoodrich Keem: BABY DRANK: REFILL

• Grafh: Sometimes Money Cost Too Much

• La Doña: Corrientes

• Nu Genea: People of the Moon

• Rita Wilson: Sound of a Woman

• BONES & Lyson: ETC.

• Skrilla: Z

• Kneecap: FENIAN

• Ealuhri: YOU’RE WELCOME WORLD

• Edward Skeletrix: Body of Work

• BandGang Lonnie Bands: Motor City Slicker

• SHARP. & Tha God Fahim: The Blacker The Berry

• Mak Sauce: FINALLY

• Oodaredevil: SKURF’d UP

• YSR Gramz: The Right Rapper

• Saiah Woes: sorry 4 the fate

• Four50: The Four Hoursemen

• CODENINE & ???: THEFIRSTSUPPER

• Truie Fiend: prod jetski55555

• Supreme Cerebral & O the Great & Alpha_Betic: Clash in Cairo

• Reno RX: Rap Ain’t a Young Man’s Game

• esteban.: ZAPOFALLTRADEZ!

• Dream On, Dreamer: Heavens

• Safety Trance: sacrificio

• Jay Montana: Montana 3

• Truie Fiend: prod jetski55555

• Ana Roxanne: Poem 1

• 1k Phew: Any Given Sunday

• Traetwothree & OG Parker: Sorry, I’m Not Sorry

• Daddyphatsnaps: Mission Impossible

• Tha God Fahim: Dump Gawd: Hyperbolic Time Chamber Rap

• Ziggy Marley: Brightside

• Onra: After Dark

• Luhh Dyl: A Time to Heal, A Time to Hurt (ATH²)

• Hekt: Forever

• BLARF: Film Scores for Films That Don’t Exist

• Seefeel: Sol.Hz

• Maya Hawke: Maitreya Corso

• Emma Louise: Sunshine for Happiness

• Octo Octa: Sigils for Survival

• Piero Umiliani & Chet Baker: Smog (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

• Tori Amos: In Times of Dragons

• Young the Giant: Victory Garden

• shteppi: are you lonely?

• Lip Critic: Theft World

• Deadharrie: Eternity, Make Believe

• Modern Woman: Johnny’s Dreamworld

• Hiss Golden Messenger: I’m People

• India Shawn: Subject to Change (EP)

• Tiara Thomas: Make It Make Sense (EP)

• Dewey Bryan & Elaquent: Higher Plan (EP)

• Shoreline Mafia: BIDNESS IS BOOMIN’ (EP)

• Essosa: Crush! (EP)

• Hudson Ingram: The Long Way Home (Vol. 1) [EP]

• Canti: Citrus (EP)

• Jahson Paynter: is anybody home! (EP)

• Maya Law & Freya Ray: Tall Tales (EP)

• North West: n0rth4evr (EP)

• PlaqueBoyMax: CRASH DUMMY (EP)

• LUCKI: DAYSB4BAD* (EP)

• K Suave: AfterHours (EP)

• kels!: Live Like This (EP)

• Slug † Christ: Little Dier (EP)

• Nate X: Suite Life on X (EP)

• B.o.B: The Morning Bang (EP)

• Razakel: The Possession of Razakel (EP)

• Sakkright Hinch & Enphmaus: I-85 (EP)

• Truie Fiend & Shawn Ferrari: Bijou Boyz Sports Center (EP)

• Hester Valentine: This is Phil Spector (EP)

• Zara Larsson: Midnight Sun: Girls Trip

• Meghan Trainor: Toy With Me (Deluxe)

• Kehlani: Kehlani (Uncut Edition)

• Louis Tomlinson: How Did I Get Here? (Extended Edition)

Singles / Maxi-Singles

• Maroon 5: Heroine

• Chris Brown: Fallin’ (feat. Leon Thomas)

• AZ: Uniqueness

• Joyce Wrice: Crack the Code

• Mýa: Just a Little Bit (feat. Too $hort)

• Bella Kay: Promise?

• Nick Jonas & Brandon Lake: Hope (Remix)

• Robyn & CAR7RIEL & Paco Amoroso: Blow My Mind (CAR7RIEL & Paco Amoroso Version)

• BANKS: With You Around

• Keith Urban: Summer Breeze

• Claire Rosinkranz: Just a Man

• Heidi Montag: IV Drip

• Isabel LaRosa: Hallucination

• tig3r lewis: Too Easy

• Robin Packalen: Running Through My Head

• Alina Baraz: Take Care of You

• DOE: Know Your Name

• Kenny Mason: Bounce Wit Me

• Jon Onabowu: The Emergence

• HILLARI: How Does It Feel

• Vince Staples: Blackberry Marmalade

• Meek Mill: In My Eye Freestyle*

• Bryson Tiller: IT’S OK

• NAV: Mutt (feat. Quavo)

• JPEGMAFIA: babygirl

• Love Spells: Crutch

• Chenayder: Wonder

• Calvin Richardson: Radio Rodeo

• La Reezy: Melanate It

• Cécile McLorin Salvant, Metropole Orkest & Jules Buckley: With Every Breath I Take

• Mack Keane: Cherry Red (A COLORS Show)

• Pearl & The Oysters: Doom Mood

• Chxrry: Bottles & Lights (feat. Mariah the Scientist)

• Charlie Bereal: When You’re Around

• Lizzo: BITCH

• Rio Sterling: Die On Me

• Lucy Park: BLUE SASHIKO

• Sondae: Rushing

• Joy Oladokun: Zombie

• Dayo Bello: Stand Still

• OT The Real: 750

• Bobby V: Both Ways

• Cory Henry & Rafael Labate: Dance (Remix)

• Lex Aura: Gravity

• Aaron Cole & Tenroc: usher in the spirit

• Young Chris, MadeinTYO & Freeway: Too Strong

• Lil Skies: No Fear

• DaBaby: POP DAT THANG (Official Remix) [feat. GloRilla, Yung Miami & YKNIECE]

• KenTheMan: Popular

• Big K.R.I.T.: Sunset Vet

• KAYAM: Deja Vu

• Kid Travis: Diamonds On Your Neck

• Moio: Just a Man

• Odessa A’zion: Maybe I’m Not What You Need

• GAWD: GTA

• Ama: So…

• Kelsey Lu: Better Than That

• Talia Goddess: WE COME AGAIN

• Shann Aberdeen: State of Flow

• ARYIEL: No More

• Jeff Bernat: Whatever Goes

• Pan Tèrra: Quit My Job

• Zenesoul: Heart on Fire

• MAKALM: Choose

• Sarah Defne Gray: That Girl.

• Saint Demarcus: Lifeline

• Echo Huang: YOUR GIRL

• MOIO: Just a Man

• Tyree Thomas: Safe Place

• Aiyana-Lee: Pretty Picture

• Claire Brooks; LIKE LOVERS DO

• James Berkeley: back again

• Maz B: Running Out

• Isaiah Kaleo & ROME: lead me on

• Jaz Elise: Move Mountain

• 38 Spesh & Dave East: Heavy Burden

• Switch & Planet Asia: Serpent’s Tongue

• Nick Grant: Back Up (feat. BJ the Chicago Kid)

• Lord Sko & Statik Selektah: HANGMAN

• Anna Margo: Brainrot

• Kavi Synatra: Calling for You

• BJ Swayed: Downtown

• Ariel J.: Forever

• Tyler Watts: Number One (#1)

• Mike Teezy & Kierra Sheard: TIME4U

• Jessica Tori: Curious

• Pan Tèrra: Quit My Job

• ace hashimoto & kenya fujita: TOP NOTCH (Japanese Version)

• Jessie Reyez & Muni Long: AIN’T U TIRED

• The-Dream: Bring That Body

• Felix Ames: Crack a Smile

• Real Boston Richey: Bitch You Weird

• Southsidesilhouette: Dojo

• Devstacks: Him

• Babystaydown: Saint Soprano

• Chow Lee & Cash Cobain: 2C

• Jamal Roberts: Perfect for Me

• ANKHLEJOHN & V Don: KING, PAWN & ROCK (feat. CRIMEAPPLE)

• mango heist & KALLITECHNIS: as the world turns

• James Savage: Higher Power

• Phoenix James: Company

• CTLN: Headspace

• Budgie & The Alchemist: Prosperity Gospel (feat. Knucks)

• Eddie Kaine & MillsSkillz: Know the Rules

• Anjali Asha & Khrysis: Big Deal

• Tanna Leone: Skin

• Ibibio Sound Machine: Return to Sender

• Patrick Paige II: Let Me Down Easy

• Roberta Flack: I’d Like to Be Baby to You (Live at Montreux, 1990)

• Zae France: Said Summ (feat. K Camp)

• Roderick Porter: Roll the Dice

• Elmiene: Honour (feat. Baby Rose)

• Junetober: Like You Need It

• FIG: Day One

• S!MONE: The Worst Part

• H33RA: SHOOK

• Zohar & Adam: winter in america (feat. Sam Sellers & Nory)

• Freya Everest: Moniqué

• Levina: Spectacular Society

• Ceebo: Parable of a Skinnyman

• Heidi Montag: IV Drip

• Sorana: SKINcare

• XTINA GG: Good Knight

* = 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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The keyboards on Just Let It sit in your chest. Jarrod Lawson, who debuted at 37 after years of laying stone for a living, produced the whole record himself, and the first thing you notice is how good the band sounds—thick, easy, every chord given time to ring before the next one drops in. His falsetto rides above the arrangements cleanly, and when he stacks his own harmonies three or four voices deep, the blend is so tight you’d swear it was one throat. Lawson plays keys on everything, sings lead and background, and wrote or co-wrote every lyric. Where the playing is precise, the writing is often vague. Full of good intentions and short on the kind of detail that makes a song belong to one person and nobody else.

Except when it isn’t. On “Smoke Me Out,” the bass walks underneath Lawson while he sings about growing up on the south side of a town where ten-year-olds are packing heat and the powers that be pretend they’re cleaning up the streets. He names Mrs. Jones two doors down, whose teenage son was gunned down, and asks how a village can heal when men like him just decide to leave. People keep telling him to get out. He agrees, but he won’t let them smoke him out. Mrs. Jones, the brothers selling in the streets, the mamas and kids: these are the only named characters on a record where most of the cast is “you” and “baby.” The song earns them.

On “There Can Only Be One,” Lawson talks to Allen Stone over a horn section trying to start a parade: “Pacific Northwest grown, just like this other guy that I know,” he sings, “two blue-eyed, curly-haired, soul-singing white boys with something to say.” He accuses Stone of combing through his hometown, pilfering his musicians, recruiting his homies to some Kool-Aid compound. He mentions Bieber thinks Stone is super cool. Stone responds by calling Lawson’s voice “sweeter than a baby’s smile” and saying, “Even Bieber wouldn’t change the dial.” Two white guys from the Pacific Northwest making soul music, each wondering if the world has space for even one of them, and the affection depends on how close the comedy runs to the anxiety.

The rappers on this record write harder than Lawson does, and that’s a compliment to the company he keeps. JSWISS shows up on “Let Your Heart” and raps about playing mental tennis with his own decisions, about how the brain makes the feet move but “the heart make the mouth speak.” On “I’d Do It Again,” he puts in a deposit “two, three times, or whatever that it costed,” and if God granted three more chances he’d do it just to meet her three more times. donSMITH on “Head-On” is better still. He wasted his teens trying to be AI until they changed what it means, he raps, and “You can’t ChatGPT your way to the league.” He learned to turn his problems into furniture. He describes his mother as “mama’s Mona Lisa in Carhartt.” His tailor is Mossi, while his insecurities are what’s curing him.

Lawson married Evalee Gertz in 2022 and has a track named for her on an earlier record. On Just Let It, she’s everywhere and nowhere. “Gentle Soul” has him fumbling through darkness until a fire came through the shadow and a face emerged. “Nothing to Forgive” brings him home to drop his phone and cuddle on the couch because he’s got nothing left to give. “Authentically Me” goes the furthest of the four: he calls himself a scared little boy afraid to be seen, says she taught him to forgive himself for all the thoughtless things he did. His voice on these tracks is what sells them—the falsetto warm, the phrasing gentle enough that you come closer even when the words stay general. The gratitude is real. But four declarations of gratitude without a single scene between them start to blur. He keeps saying she saved him, but never says from what room, on what day, while doing what. The voice carries it in a way that a weaker singer couldn’t.

Two kinds of release show up side by side. “Do Whatchu Gotta” has Lawson telling a partner to leave: “girl, get your fine ass out there and fly.” That line stings because he’s watching her walk and admitting he always knew deep down she needed more. “If We Pretend” is bigger and vaguer, asking why people have a chip on their shoulder and can’t look each other in the eye. One has a person in it. The other has a subject. But both sound gorgeous—Lawson’s piano on “If We Pretend” does half the talking the lyrics won’t.

Eric Roberson is the funniest thing on this LP, and it’s not close. “Laugh at Yourself” has Roberson telling a story: he stubbed his toe, felt bad for himself, and God told him, “Why you trippin’ on that toe? You got nine more.” Lawson cracks up. Roberson says he’s walking with a limp, makes his flaws look good, says even if you’re laughing to keep from crying, keep trying. That exchange between two grown men goofing on each other about humility has more personality than “Just Let It” or “Let Your Heart” or “I Got Your Back,” where the advice is fine and the voice delivering it could belong to anyone. Lawson can sing, and he can play. Chick Corea and Oscar Peterson and Ravel all in his hands, and you hear each of them in the chord changes. The guests brought the words, but Lawson made the room they’re standing in, and the room is why you stay.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “There Can Only Be One,” “Head-On,” “Smoke Me Out”

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Seventeen tracks (with an All-Star production and songwriting team) is a lot of album for anybody, and it’s an especially bold number when your last record won a Grammy at fifteen. BERNARR., the fourth studio album from Durand Bernarr and his first since BLOOM took Best Progressive R&B Album in February, goes wide on purpose: funk, workout-instructor counting, therapist’s-couch confession, yacht rock, and several flavors of love song. Most of it works, and a surprising amount of it is great. The best material comes from directions you wouldn’t predict for an R&B album.

On “Sugar Family,” gas is so high he had to pray just to drive his car; the price of eggs nearly made him faint; daddy’s American Express is “pressed.” The chorus, “this jam needs bread, your cousin, your auntie, your brother, everybody chip in,” is built on a pun so obvious it shouldn’t work, but the names around it are real: big Reggie, Aunt Kitty, the brother who has bills of his own. It’s a family song and a recession song at once. On the Chic-inspired “SHARP!” the best line is the one about the person’s parents getting together “for a night of heated fellowship” and creating a masterpiece. The dance-driven “EFFORT.” goes further (the cadence of a gym instructor) to talk about what happens when someone doesn’t try hard enough in a relationship. “I don’t think you tried hard enough last night, thought you came in heavy, but it gave light.” The joke eventually turns literal: “go outside, touch some grass, extend your life, maintain your spine, hydrate daily, more than twice.” They’re funny about real things, not funny about being funny.

The record has more than comedy in it, though. “sleep” asks, “What did I say yes to?” while insisting there’s still so much left to do. Bongo ByTheWay-produced “Undivided” apologizes for being unavailable: “Wish that I could give you time, but it’s something that I can’t provide right now/I wanna give my attention, my capacities won’t let me divide right now.” He talks about time the way “Sugar Family” talks about money, as a resource he has already run through. On “Am I Okay?!” he sits on a therapist’s couch, says he’s run out of fucks, says his heart is in a rope, asks to be pulled up, asks to be shown how to get home. “AYO!” with BJ the Chicago Kid covers adjacent ground with a looser grip: “Turbulence comes with flying, it’s not rocket science.” And then, near the end: “The devil didn’t do it/Life just happens/We all got issues/Grab your tissues.”

The album is named after Bernarr Ferebee Sr., his father. “River” opens with that: “Papa wasn’t a rolling stone, but he taught me to move like water/Mama said chase your dreams ‘cause she knew I could go much further.” Self-affirmation for the rest of the song: “You better move out of the way, I’m like a mighty river.” The dedication is on the cover. It stays there.

On “HELLO!” he wears the occasion plainly. “Look ma, they really like me,” a Sally Field riff, sure, but followed by “state of twenty years, thank those joyful tears,” and the number is real: he started posting YouTube covers in 2008 and didn’t hold a Grammy until 2026. The bridge chants “Do your big boy” with a giddiness nobody could fake. The second verse dips into math metaphors (“Four plus four equals eight/So if you slow you better get up out my way”) that feel more like filler, but the song’s honesty about how long arrival took gives it weight that cleverer writing might not have.

The love songs run quieter. On “BLOOM” (the song, sharing a name with the album before it), he asks for “permission to have my way with you, even if I already have the answer,” then: “I crave to be in agreement intellectual first.” And then: “I am the safe word, you couldn’t be safer.” “Wild Ride” with James Fauntleroy has a tossed-off ease: “I don’t care where we go, don’t even need to know, just go,” that keeps it loose. “soft.” with Khalid and “My Life” are gentler; “Isn’t it nice, all this gentleness” on one and “Baby, can’t you see this is heaven” on the other don’t cut as deep as the album’s harder material, but Bernarr sounds genuinely at ease inside them. “10,000 Lifetimes” with Sevyn Streeter closes the love-song run with “Our love is off the chain,” and Streeter’s verse, where she’d have him “tatted on my chest so you know it’s yours,” gives the duet a physical specificity the quieter ballads don’t reach for.

Big Sean on “Waiting” turns in the liveliest guest verse; he’ll be “fair like cotton candy and teddy bears and Ferris wheels,” then one bar later he’s at “your auntie house, your mama house, we can do it like nobody’s there.” The whiplash between carnival and bedroom gives the song an energy nobody else here can match. Vic Mensa on “Homesick” runs a similar play: “I’m ‘bout to run off like a dad on Maury/Knock out like Tyson Fury, quick fast in a hurry.” On “I Found Myself,” he says he hated everything that made him who he is, then discovered his breath, “inhale less than exhale,” and centered himself. The second verse says he peeked in the rearview to see who he had to leave behind, and it broke his heart. That kind of long-range pairing with songs full of variety is something you can only pull off on an album this size. Daddy tried his best, but that American Express is pressed.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Sugar Family,” “Am I Okay?!,” “EFFORT.”

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Golden, Texas, is in Wood County, population under two hundred. There’s a sign on the road into town: “Somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere.” The kind of place that introduces itself by confessing it’s barely there. Kacey Musgraves grew up there, started writing songs at eight, learned mandolin before she learned guitar. Her sixth record takes its name from the sign, and the place names on Middle of Nowhere stay this specific: Abilene, Uncertain (a real town, population ninety-four, on Caddo Lake), the Dairy Queen, the county line. Norteño accordion and zydeco rhythms show up because they belong to East Texas and the border region. When she sings “Past the Dairy Queen, the county line,” she means a road she’s driven.

She can go days without seeing anyone, she tells us on “Loneliest Girl.” Won’t deal with anyone’s childhood trauma, won’t pretend she cares about their friends or their mama. “Put me on a poster of somebody who’s living the life,” she sings, and she sounds convinced. But that song also admits “I’m not sure I can stand my heart getting broken again,” and the bravado cracks. The preference for being alone is also a refusal to risk company. Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk, producing with Musgraves for a third straight run, give the song a soft, swaying arrangement where the pedal steel floats under her voice, and the two feelings, contentment and fear, share a key.

Three hundred and thirty-five days. That’s how long it’s been, and “Dry Spell” is the record’s best comedy and its most physically honest song. “Lonely with a capital H, if you know what I mean,” she sings, and then she mentions sitting on the washing machine. “Ain’t nobody’s tool up in my shed, Ain’t nobody’s boots under my bed, Ain’t nobody’s truck up in my drive.” And by the final verse: “Nobody but the chickens are getting laid.” “I got the bacon and no one to bring it home to” is corny and knows it. Luke Laird’s co-production pushes the arrangement toward honky-tonk bounce, pedal steel sliding under each verse, light enough that she can sing about sexual desperation for three minutes and keep it comic.

The men here are defined by what they can’t do, won’t do, or already did. In “Back on the Wagon,” he was out of his mind on the Fourth of July, blew all their money, thought it was funny, got found passed out on the floor at the derby. She takes him back. She says “there’s no more red flags in him.” And you believe her? In “I Believe in Ghosts,” he disappeared, “you didn’t even have the balls to tell me goodbye and look me in the eye.” Exes as apparitions is clear from the title and doesn’t complicate itself, which is the record’s weakest tendency: a few songs state their premise and stay put. In “Coyote,” Gregory Alan Isakov gives the man a verse, and it’s a plea: he just got back in town, he’s over by her house, he can’t defend the way he’s been. He asks to be let in before the light comes. In “Hell on Me,” she tried to change him and it changed her.

The first-person habit breaks on “Abilene.” A woman went out for cigarettes and ended up on a bus, headed anywhere far from home. Her daddy disapproved of the boyfriend, “you couldn’t clean off the dirt even if you hose him down and put him in a collar shirt.” The pills didn’t help. The whole town can only speculate what was in her head when she hit the interstate. Then the outro shifts: the person who stayed behind admits “I probably thought about it but I won’t ever leave Abilene.” Two people, one impulse, different choices, and the best writing here is in giving both of them a turn.

Musgraves co-wrote “Mama’s Broken Heart” with Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally; it was pitched to Miranda Lambert without her consent. “Horses and Divorces” is the only song where both singers are in the same room, both admit fault, and neither one wins. Lambert sings she was on her high horse but Musgraves would still be higher, “and a few years ago, you’d had set me on fire.” They discover common ground: “horses and divorces and we both like to drink.” They can’t believe they don’t share any exes. Neither can I. “We both love Willie, but I mean really, what asshole doesn’t like Willie?” The reconciliation happens inside the song instead of around it.

Gold hoops, cowboy hat, hot pink shorts, bathroom floor. “Mexico Honey” is all scene, and the man in it is the only one here who gets a clean entrance. He goes down smooth; she wants him so bad it isn’t even funny. He tells her he’s always had to be tough but not in front of her. She smiles even though she knows she’ll cry when she has to leave. “Rhinestoned” is after the same company with less to go on: a stranger at a bar who’s been crying, “I got something in my pocket, we could step out back,” and two people holding each other in smoky light.

Willie Nelson shows up on “Uncertain, TX” and mostly cosigns the verdict. The song is named for a real town, barely on the map, where cowboys can’t get off the fence and characters made of straw blow away with the wind. Musgraves asks, “Did you ever love me, baby?” and nobody answers. Nelson gets the last line, a long string of insults stacked into a compound adjective: “nobody ever makes up their dusty ol’ love-bombin’, snake-charmin’, bullshittin’, heart-breakin’, godforsaken dumbass mind.”

Solid (★★★½☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Dry Spell,” “Abilene,” “Mexico Honey”

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Translator’s Note: Written by Minako Ikeshiro for bmr (Black Music Review) in an April 2001 magazine issue number 272. Originally written in Japanese; translated into English for publication. All rights reserved.

Early spring, 2001. Maxwell’s third album Now is about to arrive, and the purpose of this piece is to get an advance look at the full picture of the new record and the man himself before its release, sharing that “we’ve been waiting!” anticipation with bmr’s readers and building the excitement even further. But to show my hand: as of this writing, with Valentine’s Day only just behind us, the only thing I’ve heard is the first single, “Get to Know Ya.” On top of that, the exchange with Mr. Maxwell, who apparently isn’t the biggest fan of interviews, was conducted via email. It’s a method that’s new and novel, sure, but even harder than a phone call when it comes to getting a read on the other person, and I have serious doubts about how well this will satisfy Maxwell fans’ expectations. To offer a bit more in the way of excuses: in the US hip-hop and R&B market, music has increasingly been leaking against artists’ wishes before release, and in the worst cases it ends up circulating as bootlegs. As a result, there’s been a growing crackdown on letting any music out before street date, and the collateral damage has landed on people like me, who have zero intention of profiting beyond a writing fee.

I’m not well versed in the situation in Japan, but if you happen to spot something that looks like a bootleg in a store, please don’t buy it. Refraining is one way of showing your love for the artist.

My apologies for starting with such an ugly, complaint-ridden opening. This is no way to match the beauty of Maxwell, so let me change the tone. When the proposal came from the other side, deep in recording, that they’d prefer to respond to the interview via email rather than by phone, I’ll be honest: a wave of anxiety hit me. (There I go again, back in complaint mode.) But when the forwarded replies to the questions I’d scraped together with my limited brainpower and information arrived and I opened them, my heart did skip. Email is also a slightly private, slightly formal medium. At its root, it’s a variation on the letter. So think of this as an open letter from Maxwell to bmr. Yes, when you look at it that way, it starts to feel special and exciting. (Staying positive, staying positive.)

First, let’s confirm the framework of the new record. From the start of his career, Maxwell has been an artist who generously showcased his talent for writing lyrics and crafting music, along with that falsetto voice. He has credited his work as a creator under the name “MuSZe,” hinting at the presence of a mystical muse within. Another widely known fact is that he brought in Stuart Matthewman, a core member of Sade, as his sole outside producer, in order to complete his art. I asked whether anything has changed on the new album.

Is the new album mostly the work of “Musze” again?

“Yes.”

Does “Musze” have any supporting members? If so, please introduce them.

“For me, God is ‘MUSZE.’ It’s also my own special nickname, the place I’ve been given, my everything.”

Is Stuart Matthewman involved on the new album as well?

His answers, his sentences, are in a sensory kind of English that connects to the world of his lyrics. The grammar might confuse a Japanese exam student (though the problem lies with the absurd rigidity of Japanese entrance-exam English, not with Maxwell, just to be clear). But reading his words over and over, I sensed a beauty hidden in the writing. That beauty comes from Maxwell’s inner world, and from the richness of his sensibility, since writing sometimes reveals a person more than speech does. To convey that beauty on the page as much as possible, I’ve kept the translation close to literal rather than liberal. It may be slightly hard to read, but I’d ask you to slow down for his answers. If doing so brings you into contact with his beauty, that’s all I could hope for.

When writing lyrics, what inspires you the most?

“It depends on the time and the situation.”

What are your usual circumstances when you write lyrics?

“There’s no set method. When something comes, it just comes. I’ve tried to control it more in the past, but I’ve found it works better to surrender to the inspiration when it wells up.”

You studied photography and design. When writing lyrics, do you have specific visuals or images in your mind?

“To some extent, but they’re not especially vivid. When I write, I’m more focused on setting down what I feel.”

What instruments do you use when composing?

“I start with the basics. Piano or guitar.”

On the previous album you used Spanish. Have you expressed your Latin or Caribbean roots this time as well?

“There’s a bit, but not prominently.”

The album title is Now. What kind of era do you believe we’re living in?

“I believe the possibilities are infinite, and the ultimate theme is truth. Cherishing ourselves, and respecting what is different from us. I think we’re living in a truly fascinating time.”

That last response might seem like a mismatch with the question, but I don’t think he misread it. Rather, he was conveying the overarching theme of the album and his message. It’s also the answer that best reveals his character, and it lets you infer that the essence of Maxwell’s music lies in a high spirituality and sharp sensitivity. That, most likely, is the true identity of “MUSZE.” Born in Brooklyn, New York, with West Indian blood including Puerto Rican heritage, he carries within his urbane sophistication a reverence for the primitive and a willingness to follow his emotions honestly. His fondness for the phrase “heart and soul” has a certain naivete that stands apart from the industry at large, a world that prefers to talk about money and chart victories, and it makes perfect sense that he keeps his distance from everyone except Matthewman.

“Get to Know Ya” is a beautiful song. What inspired its creation?

“I met someone who bewildered me in a way I’d never experienced before.”

What was your reaction when you first heard “Fortunate”?

“This is going to work.”

Did you think it would become that big a hit?

“Not especially. I don’t look at things that way. I decide based on whether I like it or not. Hits are unreliable, and having one doesn’t necessarily reflect a person’s talent. Having a hit does generally enable you to keep doing work on an even bigger scale, though.”

Your musical styles are completely different, but when I interviewed R. Kelly, I found he was also an extremely shy person. What was the studio experience like?

“I’ve never met him.”

“Fortunate,” the second single from the Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence film Life, remains his biggest hit to date. Given that R. Kelly basically invites artists to Chicago for recording sessions and that Maxwell has never met him, one can imagine Kelly crafted and handed off the song entirely on his own. And for Maxwell, who says the important thing is whether music is “good,” who the producer is probably matters less than how to make a good song his own. And it did, in fact, “work.” Q-Tip once said he was fed up with the trend of everyone judging songs by whether they’re “hot” rather than whether they’re “good,” and if you obsess over making “hot hits,” you’ll literally cool off eventually. Just as Urban Hang Suite still sounds fresh today, I have no doubt that Now will be a work that reflects its own “now” for decades to come. To be alive in a “now” that keeps producing talents like the ones Maxwell mentions is, I sincerely feel, fortunate for all of us.

A number of recently emerged artists regard you as a pioneer. What do you think of Musiq Soulchild, Bilal, and Jill Scott?

“I like and respect all of them. This movement is only going to grow, and the fact that it’s heading in this direction is testament to the heart and soul that lives in everyone.”

The word “testament” also refers to the Bible, and this answer offers a glimpse of his devoutness.

How do you evaluate Sade Adu as a vocalist?

“She’s an original.”

Do you think you’ve been influenced by her?

“Not in any particular way, but her records were the door that led me to meeting Stuart, a person of great influence.”

You’ve newly recorded Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work.” Are you drawn to British music?

“I just like ‘good’ music. I don’t much care where it comes from. What matters is whether it has heart and soul, and anyone from anywhere should be able to express that.”

Speaking of Matthewman, how did you find Sade’s new album?

“I love it. I think ‘Every Word’ in particular is a wonderful song.”

Is the theme of the new album love? If there are songs that address topics other than romance, could you tell us about them?

“The subject is always changing; you could say it reflects each moment. Romance is part of it, but my own growth, and having learned to let things roll off even when they don’t go well, has been the driving force this time.”

What’s the biggest difference from your previous two albums?

“I pray there are many differences, but I can’t give a clear answer. I think that’s something better left to the listener’s judgment.”

Do you have any special plans for Valentine’s Day?

“I’d like to.”

You’re regarded as a fashion leader. Who are your favorite designers?

“Right now, more than ever, I’m in the mood for regular clothes being the best.”

A song born from meeting a mysterious woman who rendered all prior experience useless (”Get to Know Ya”), things that didn’t go as planned and could only be let go of... It seems there have been all sorts of developments in his private life, and perhaps he converted those experiences into something positive through his music. According to press materials, this time around the production wasn’t as meticulous as on previous albums; he let things flow. Put differently, the album will probably be one that naturally wears the air in which the music exists. Maxwell’s heart and soul, the Maxwell who confides that “casual clothes suit my mood right now,” are surely packed into Now.

Sidebar: Maxwell’s Style

Atsuko “Akko” Matsuda

When I first saw Maxwell in the video for his debut single “Til the Cops Come Knockin’,” crawling across the floor in his explosive curly hair, a shirt, and slim-fit pants, I was shocked. “A UK singer? Gay?” That was my impression at the time. But Maxwell grew up in East New York, Brooklyn’s infamous ghetto, the same neighborhood that produced Cormega and many other rappers. During his middle and high school years, school and the streets around him must have been wall-to-wall hip-hop. So where did Maxwell’s style come from?

Before he had a record deal, Maxwell first performed at the downtown club Nell’s in 1993. From around 1992 to 1994, house parties in New York were losing steam, and downtown parties that played rare-groove records, like Giant Step and Soul Kitchen, were the main draw. I went to a few myself, and the crowd was mixed-race. I remember people wearing tidy shirts or vintage suits, often with a white tank top underneath, a hunting cap on their head, or their hair pulled back in a bun with a scarf wrapped around it. The fashion leaned toward what you’d see on UK acid jazz musicians. So when a friend of mine, who used to hang out with Maxwell just before he got his record deal, told me Maxwell was a regular at those parties, it all made sense.

According to that same friend, Maxwell was quite particular about his fashion and always looked stylish, so I believe he basically doesn’t use a stylist. With that in mind, if I were to pick my favorite looks from his magazine shoots, videos, and shows, the most striking was from his concert at Madison Square Garden last year. He wore an all-white suit with a white-based knit cap featuring Rasta-color stripes. The other was an official label photo: tightly braided cornrows flat against his scalp, paired with a fitted pinstripe suit. In both cases, he loosened up a sharp suit with his hairstyle or a knit cap, showing a style unique to Maxwell and unlike any other R&B singer. The styling has a UK feel, but as I mentioned, it actually emerged from New York’s downtown party scene. Maxwell’s fashion was, in the end, the ultimate New York downtown style.

II. Caribbean Frequencies in Maxwell’s Music

Michihiko Takahashi

I’m going to deviate slightly from the Caribbean framework right out of the gate and talk about Latin America for a moment.

On the well-known Red Hot + compilation series, one of its strongest entries, Red Hot + Rio, includes a Maxwell track called “Segurança.” As the “+ Rio” indicates, the album is focused on Brazilian music, and it features contributions from PM Dawn with Flora Purim and Airto Moreira, plus names like Money Mark and Caron Wheeler. Even in that company, Maxwell’s original number “Segurança” stands out. It’s not a flashy track by any means. In his usual alluring fashion, he delivers a vocal and arrangement heavily inspired by bossa nova. The song is co-written with Stuart Matthewman, and while you can certainly find a bossa nova sensibility in Sade as well, the key asset on “Segurança” is the presence of guitarist Vinícius Cantuária. A Brazilian musician based in New York and formerly of Caetano Veloso’s band, Cantuária adds a deeply authentic flavor. But authentic as it is, the way the güiro (a small percussion instrument made from a dried gourd with ridges scratched by a stick) and percussion are deployed carries a subtle Caribbean fragrance. Taken as a whole, the song becomes something only Maxwell could have made: a piece of music that is quintessentially New York.

Even tracks that appear simple in structure turn out to be quite intricately layered.

When it comes to Caribbean connections, artists like Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez, and Christina Aguilera, squarely in the showbiz lane, may be easier to discuss at this point. Their music puts backgrounds like Puerto Rico or Venezuela right on the surface. But Maxwell, despite being of Puerto Rican descent, never presents his heritage that directly. I get the sense that Roxy Music’s Avalon and Caribbean music have occupied roughly the same distance in his aesthetic world until now.

Looking at tracks from Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite, “Whenever Wherever Whatever” carries a strong Caribbean scent. It’s not dance music; it’s a simple song backed mainly by a single guitar, but between the Spanish-inflected guitar tone and the vocal itself, you can sense a sabor (flavor) akin to what salsa calls sentimiento. The lyrics are in English, though.

This is all admittedly impressionistic, but as an album, the follow-up Embrya seems more consciously Caribbean in its sound. The percussion resonates differently from the first record, that’s the clearest tell. Following the opening secret track “Gestation: Mythos,” the song “Everything: To Want You to Want” features the same quality, but on “I’m You: You Are Me and We Are You (pt me & you),” sung partly in Spanish, the commitment to percussion becomes even more pronounced.

The new single “Get to Know Ya” is unexpectedly straightforward and pop in its feel, dialing back Maxwell’s usual seductive atmosphere. What’s interesting is that the horn arrangements are unmistakably Caribbean. Others have felt the same way, so this isn’t just my imagination. In fact, beyond the Caribbean, the horns evoke an African group: the groove is reminiscent of the late Franco (the greatest guitarist Africa ever produced) and his Congolese ensemble, simultaneously relaxed and sharp, exquisitely balanced. Embrya had “Arroz Con Pollo,” a track where the horns play a phrase resembling Allen Toussaint’s “Yes We Can Can,” but “Get to Know Ya” pushes that approach a step further.

I still haven’t been able to hear a single track from the new album beyond this one, but there’s a chance the musical direction has shifted considerably. Then again, he’s such an exceptionally stylish artist that the album as a whole might not change all that dramatically. Either way, I’m eagerly awaiting its arrival.

III. Maxwell’s Voice

Hayashi

By the standards of conventional soul and R&B, Maxwell’s vocals are not, strictly speaking, soulful. His falsetto-laced, caressing singing voice sits at the opposite pole from a sweaty, gritty singer like K-Ci, the type who leans on shouts and overpowers you with raw vocal force. And yet his sweet, sensual whisper grips the listener’s ear and doesn’t let go. The persuasive power is more than sufficient.

Sade and Maxwell are frequently compared (or practically equated) in terms of their musicality, not least because of the Stuart Matthewman connection. Sade Adu’s vocals, too, are neither soulful nor particularly virtuosic, yet precisely because of that, they radiate an erotic mystique that draws the listener in like quicksand. Whether or not Matthewman has an affinity for this type of voice is a separate question, but when Maxwell’s or Adu’s vocals dissolve into a mellow track, they don’t just gain in sensuality; they emerge with a three-dimensionality that sends a shiver down your spine.

At its core, Maxwell’s approach centers on a delicate but resilient tenor voice, deftly moving between falsetto and chest voice to enrich his expression. In that sense, he’s very close to Prince. On MTV Unplugged, when he sings Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” in an agonized, transcendent falsetto, the effect is pure Prince. “Lonely’s the Only Company” on Urban Hang Suite carries a similar quality, if less intensely. That said, rather than making a raw emotional appeal through falsetto alone, his vocals, which deploy vibrato to trace delicate emotional terrain, possess something like compassion, a gentleness of manner, a tenderness toward the other person.

That brings to mind the artist whose work is most often cited alongside Maxwell’s (as with Sade): 1970s Marvin Gaye. Whether Maxwell himself acknowledges it or not, the resemblance to Marvin’s restless, wandering vocals on I Want You (1976) and Here, My Dear (1978) is undeniable, including the multitracked vocal layering. The affinity between Maxwell’s work and I Want You in particular, an album on which vocal recording alone reportedly took close to a year, is beyond question. How much time Maxwell spent on his vocal tracks is unknown, but in his singing, with its subtle deployment of a diverse range of voices, one senses, for better or worse, a certain calculated precision.

Come to think of it, El DeBarge, who covered Marvin’s “After the Dance” in 1992, has a naive, delicate vocal style in which the parallels with Maxwell are easy to spot. And both El DeBarge and Maxwell have Hispanic roots, which makes it tempting to dismiss their vocals as “not soulful like other Black singers.” That’s far too reductive, but the fact that Maxwell’s influences don’t come exclusively from Black music is genuinely significant. On MTV Unplugged, beyond the Kate Bush cover, he also tackled a Nine Inch Nails song, making no secret of his rock influences. It’s entirely possible to detect a (white) rock singer element in his vocals. Overlay the voice of someone like Bryan Ferry, a singer influenced by Black music, onto Maxwell’s, and there’s surprisingly little dissonance (a roundabout way of putting it, I know). Of course, Urban Hang Suite also includes “Suitelady (The Proposal Jam),” where he sings raw and rough in a traditional soul style straight out of the Sam Cooke-to-Bobby Womack lineage, and that makes perfect sense too. In any case, Maxwell is an omnidirectional singer, much like the hairstyle on the back cover of Urban Hang Suite. The question now is: what vocal style will he use to speak of his love for women on this new album? I can’t wait to find out.

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New Jack Swing had been running R&B for two years by this point. Teddy Riley programmed the drums, Bobby Brown set the attitude, and Bell Biv DeVoe proved you could break up a vocal group and come back louder with half the singing. The sound was percussion first, melody second, and if you wanted to hear men actually harmonize you were probably digging through your parents’ records. Male vocal groups—the format Motown had invented its empire around—were functionally extinct. Four kids from Philadelphia’s High School for the Creative and Performing Arts showed up that April with a debut they’d named after a 1975 movie about Black kids on Chicago’s Near North Side. Boyz II Men didn’t announce a revival. They just sang like one was already underway.

Dallas Austin, who produced eight of the ten tracks, was twenty years old and had never made a ballad. He’d been a high school dropout in Atlanta running the lightshow for a local act before becoming a keyboardist, then a producer; his first real credit was Joyce Irby’s “Mr. DJ” for Motown in 1989. He came to Philadelphia to cut two uptempo tracks and ended up doing the whole record. When the group asked if he could do slow jams, he went and bought Babyface records, listened to them, and figured out the structures on his own. Babyface didn’t produce a single note on Cooleyhighharmony, but his fingerprints are on every ballad. Austin copied his homework in real time. That kind of frankness says something about the album’s character. Nobody here was pretending to be seasoned.

And the songs don’t pretend either. “Please Don’t Go” opens with a spoken apology: “Hey baby, I’m sorry, I never meant to hurt you.” The speaker hasn’t given any reason for the apology yet. He just knows he should be saying it. He promises to be there when she calls, swears he thinks about her when temptation shows up, asks her not to leave. “Lonely Heart” starts even further along. The breakup has already happened. A girl tells Mike it’s over in a spoken skit, and the rest of the song is him trying to prove the relationship still has a pulse. “This Is My Heart” skips the conflict and goes straight to declaration:

“Loving and kissing and holding you tight
Letting you know everything is all right.”

These are teenage boys talking about love the way teenage boys do. Total commitment offered upfront, no hedging, no conditions, no evidence that they’ve been through enough to back up the promises they’re making. The sincerity is real precisely because it hasn’t been tested.

Nothing on the record is stranger or better than “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday,” a cover of G.C. Cameron’s 1975 original from the Cooley High soundtrack. The group sings it a cappella. No drums, no keyboards, no bass, nothing except voices stacked on top of each other. Cameron’s version had a full arrangement with strings and piano. This one strips all of that away and makes you listen to Wanya Morris’s tenor and Michael McCary’s bass occupy the same space without anything between them. The song is a farewell, but the Cooley High context was friendship and death, not romance. When the group’s tour manager Khalil Roundtree was murdered in Chicago while they were on the road with MC Hammer, they started dedicating the song to him. A cover recorded by kids who probably just liked the melody ended up carrying real grief, and the absence of instruments made the weight of it sharper.

“Motownphilly” does something different entirely. Michael Bivins raps the group’s origin story over the top of the track, shouting out “ABC” and “BBD” for Another Bad Creation and Bell Biv DeVoe, the other two acts he managed. The song is a hometown anthem, Philadelphia pride, “back again doin’ a little east coast swing.” It’s also the group narrating themselves into existence inside the album, telling you their name, their city, their mentor, their lineage. They named themselves after a New Edition song. They titled the album after a Motown soundtrack. The biggest uptempo single is literally called “Motownphilly.” Everything about the record’s identity is stated outright, and the stating of it is the content.

The loosest track on the album is “Uhh Ahh,” which opens with the group harmonizing informally, joking about doing harmony over hip-hop beats, and then settling into a slow jam carried mostly by finger snaps, percussion, and layered vocals doing the melodic work that instruments would normally do. It found a second life when Beyoncé sampled it on “Countdown” twenty years later. The two songs produced by Troy Taylor and Charles Farrar as the Characters have a thicker, more synth-heavy feel than the Austin tracks. “Your Love” runs close to six minutes and stretches the vocal arrangements into long harmonized passages where the voices trade phrases without rushing to a resolution. “Little Things” puts its argument in the hook. Little things mean a lot. Neither song reinvents anything, but they round out the album by doing the small, specific work of being grateful instead of pleading.

What mattered more than any single song was the way the voices split the work. Nathan Morris’s baritone, Wanya Morris’s vibrato tenor, Shawn Stockman’s higher tenor, and McCary’s bass all sang lead at different points. There was no designated frontman. McCary did spoken-word intros; Wanya took the showiest melodic turns; Stockman provided the falsetto-range counterpoints; Nathan held the middle. Most R&B groups at the time ran on one or two lead voices with the rest singing background. This group rotated, and the rotation was the sound. Bivins called it “hip-hop doo-wop” and the phrase was clumsy but honest: New Jack Swing drums underneath, Temptations-era vocal stacking on top, and guys from a performing arts high school who clearly spent years singing together before anyone handed them a microphone.

Standout (★★★★½)

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Samba Jean-Baptiste, +3

On +3, Samba Jean-Baptiste plays every instrument, writes every lyric, mixes every track, and the solo setup sounds like a choice. The whole back half of “Peppermint” is him singing to her over a pillowy programmed loop about waking up hot, running laps in his head to stay awake, offering her a private prayer he already knows has expired. Then Bung comes in with a bassline that feels closer than the vocal, and the song flips: “I could break down on my own, but it’s you and me on the phone for hours.” Chloë LeStage features on “Pressure & Light” and “By the Wind,” but her biggest contribution to the record arrives on “Statues & Symbols.” Samba opens the song gasping a run of two-word couplets (old days, daylight, road rage), one per breath. LeStage takes the hook, a chorus built around keeping her eyes wide open, and on it she sings the album’s sharpest political line inside a hook about staying wide-eyed (“Black blood leads to fame/But the news don’t say my babies name”), so the baby the news will not name and the child she is watching over wind up in the same breath. Samba is altered across most of these tracks and nobody in the room checks on him. On “Twisted Angel,” he flicks a joint into the grass, watches it burn, and thinks of a woman he has not felt for in weeks. Bass and shaker and almost nothing else move under the vocal. He waits at a bus stop in a coat, in wind, wishing someone would collect him like a phone call. A memory turns into a freestyle. A whole face goes into the snow just to watch it melt. The touring schedule is loud enough that Samba cannot be bothered to answer his cell. The song, and the record, end on the shrug. — Ameenah Laquita

Arlo Parks, Ambiguous Desire

Signed at 17, Mercury Prize at 20, a US tour cancelled for mental health concerns at 22. Arlo Parks had been famous longer than she’d been an adult when, in the spring of 2024, she wrapped her My Soft Machine tour at Brooklyn Steel and found herself with nothing to do. So she did what 23-year-olds do. She went to Midnight Lovers in LA and juke nights in Greenpoint. She read McKenzie Wark’s Raving. She started DJing Goldie and Prince at house parties (still hasn’t picked a DJ name) and fell in love with someone who lived in New York. Then she linked up with Baird, a Baltimore producer known for his work with BROCKHAMPTON and Kevin Abstract, in his downtown loft, and the two of them made a song every other day for two years. The guitars from her first two records disappeared. Modular synths, breakbeat rhythms, and UK garage kicks took their place, and the bedroom-confessional poet who’d been everybody’s sad best friend suddenly had bass frequencies and a reason to leave the house. The songs are full of people. Aleda’s cousin is being sick out back while the disco lights turn blue at ten to six in the morning. Maria stands on a dancefloor holding both her heels, sequins on her jeans, wishing she wasn’t herself. Cindy slips out of a car in leather and pink chrome. Joey guards his decks. Parks packs a night bag—cigarettes, cash, phone—and rides in a Jetta to someone named Conor’s place. And then, on “Beams,” she’s sobering up on a stranger’s stairs, looking at Harley Weir photos, and she tells someone flat that she was suicidal in Brazil. On “Senses,” she admits she’s been dulling herself with art and women, wishing she’d disappear at speed while cycling, asking Sampha’s question back at herself: is trying better than nothing? — Charlotte Rochel

Eboni Riley, Beautiful Tragedy

For a decade, two women shared the same body. Riley Montana walked for Marc Jacobs and Givenchy, shot the Beyoncé x Balmain Renaissance campaign, appeared in Vogue. Ebony Riley, the name on her birth certificate, was writing songs in private, recording demos nobody heard. She’d grown up on Detroit’s West Side, joined her church choir at seven, lost her mother at nine, passed through state custody before earning a nursing degree she never used. When she signed to Interscope in 2020, she did it quietly, during lockdown, as if sneaking out of one life and into another. Beautiful Tragedy is what she found on the other side—a debut, executive produced by Larrance “Rance” Dopson, that puts a graphic sex song about choking and threesomes (“Otherside”) next to a prayer built on Aunty Renee’s voicemail about trusting God (“Through the Motions”) and asks you to take both of them seriously. The range is wild, and Riley is dead serious about all of it. “Who Raised Y’all” puts broke, unfaithful, club-dwelling men on collective trial—she kept the receipts from their texts, she says—while “Honest” admits she used to say yes to men she didn’t want and fake it to avoid sleeping alone. “I’d rather be real and rejected/Than fake for acceptance,” she sings. But the song that will outlast the rest is “Bloom,” where Riley sings directly to young Black girls and spells out the exact household: mama gone, big sister making sure they eat, a teenage girl whose grandmother called her ungodly. — Aicha Odilia

CRIMEAPPLE, BEEMER ON BROADWAY

Since 2017, CRIMEAPPLE has been cycling through producer partnerships the way some people cycle through restaurants: one album with DJ Muggs, one with Big Ghost Ltd, one with Apollo Brown, one with Preservation, one with DJ Skizz, one with V Don, one with Evidence, two with Buck Dudley, and a self-titled album he cooked alone. He names the projects after cars parked on Jersey streets: Jaguar On Palisade, now Beemer on Broadway. He has never spread the production across six different hands on one album before this one, and it loosens him up. LOMAN’s drums bounce hard enough for him to drawl and speed up in the same couplet; Comma Uno strips everything back until there’s barely a beat under him on “No Reason,” where he dismisses a rival’s five hundred dollars as “frivolous funds, dinner for one”; Wino Willy’s swampy loop on “Patio Bonito” plays under a Colombian sample about a man traveling with three coronels and seven machine guns. CRIMEAPPLE raps over it like somebody put a war documentary on at a family cookout. DJ Skizz produces “Rosie Perez,” and it’s two full verses about a woman. CRIMEAPPLE takes her around the world, Japan and Italy, describes her caramel skin, calls her “truly flawless.” Imagine Ghostface’s “Camay” played completely straight for three and a half minutes. Who does that anymore? On “Pigs Feet,” mama pulled out a pot and made stew when the family didn’t have much else; the brothers used to share shoes. And on “Beef,” he rewrites the Biggie question with a running catalog: kids overseas starving, Spotify paying him pennies, AI taking jobs, billionaires doing “wicked shit to missing children on an island,” a woman named Michelle gone from his life to drugs. — Nehemiah

BLUEHILLBILL & Tremendiss, Blue Tears

BLUEHILLBILL has been rapping steadily for years inside a corner of the underground East Coast that runs through al.divino, Estee Nack, BoriRock, and Kil The Artist, where everybody features on everybody else’s record and nobody waits for permission to drop the next one. Blue Tears is a full project with Tremendiss, who produced every beat, and the two of them settled into a single mood and didn’t leave it. Tremendiss keeps the samples tense, and BLUEHILLBILL raps over them fast and fluent, not looking up. On “Love Jones,” he talks to cocaine like a girlfriend he can’t quit seeing. He calls her pearly white, numb to the touch, says if she were a person he’d take her out to Benihana’s, says she gains weight when she hits the water. He gets jealous when he sees her with other people. “Chasing Ghosts” has the devil is stepping on his chest, his doctor and therapist are trying to figure out his triggers, and he won’t sit there explaining himself. He says God gave them life but only on consignment, which is the sharpest bar on the album, a drug-trade word turned into a lease agreement with the Almighty. On “Maya Angelou,” a Muhammad Ali sample opens the song and BLUEHILLBILL says riding around with a brick in his trunk is white privilege, pouring Hennessy in his cup is Hennessy privilege. He calls himself a Gucci sock Socrates on the opener, which is a bar so stupid it wraps around to genius. — Kamarion

Hulvey, COULD BE TONIGHT

When he was sixteen, living in Brunswick, Georgia, a kid named Christopher Hulvey got cut from his basketball team and started rapping about Jesus. He dropped out of college, moved to Atlanta, scrubbed supermarket toilets for money, and signed with Reach Records, the Christian rap label Lecrae built. He put out two albums. “Beautiful” became a minor crossover. He got married, had two sons, Memphis and Rocky, got diagnosed with OCD, and kept making records that said “Holy Spirit, speak through me” at the top of every session. He had announced his departure from Reach earlier this year, and three months later he surprise-dropped twenty tracks produced entirely by xander. at a pay-what-you-want price, no rollout, no warning. Jesus could come back tonight, so the album should arrive the same way. “I gave all I had for a rap dream/Gave my wife, gave my sons, gave up Christ for number ones/I gave all I had for Christian rap dreams/He said, ‘You actin’ like you one, but you are not my son.’” First verse, first song. He opens his farewell record by accusing himself of being a fraud. “SEPARATION” is Hulvey writing as Christ proposing to the Church, and the allegory ends with the bride accepting while wearing the mark of the beast on her arm. — Murffey Zavier

Fatboi Sharif & Child Actor, Crayola Circles

Since 2016, Fatboi Sharif has released records with Roper Williams, LoneSword, noface, Steel Tipped Dove, Bigg Jus, Fat Tony, and Duncecap, each collaboration lasting one album before he moves on. Crayola Circles pairs him with Child Actor, a producer who came up making dream-pop before landing credits with Navy Blue, Earl Sweatshirt, and ELUCID on the same Backwoodz Studioz roster Sharif joined for 2023’s Decay. The two had never worked together. Child Actor said he built the beats from jazz and folk scraps, and it shows: the production across these fifteen tracks (none longer than three minutes, the opener a 21-second instrumental) sounds like a college radio signal dying in a parking garage. Drums show up late or not at all. There’s almost nothing underneath Sharif except open air, a low throb, and whatever he decides to put there. He fills it with shrapnel. “The hotdog truck postponed by falling evidence,” he raps on “How to Disinfect a Live Grenade,” a sentence that contains a real noun and a real verb and no recoverable meaning between them. “Poison gateside near the playground, fell syringe.” And when Sharif raps “My parents asked if suicide is the solution” on “How to Disinfect a Live Grenade,” sandwiched between a ghost ship and a fast lane to heaven, or “My father who carved out my heart at arm’s length from a distance” on “The Destitute Stashspot,” those lines arrive at identical volume as the Reagan assassination and the mermaid fantasies and the poison candy apple carrot cake. The album is over before you’ve finished processing what you just heard. — Koda Lin

Mamas Gun, DIG!

In the spring of 2006, a 26-year-old Andy Platts had just signed his first publishing deal in New York and was being shuttled around writers’ rooms by people who thought he might be the next white English soul kid worth backing. The list of people he sat across from that month included Rod Temperton (the man who wrote “Rock With You” and “Off the Wall”) and John Oates. It also included Brian Jackson, Gil Scott-Heron’s longtime keyboard partner, who walked into a session with him and started a song they never finished. They stayed in loose touch across the Atlantic for nearly twenty years before Platts, by then six albums into his career fronting the British soul outfit Mamas Gun and co-fronting the K-pop-charting duo Young Gun Silver Fox with Shawn Lee, sent Jackson a demo for a track called “DIG!” Jackson said yes. The sessions that followed produced the album, the most fully realized record Mamas Gun have made and one of the few analogue-soul revival LPs of the decade that doesn’t sound like it was assembled out of obligation to a house style. Six albums in, they have figured out how to make working-husband soul music with one of its founding architects in the room. Reverence, sweat, no glass between the band and the tape. — Reiko Oshima

Thundercat, Distracted

Stephen Lee Bruner’s father, Ronald Sr., was a session drummer who toured with the Temptations and the Supremes. His older brother Ronald Jr. won a Grammy behind the kit. His younger brother Jameel played keys in The Internet. By fifteen, Bruner had a minor pop-punk hit in Germany; by sixteen, he’d replaced the bassist in Suicidal Tendencies and was touring internationally, shredding crossover thrash while still figuring out what to do with his voice. After six years, Distracted breaks that silence with a jarring personnel swap: ten of its fifteen tracks are produced by Greg Kurstin, the man behind Adele’s “Hello” and half of Beyoncé’s Lemonade. Flying Lotus, who executive-produced every previous Thundercat album, contributes just two songs. One of them, “She Knows Too Much,” carries a posthumous Mac Miller vocal recorded before Miller’s 2018 overdose—Mac rapping crude, funny, contradictory bars about a woman who’s read all the books but doesn’t know him, offering to upgrade her apartment, then calling her a “motherfuckin’ bitch” for wanting a celebrity, then catching himself mid-verse: “Man, that was a little harsh. You’re just lost. But I’m here to find you.” It’s the opposite of a memorial. It’s Mac in the room again, talking reckless and alive. The rest of the album belongs to Sober Steve—Thundercat’s name for himself after quitting drinking following Miller’s death, losing over a hundred pounds, and starting to box. Sober Steve writes songs about waking up burnt out and talking to his cats (“Great Americans”), about having his emotions “sanded off” from living in L.A. (“No More Lies”), about feelings being like children in a car: “You can put them in the trunk, but let them drive, you won’t go far” (“What Is Left to Say”). It’s the best album Thundercat has made since Drunk, and it might be funnier. — Phil

DJ Muggs & T.F, Don’t Call Me Lucky

T.F was already a decade into the rap game when ScHoolboy Q put him on “Tookie Knows, Pt. II” from 2016’s Blank Face LP, the verse that introduced South Central’s most patient writer to the wider underground. Blame Kansas arrived in 2024 under Mephux and Roc Marciano. The Green Bottle followed a year later, handled start to finish by Khrysis. Don’t Call Me Lucky makes it three single-producer full-lengths in under two years, this one across the table from DJ Muggs, who’s run the past five years booking joint LPs at a record-per-season clip. “Ressie Pieces,” where Meyhem Lauren and OT the Real trade bars with him, runs on the fake-yeast trick. Sell a guy a kilo of baking yeast as cocaine, and when he figures it out, chop him up and name the chunks after the candy. (Yes, really.) Roc Marciano takes the whole first verse of “Ya Heard,” rapping, “dodge the pen, had to turn the pen into a poppy field.” Ghostface Killah arrives on “CLAP” with a baseball spliff burning right out the cheap spot and tugboat chains heavy enough to hold lions. “El Sancho” stretches into three acts of prison-and-infidelity narrative, with skits doing the scene changes and an outro of the locked-up boyfriend screaming into a phone about Chips Ahoy, Ovaltine, pillowcases, his kids. — Phil

Parlor Greens, Emeralds

Three personal losses hung over the second Loveland, Ohio session. Guitarist Jimmy James, organist Adam Scone, and drummer Tim Carman walked into Colemine’s Portage Lounge studio carrying real grief, and the closing ballad on Emeralds, “Queen of My Heart,” is the one James wrote for his mother shortly after she died. None of that shows up as solemnity in the playing. The Sugarman 3 vet, the GA-20 vet, and the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio vet (almost half a century of organ-trio playing between them) sound like a band that has been touring its own debut for two years, settling deeper into the 1970s soul-jazz tradition they staked out the first time around. The opening cut hits on a Charles Earland four-on-the-floor, Scone punching one organ figure while James’s guitar darts around the holes. By “Lion’s Mane,” the trio rides in on a quote from Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father” before James lets a solo rip and Carman drops into a slow Band of Gypsies trance. Their Dolly Parton cover is the obvious one. They find a real read on “Jolene” anyway, Scone working the melody with the greasy weighted comping Jack McDuff used to favor. “Drop Top” cribs the creeping processional cadence of William Bell’s “I Forgot to Be Your Lover.” Nothing here reinvents the organ-trio playbook, and these three know what the form can do without making a show of it. — Brandon O’Sullivan

duendita, existential thottie

Candace Lee Camacho grew up in Jamaica, Queens, studied classical voice, went to NYU’s Clive Davis Institute on scholarship, moved between New York and Berlin for years, and somewhere in there started telling her friends—painters, illustrators, people who had never touched a sequencer—to learn how to use an Elektron Digitakt. You need to write a song for your health, she tells them, and coming from someone who’s been involuntarily sedated, that’s literal advice. She produced every song on existential thottie herself, starting alone with the Digitakt in late-night sessions before the rest of the band filled out the arrangements. The demos were already on the album. Everyone else was confirming what she’d said in the dark. The songs go wherever she was at, and where she was at was everywhere at once. “As I Am” describes being injected, asleep for three days, her father crying, a nurse pulling up a video of her singing at a restaurant in Colby that she couldn’t recognize herself in—and then asking, genuinely, “Who’s gonna love a fucked up crazy bitch like me?” “Nexplanon” names what birth control hormones do to her moods. “Roasting That Ass” ends with her yelling at herself to finish her tracks. Who else is putting involuntary hospitalization and birth control side effects and club music on one plane, treating each equally? “Super Sad!” puts it best: “Wanna fuck, but I’m so depressed.” Same verse, same comma, no irony. “Toxic and Evil” asks “how many dicks can I fit in my mouth?” and then falls apart on the chorus: “No, no, I’m not okay.” She said the album might be for her more than for anyone else. After hearing it, good luck believing that. — Chiamaka Boudreaux

Les Imprimés, Fading Forward

Twenty years behind the glass before he ever sang lead on one of his own records. Morten Martens, the Norwegian producer who works under the name Les Imprimés, logged the bulk of his career engineering other people’s albums in Kristiansand on the southern coast of Norway, anonymous to anyone outside the local scene. Big Crown signed him in 2023 off the back of Rêverie, his first full-length as a frontman, which pulled him out onto live stages for the first time in his life (he was past forty by then). Fading Forward is the second one made under those changed conditions, and he made it the same way he’d made the debut: alone in the same chair, playing nearly every instrument across all twelve tracks and tracking every overdub himself. The Big Crown roster runs heavy on full bands in rooms together; here it’s one man, one room, getting to a similar cohesion from the opposite direction. He’s said in his own words that he likes the contrast between bright music and sad words (the words always lose), and he’s built a whole record around that premise without ever naming it on the cover. — Asa McKenzie

Yaya Bey, Fidelity

Before she was Yaya Bey, Hidaiyah Bey trained as a dancer, worked in Queens libraries and museums, wrote poetry, and showed up to protests. Her first record (The Many Alter-Egos of Trill’eta Brown) came with a self-published book. That range carries into Fidelity, her fourth album, built almost entirely on her own from an SP-404 and a ukulele in Brooklyn. Her father was Kaleel Allah, aka Grand Daddy I.U. of the Juice Crew; he died in 2022, and she’s been writing toward the hole he left across all her records since. Fidelity is the first where he appears as more than a wound. Her writing’s at its sharpest when she raps instead of sings. “Freeze Flight Fawn” has her asking who’s paying inflation on what Black people have lost, and naming the numbers herself. “The Towns,” a sequel to last year’s “bella noche” about a since-closed Baton Rouge nightclub, ends on two words, “no music,” an obituary for a whole South Louisiana nightlife scene. “The Breakdown” is a ballad about grief until Bey starts rapping, turning the song into a verse aimed at a friend whose success came with strings: “They just wanna pimp it, sell it, bag it,” four words that indict a whole business model. In the softer middle, Bey lets the bar for joy come down, which she’s called “the ultimate Black skill.” “Egyptian Musk” is a reggae duet with Queens singer NESTA, whom Bey pulled in last-minute after running into him at an event; “In the Middle” and “Higher” are guitar-and-voice love songs you put on while washing dishes. On “Cup of Water,” Bey says plainly she could use a drink if the path gets any longer (her one direct ask on the whole record). It’s not a small ask on an album this dense with loss. Who else is keeping count? — Osei Addae

millkzy, Floetry the Extension

millkzy was working fast food in Dallas when his first full-length charted in January 2025, months after he’d already quit the job. The 21-year-old, St. Louis-born MC had built a small career around a word he coined himself, floetry, his name for what happens when you write fiction and poetry over live piano and strings instead of programmed drums. He’d been catching hate online since the original Floetry EP in 2023, which is to say since he was 18, for what the YouTube comments decided was a gimmick. Same flow, same opening tag at the top of every track (“Yeah, look, it’s Floetry”), same premise stretched across a release pace closing in on an album per quarter. Failed Author, his merch line, prints his rebuttal in his own words on a shirt: “I got a lot of hate for a flow that I started. This song is a response.” Floetry the Extension, the album that arrived four full-lengths into an eighteen-month run, is the one that stops needing the rebuttal. Mike Vincent’s guitar and Sandro’s piano wander underneath “The Cafe Closes at Nine” while a short story plays out by the clock. Quarter past eight, the speaker is asking the woman across from him about her dreams. By 8:30 he is worried about everything he just confessed walking out the door with her. By nine the bar has closed, he wheels around, she is gone, and a man’s voice outside the café yells for her to hurry to a different reservation holding her seat “’til 10:00.” Then verse two starts over at quarter past eight while he keeps pitching the same set to the empty seat. What kind of 21-year-old rapper writes that scene, and how did the YouTube comments miss it for three years? millkzy writes every line of this album himself, gives the last word to the woman on the other side of the fight, and on “Truth Be Told” sums up his four-year quarrel in one bar, “I claim the poet lyricist role, not the rapper.” — Wesley Durham

Lekan, For All the Right Reasons, Vol. 1

The late-90s R&B debut had a whole formula. As a first-generation Nigerian-American who grew up in Columbus’s 614 after being born in Brooklyn, Lekan has released loosies for years leading up to this project. His father, credited as “Pops,” delivers a spoken-word blessing on the opener “Balance,” telling him to make sure his faith rises to the level where he can claim what he has with the Lord. His uncle calls in on “Unc Interlude” and immediately loses his composure. In 2026, a Nigerian-American kid from Ohio is making the kind of R&B record that used to ship with thank-you notes to God and Grandma on page three of the booklet, except the chorus is in Yoruba. With “Make It Right,” produced by 88jay, Bonxu, Hollywood Cole, and fantompower, he admits he never could commit, she found somebody else, and he hit her up last night anyway. “Give & Take” goes further: “I’m trying to balance these hoes/Back and forth between my goals,” he tells us, then asks the question the whole album keeps returning to, “Who can I save when I too need saving?” He wants her there when the church starts clearing. He’s messed up too many times to play the victim. And on Always,” he describes curly hair scattered around the sink, last night’s makeup, dirty dancing in the sheets, and sings, “Never let a petty argument make you mean/And when you get lost/Make sure you find your way back to me.” — Raya Sinclair

Cadence Weapon & Junia-T, Forager

Cadence Weapon grew up rapping in math class, failing math, blogging about records for Stylus and Pitchfork before he could rent a car. By twenty, he had a Polaris nomination; by thirty-five, he had the prize. Junia-T, the Toronto producer behind the boards here, almost quit music after his 2014 debut flopped, rebuilt through Addy Papa’s Riot Club sessions, and came back with Studio Monk in 2020 to a Polaris longlist nod. He’s also Jessie Reyez’s touring DJ. Forager is their first collaboration, and its conceit fits inside an interlude: Pemberton buys old clothes, and he thinks digging through racks for the right garment is the same discipline as digging through crates for the right bar. He bought a Harris tweed blazer on the way to the studio, virgin Scottish wool from the Outer Hebrides, and describes it on the record the way a collector describes a rookie card. An interlude on “501XX” details a pair of hidden-rivet jeans worth twenty-five thousand at auction. Elsewhere, he thanks his therapist on “Toronto Zoo” for saving his life; “Babymoon” sketches a trip to Miami’s Arts District with his wife before their son arrived. The Niagara Region sixteen has him eating exotic cheese with his main squeeze, she orders the Riesling, and then he’s describing a Woolrich barn coat like he’s outside tapping maple trees. Canadian design runs through the album (Edmonton as origin, Toronto as work, Hamilton as home, the Niagara region as a weekend), and those places feel inhabited rather than visited. The fashion bars are funny; he needs your opinion the way he needs another tote bag, he pulls up dressed as Bebop and Rocksteady. But the fatherhood and the geography are what stay. — Rian Frost

Wesley Joseph, Forever Ends Someday

The day Wesley Joseph realized what “July” was about, Jorja Smith texted him from somewhere else in the world about the same memory. They grew up in adjacent corners of Walsall, the West Midlands town that puts a particular kind of pressure on the children of its who get out and stay out—what Joseph calls the standing instruction from home, “Do your thing for us.” Smith flew back, and they cut her vocal at his parents’ place in Walsall after a day together talking about the friends who hadn’t made it out and the ones who had but couldn’t sleep right anymore. Three years in the writing, named for what loss had made plain to a twenty-nine-year-old singer about the borrowed nature of being young, Forever Ends Someday answered the standing instruction by making good on it. It sang to some of those people. It sang for others of them. On “Quicksand,” the worry over a brother whose head has stopped being entirely his own breaks into open panic, “My boy isn’t the same, I think he went skits/His thoughts aren’t his/They were calling us twins/Stood in the same skin.” Joseph saves his biggest swing for the Danny Brown collaboration “Peace of Mind,” produced with Nicolás Jaar and Romil Hemnani, where he stages his own wake, threatens “Well fuck it, pull up, I’m already dead,” then cancels his subscription to being watched at all, “Done with the news, done with the net, done with the press/Recording the tears I never shed.” Brown follows him in dodging the Grim Reaper and stepping over dollars to pick up dimes. — Ameenah Laquita

Oddisee & Heno., From Takoma with Love

Yihenew Belay’s name is Amharic for “this is what you see is what you get.” He went by other names for most of his life because Americans couldn’t say it. He put a period at the end of Heno. when he stopped letting that bother him. He’s from Takoma Park, Maryland, first-generation Ethiopian-Eritrean, and at six years old, undercovers at Maple and Lee mistook him for a drug dealer pushing pills. He grew weed, started making beats, left for Oakland, then LA, then came back. Amir Mohamed el Khalifa, who goes by Oddisee, is Sudanese-American, raised down the road in PG County and Silver Spring. His father moved back to Omdurman in 2007 and survived the civil war, shrapnel from a bomb that killed four soldiers hitting his apartment building while it was being used as a refugee shelter. Oddisee got his start in Garry Shider’s basement studio (Parliament Funkadelic) and placed his first major beat on DJ Jazzy Jeff’s The Magnificent in 2002. Back then Heno. was still a kid. They grew up minutes from each other. Their fathers are from opposite sides of the same continent. "Integrity," their first collaboration, came in 2025. From Takoma with Love is co-credited.

Oddisee produced everything. On “Woe Is Me,’ Heno. raps about getting cuffed at Maple and Lee at six, and Oddisee follows with his own verse: “Product of immigration and disengagement, a combination of food stamps and visas.” On “MIMS,” Oddisee almost misses a stop sign, his kids crying in the back, his mother calling, his phone on Do Not Disturb. On “Round the Way,” he names Largo High, Sago Creek, brothers in Merlin, family in Toronto, his father in Sudan surviving janjaweed. Same suburbs, a generation apart. Heno. is on Aurelius Street in Germany, drinking herbal tea for “Good Habits.” Nobody there had heard of him. He did a show and suddenly they urgently wanted to work with him. A kid from Takoma Park who learned a set of codes around the same time he was told to eat his vegetables, halfway around the world, and they still can’t pronounce his name. — Quinn Baptiste

Tink, Fuck, Marry, Kill

By 2017, Tink had already lost a major-label run. Her 2014 contract with Timbaland’s Mosley Music Group at Epic produced an XXL Freshman cover the year after, plus a finished album, Think Tink, that Timbaland privately buried on the runway. She gave the next two years to lawyering her way out of the deal. Trinity Laure’Ale Home, who’d been going by Tink since her Calumet City Winter’s Diary mixtapes (the first one came out while she was still at Simeon Career Academy in 2011), bought herself free, founded Winter’s Diary, and there’s been a new full-length nearly every year. Five of those have been with the Chicago producer Hitmaka, who’s twelve credits deep on this one, his most invested collaboration with her yet. Fuck, Marry, Kill is what five years of that working language sound like at full bloom. The conceit is the middle-school party game stretched across, and the sequence moves through the categories in a loose order. Lust takes the album’s early stretch, then come the marry songs, and the back end of the LP earns the album its place on this list. “Overrated” itemizes a dead relationship in past tense, every line a receipt. On “Diabolical,” Tink at last has the clinical word for her ex’s behavior. And “Plan B,” the centerpiece, is where she stops performing inventory and admits the math. She’d lose the house if she walked, she says so on the hook, she lets the line do its work without a flourish. It’s not a small thing for an R&B singer in 2026 to admit, on a chorus, that a lease in two names is a real reason to delay a breakup. Tink did. — Danica Ford

Primo Profit, RLX & MichaelAngelo, GABO

Before he was flipping samples for Griselda-adjacent MCs and earning credits alongside CRIMEAPPLE and Estee Nack, MichaelAngelo was pouring concrete in the Boston suburbs. The Italian-origin producer quit that career to build beats full-time, and the ten he constructed for GABO, a joint album with Manteca crew MCs Primo Profit and RLX, carry a bricklayer’s sense of load and placement. Every kick drum lands where it needs to and nothing else goes on top of it. GABO takes its title from the childhood nickname of Gabriel García Márquez, and the Colombian novelist’s voice drifts through the record in Spanish-language samples stitched between songs, praising his own accomplishments and narrating his own homesickness. But neither MC mentions the man once in their verses. Primo raps about Pyrex and kitchens, microwaving coke with the stove off. RLX raps about planes, property, and a label that never signed him. García Márquez’s words sit between their bars unmarked (mostly in untranslated Spanish), and decides whether two MCs from Lawrence and East Boston have anything in common with a Nobel laureate from Aracataca. — Quinn Baptiste

Finale, The Good

In 2019, Finale released an EP called 62 and pulled it from digital shelves after exactly sixty-two days. The joke was clean and the move was old-fashioned, the kind of thing a Detroit MC who quit his automotive engineering job in the late 2000s to chase rap full-time would do without explaining it to anybody. The Good is his first proper solo LP since Odds & Ends with Oddisee in 2015, and on the second song he says the number out loud, “Who knew I needed six years off to grow?” He opens the album listing what he’s after (“One good night with one good crowd and one good mic”), and by the elegy “A Good Time to Go” the word has turned into a prayer for the listener (“I just pray you locate the good”)/ The same Detroit circle from twenty years back is here in full force—beat-switch diptychs split a fifth of the album mid-song, doubling DJ Manipulator’s, Apollo Brown’s, Nottz’s, and Kev Brown’s contributions into a roster that’s been trading beats with each other since the mid-2000s. The four-verse posse cut “4 Rounds” (produced by Mute Won, with Guilty Simpson, IAMGAWD, Phat Kat) is not bidding for the pop charts and not pretending otherwise. Finale isn’t selling to anybody outside the city. He’s writing for the people who already know who Etrid was. — Harry Ford

Marlon Craft, The Internet Killed the Neighborhood

Manhattan Plaza, the Mitchell-Lama building on West 42nd Street, has given preference to performing-arts tenants since 1977—jazz musicians, Off-Broadway actors, dancers, all stacked in subsidized apartments while Times Square scrubbed itself shiny around them. Marlon Craft grew up there. Father on the drums, mother in the theater. He hooped AAU in the South Bronx, studied urban education at American University, came back to Hell’s Kitchen, and started freestyling on YouTube out of his childhood bedroom. He signed with Sony, put out Funhouse Mirror in 2019. Six years and a whole lot of his own cash later, he finished The Internet Killed the Neighborhood. The album’s central grievance is blunt enough to fit on a bumper sticker: the physical neighborhood—the block, the bodega corner, the open mic where strangers became collaborators—got eaten by the internet, and nobody seems to miss it much. On the title track, produced by five people including CARRTOONS and River Tiber, every city of dreams has become a city of memes dictated by a shitty regime, people reduced to human load screens with nothing behind the buffering. An interlude flips Wu-Tang on itself: it was about the money when the Wu wrote “C.R.E.A.M.,” but now wealth is just a smokescreen. On “Analog Man,” Havoc chops Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings into something that creaks under six minutes of bars and a string quartet recorded in Mexico City, and Craft says your favorite rapper would be cuddled up next to Elon on the rocket ship, leaving everyone for dead in the cockpit making TikToks. An MC from subsidized housing in Hell’s Kitchen who left a major label, paid for his own album, built a subscription community to stay afloat, and spent six years arguing with his phone about what it took from his block. — Quinn Baptiste

Javon Jackson, Jackson Plays Dylan

The tenor saxophonist came to Bob Dylan late and through an unusual door. Growing up immersed in jazz, he had no working knowledge of rock at all when Art Blakey’s attorney started playing him Dylan records during his Jazz Messengers years. The Denzel Washington film about Rubin Carter sealed it. Jackson Plays Dylan was originally planned as a third collaboration with the poet Nikki Giovanni, who meant to write new pieces in dialogue with Dylan’s lyrics until her death from lung cancer ended the plan. The quartet record that got made instead leans on Lisa Fischer and Nicole Zuraitis (both Grammy winners, both in their own way the only voice the song was going to take) wherever Jackson decides the lyric needs a body to sit in. A wordless “Hurricane” runs funk-charged through the original outrage without needing the lyric to keep it alive. Fischer takes “Gotta Serve Somebody” close to the mic and growls and sighs every line until Dylan’s threat sounds more like a confession than a sermon. Both vocals do the same job. They enter when Jackson decides the song needs a body to sit in. On “Lay, Lady, Lay,” bassist Isaac Levien holds the original melody while Jackson improvises above him. Has any horn player ever taken that song anywhere other than seduction? “The Times They Are A-Changin’” climbs from a near-funeral dirge into something almost jaunty, which, given the year it is landing in, says everything. — Nehemiah

Kehlani, Kehlani

How do you get Brandy to sing a full verse on an R&B album in 2026? You don’t, unless you’re Kehlani. On her self-titled fifth album she got one on “I Need You,” along with a full Usher duet on “Shoulda Never” that gives him equal billing, a Clipse couplet over a Pharcyde drum loop on “No Such Thing,” and Missy Elliott playing the jealous boyfriend in a back-and-forth scene on “Back and Forth.” Imagine that lineup. The album arrived on her thirty-first birthday in April—eight weeks after she walked offstage at the 68th Grammys with her first two awards for “Folded” and a “Fuck ICE” closer to cap the speech. Hear the lead single. An ex has left clothes at her apartment, and she’s not about to drop them off. She washed them, folded them, stacked them on the bench by the door, and called to tell him to come get them. Notice how quiet she keeps it. The bravado cracks on “Anotha Luva,” where she spends her verse in circles: “I know you’re not mine, telling myself/But every time that I refine, I don’t want nobody else.” By “Still,” with ad-libs under the chorus line “My body knows I love you still,” she’s in a hotel room and past pretending. Every R&B voice Kehlani came up learning from shows up on the record. She matches all of them. The Grammy came ten years late. — Kendra Oluwaseyi

Jacob Banks, Limerence

Jacob Banks did not sing in public until 2011, the year a close friend died and the family asked him to sing at the funeral. He was a Nigerian-born, Birmingham-raised twenty-two-year-old with no formal training and no plans, and he stood up and did it. Fifteen years later he is on his fifth studio album and his second on his own imprint, Nobody Records, which he founded in 2022 after walking away from Interscope. The two years before Limerence he gave to the three-part Yonder series, an extended sit-in with Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sam Cooke, and Al Green that doubled as a retreat into the gospel music that raised all three. Limerence is the first love record on the other side of that retreat. Its title is borrowed from the psychologist Dorothy Tennov, who coined the word in 1977 to name the involuntary part of obsessive attachment, the part that runs circles in the mind praying for a bigger sign. “Easy Ain’t Home” turns common phrasing into confession over a piano figure that could have been recorded in an empty house at two in the morning, with him singing own compliance in the present tense. He puts himself across from a Superman on “Who Made You King?”, and the song asks the rescuer to stop catching him. — Lilian Sharpe

Starker, LIVING TYPE DANGEROUS Vol. 1 “North Face Nace”

The Cooper Houses in Williamsburg used to sit in the middle of a neighborhood where you might catch a buck 50 on the train on your way to cop a Tony Touch tape. That was the Giuliani-Bloomberg era, when the blocks still had Avirex jackets and ‘97 Benz with the bugged headlights and Jadakiss floating out of Jeep windows. Most of that is rubble now, or a quote on a plaque, but Starker raps about all of it like he just stepped outside five minutes ago. On LIVING TYPE DANGEROUS Vol. 1, the Nuyorican rhymer tears through soul loops and grimy East Coast beats at a clip so frantic the bars crash into each other—stray memories piling up on half-finished jokes, threats dissolving into punchlines before he remembers the threat. He’ll stuff his face with cannolis from the Italian bakery that survived gentrification on “Pignoli,” then skid into a story about his brother trying to rob their father for a watch. The family melodrama and the rainbow cookies share a sentence. He’s on his anti-“Empire State of Mind” shit; Aaron Judge ain’t saluting the flag to “Up in the deli is how she met me, giving the custy a nose job.” Over Nicholas Craven’s crate-digging mist and Lord Unknown’s grimy loops, Starker barks out nonsense with dead-serious conviction (“Y’all niggas is escovitch fish”), has a little of Ghostface’s dusted stream-of-consciousness, and there’s a Rio da Yung OG energy to the stretches where he clearly has no idea what’s coming out of his mouth next. YL, the mellower half of their duo RRR, drifts in on “W.K.I.R.G.W.” and “Flipmode” to let you breathe, but Starker shoves you right back. Subjxct 5’s chain-snatching theme on “Flipmode” will have you wanting to check if my uncle’s bootlegged Clue tapes from 2003 are still in his closet. — DeShawn Ellis

Coyote & Statik Selektah, Machetes & Micheladas

The Morales brothers, LadiesLoveGuapo and Ricky Blanco, grew up in Hawthorne bouncing between the South Bay and Mexico, raised on Wu-Tang and Nas, started rapping together after they lost a championship basketball game, sat down, smoked for the first time, and never stopped writing. They own a barbershop on Melrose Avenue. Their name, Coyote, means trickster and also means the person you pay to get your family across the border. Both definitions apply. Their fifth album hands every beat to Statik Selektah, the Massachusetts DJ who’s spent two decades keeping boom bap’s sample chops in circulation, and he repays the trust by never once trying to modernize them. Over that, the Morales brothers rap in Spanglish about finishing bagging up work and then playing lotería, about wanting Jordans and ending up at Ross where a pair of nylon Cortez on the half-off rack changed their whole self-image, about a kid named Johnny who was a straight-A student until his father got killed in a drive-by and ended up on the street begging for dope money. Conway the Machine stops by with a verse about a car that’s mango on the inside, tajín on the outside, silk pajamas, Tracy Chapman playing. B-Real and Sick Jacken share a track—a kind of Psycho Realm reunion by accident—and Jacken, three decades deep, announces that sobriety is his new high, his parents from Sinaloa. R.A. the Rugged Man, on the political song that flips Biggie’s “What’s Beef?,” goes after people who are afraid of Black mermaids and Bad Bunnies and Bud Lights, says the Oval Office looks like Jerry Springer, and stands behind every syllable. Locksmith, on the same track, figures if Jesus showed up tonight they’d deport him. Nobody pulled a punch. — Joelle Figueroa

Jesirae, Mama It’s a Renaissance

Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Augusta Savage, Cab Calloway, Florence Mills, William Grant Still. Josephine Baker shows up in the same verse, Diana Ross on a different song, Langston Hughes more than once. That’s a lot of names to drop on a debut. Most rappers who try this kind of thing wind up in over their heads inside three bars; what makes Jesirae’s version brazen is that she does it on an independent record with no marquee co-sign and writes the bars to back it up. Her parents arrive on “All of Me” as “lil Suge Knight, lil Huxtable”—eight syllables that ask you to hold those two figures in parallel and produce “purple” by mixing them. Tell me how many MCs working today would assume a reader can run that bar without a footnote. (And there’s a vampire-deflection joke about the Minneapolis area code two verses later that I’m not going to spoil.) Mama It’s a Renaissance defaults to 1995. Boom-bap drums, jazz-leaning neo-soul, no commercial-radio gloss anywhere, and Jesirae chose every bit of that on purpose. The Great Migration north from Mississippi is the actual subject of “Cross Country” (foreclosure crisis included). The second verse of “Self” is what label refusal sounds like, sandwiched between “land of ten thousand lakes, it birthed and raised me” and a personal-faith spelling-bee for her mother’s name. Nothing here is softened. Nothing is aestheticized. Jesirae names what she was given, what was taken, and what she’s putting on the page about all of it. — L. Ari James

Isaia Huron, Mr. Lovebomb

Isaia Huron’s father pastored a congregation and was a civil rights activist who received threats from the KKK; his mother directed the choir; by fourteen Huron was drumming professionally for a megachurch of four thousand. He taught himself production on Ableton, and used his SoundCloud as a public diary of unfinished demos until the pandemic killed his drumming gigs and gave him a reason to put music out under his own name. Mr. Lovebomb is his sophomore LP. He wrote it, produced it, sang every note. The premise, in his own words, traces “the unraveling of a man who built his life around the chase.” The man Huron plays meets a woman in the opening minutes, promises to learn her and love her starting tonight, then admits his habits have left past partners in tears and shrugs it off (“But that’s their issue”). On “Breakfast and Matcha,” the most damning thing here, he convinces himself he’s in love, suffers in silence, and creeps away in the nighttime to see a side piece while his girl sleeps, returning before sunrise with breakfast in his left hand and matcha in his right. “Pablo Honey Song #2” rationalizes a booty call by insisting they don’t have to touch (“Like Pablo Honey’s Song 2, I know I don’t belong to you”). And “Wool” turns on a stranger’s discomfort at a dinner table: new woman, feet out the window on the highway, Beyoncé playing, the sun going down, and then she’s rude to the waitress and Huron asks for the check. He’ll diagnose his failures with extraordinary clarity (“When we fight, you’re fighting with a low-res version of me,” he tells a partner on “Versions”) and then send them right back into the room and expect her to absorb them. — Daliah Green

Kumail, Mudbrown

Kumail Hamid had a producer career going in Mumbai through most of the 2010s, with a foothold in the wonky end of beat music, bills shared with Four Tet and DJ Koze, and a debut on Bastard Jazz that pulled an old Pierre Akendengue Afro-jazz sample into the room. Then he moved to Kinshasa, opened a restaurant, and stayed five years without putting out music. Not nothing, in producer time. Mudbrown gets its name from the Congo River (the brown water people in Kinshasa say never leaves you once you’ve drunk it), and the players on the album are a band Kumail put together after he left Kinshasa for Lisbon, where he lives now. On “Lady” he tells a woman she puts the soul back into him, repeating the line until it stops being praise and starts sounding like an oath. Fly Anakin appears on “Tear It Off” to back Kumail’s argument that sex is where a person can’t fake who they are, and Kumail’s band moves a step toward Anakin’s cadence (when the convention with a one-author record like this is to ask the guest to sand his cadence down to yours). Kinshasa is the only city on the record. The title carries it, and the opening minute carries it, in the voice of an artist who lives there. — Kendra Vale

KNOWITALL & Skip The Kid, Music Saved Me 3

KNOWITALL has kidney disease, has collaborated with Tragedy Khadafi and a rotating bench of underground rappers from the borough (Patty Honcho, Backwood Sweetie, Blaq Chidori), and has been recording at a pace that makes even the most prolific Bandcamp rappers look idle. The Music Saved Me series is his and Skip’s recurring tag; MSM3 cuts everyone out with all Skip The Kid production, the Queens MC rapping alone, and the album is better for having nobody else in the room. He spends most of it in the past. His mother fried fish on Friday nights, “Wasn’t no Popeye’s when I seen my first biscuit.” He and somebody named Sam robbed and scammed together, “SPIC and SPAM,” and there were shootouts every day. “Vision Clearer” has him watching kids on the short bus doped up on behavior drugs, being dressed bummy at school, seeing people he used to smoke with get murdered; he cried his heart out into a tub of tears, but that was years ago. And on “Ignorant Livin’,” old heads blow mad piff, mix it with “Brad Pitt,” somebody shoots up the avenue over a woman, bodies are stiff, fiends hit glass, and then KNOWITALL asks, “Who would’ve thought of this as our future as we was kids on the block drinking quarter water?” On “Skip 2 Step,” God told him his buffet is buffering, and time will inevitably give you what the Romans gave Christ, “whether it be cancer or a knife.” He compares himself to Magic Johnson, Joe DiMaggio, Jordan in the fourth quarter, Jerome Bettis, Dikembe Mutombo, and Bob Pettit without a gram of irony. — Harry Brown

My New Band Believe, My New Band Believe

The band name was a souvenir from a Chinese hotel room, where Cameron Picton was burning through a fever and scribbling down the scrambled phrases that stuck through it. One in particular lodged in his head even after the fever broke. By his own admission he sometimes cringes at it, but he kept my new band believe anyway, all in lower case. After spending the back end of black midi’s hiatus releasing CD-only mixtapes under the alias Camera Picture, Picton pulled together a real lineup with Kiran Leonard, Caius Williams, Steve Noble, and Andrew Cheetham, then cut an almost entirely acoustic record across 11 London studios with nine different engineers. “Heart of Darkness” carries the late-period black midi folk-rock shape into a more unguarded place. “Love Story” sets a domestic scene of Picton cooking dinner for his partner, feeling sexy about it, and then collapses the sweetness on a flash of imagining her gone. “Actress” gets closer (closer than anything else here, anyway) to the chaotic instrumentality of the Lecture 25 single he released early last year. The record is a cluster of conflicting registers stitched together by a kind of fever-dream consistency, and it makes a strong case that Picton was doing more of the storytelling in his old band than the credits ever suggested. — Oliver I. Martin

Farma G & Relense, Nearly Nothing’s Enough

Depression never found its way into conversations for Robin Coombes. He chose to rap about it on “Mr. Moany.” The song presents the character waking up without energy. He’s surrounded by rubbish, rolls out of bed and watches the bugs, rolls a spliff, stares into a mirror and plays Call of Duty. He hasn’t done any chores, hasn’t showered, but applies Lynx and then a bleach gargle. He eats 5 cakes, and writes in grime on the window. Coombes is the child of songwriter Peet Coombes for the Swimmer’s 1978 transatlantic record hit, “Fool (If You Think It’s Over).” He and his brother Chester, drenched themselves into hip-hop. They saw it through Beatstreet and Roxanne Shanté battles. By the ‘90s, this dynamic birthed Task Force and led to a new style of hip hop—the Music from the Corner series, that defined a construct for a vast number of the UK’s underground catalogs. They are still receiving debates in their wake. The entire album is produced by Brighton-based Relense, whose thump holds every song at the same temperature, and the discipline of that single room forces Farma G to do the work with his voice and his pen. He is inspired by an unhealthy mix of conspiracy theories, Jack Kerouac, and even the Monkey King who is trapped for five hundred years and later wrote a form of a five-part stratagem and the Book of Five Rings. — Tariq Belson

Honey Dijon, The Nightlife

A diva voice over a four-on-the-floor kick was the original deal at the Warehouse on West Jefferson. Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy built Chicago’s genre on it; Larry Levan took the same idea to the Paradise Garage in New York. Thirty years of Chicago-born DJs have lived on the royalties of an argument they never copyrighted. Honey Dijon, who was a Black trans teenager in those rooms before she was anything else, knows exactly who gets the credit. Her third album hands every lead vocal to a guest and keeps Honey Redmond behind the boards. What Dijon does with them is the album’s real shape. “Just Friends” stacks Adi Oasis’s cool alto, Danielle Ponder’s smokier alto beneath it, and a Suni MF rap bridge across four minutes of euphoric disco-house that could have lit up a Parisian runway in 1994. Bree Runway raps “Slight Werk” with Missy Elliott-grade snarl over a kick drum and barely anything else. Mahalia holds “Don’t rush me, take your time, we’re not in love” as a four-minute directive on “Rush Me,” and Rochelle Jordan plays both voices of a one-way crush on “Private Eye.” Dijon has been DJing since her mid-teens. She co-produced “Cozy” and “Alien Superstar” on Beyoncé’s Renaissance in 2022, soundtracked Dior Men runways for nearly a decade, and still makes the trip back to Chicago every year. What is the point of all that tenure if not this—an album that gets every name it calls? The Nightlife is the cleanest case she has put on a single LP for where this music came from and who is still there to play it back. Not bad, for a third album. — Darryl Keyes

White Fence, Orange

The last White Fence album was called I Have to Feed Larry’s Hawk, and Presley has said plainly that the hawk was his opioid addiction—the compulsion that had to be fed, the beast he’d been running from when he left Los Angeles for San Francisco and checked into a harm-reduction center there. That record came out in 2019, built around a piano he could barely play, and then nothing for seven years. In the interim Presley drew expressionist figures and wrote poetry, the creativity rerouted into media that didn’t require the instrument he associated with getting high. He told SF Weekly that getting clean felt like Samson’s haircut. He couldn’t look at a guitar. It is worth knowing all of this about Orange, his eighth album, because you can hear Presley remembering how to play—wanting you to hear every chord ring out, clearly, without the tape hiss and analog murk that used to swallow his earlier work whole. Ty Segall, who produced and plays drums on most of the record, has given him an uncrowded room. Alice Sandahl of La Luz adds keyboards that sit translucent against the guitars. The Simply Red cover “So Beautiful” sits at the center of this contradiction—a picnic-afternoon melody carrying a line about considering suicide for the first time, the borrowed prettiness of the song turning the confession into something you could almost miss. Presley said he wanted to sing his little heart out. On “Reflection in a Shop Window on Polk,” he sounds like he’s doing exactly that, staring at himself in the glass and getting the whole portrait down before looking away. — Oliver I. Martin

Tiwayo, Outsider

Tiwayo busked through his teens in the south of France, made two records for Blue Note, opened for Sting and Seal on the road, and then went quiet for long enough that what he’d already put out stopped being discussed. Adrián Quesada heard the demos, met him at Les Eurockéennes festival in eastern France, and brought him to Electric Deluxe in Austin to cut Outsider with a fixed band—Jay Mumford on drums, Terin Moswen Ector on bass and congas, Joshy Soul at the keys, Alexis Buffum bowing strings, Doyle Bramhall II as a second guitar on “Daddy Was Born with the Blues” and “Electric Spanish,” Kendra Morris on the duet “Unchained Lovers.” Quesada produced every track on the album, and the personnel barely changes across it. Tiwayo’s eulogy for his late father, “Daddy Was Born with the Blues,” skips the city, the year, and the cause, and the only thing he says about the loss directly is: “He didn’t get two lives to choose.” Six songs later “Mama Give Me the Will” is the inheritance song for his mother, a list of what she handed down, the will, the wings, the eyes to see, the love. Memphis shows up in both that one and in “Love of My Life,” and the sequence never tells you to notice. On “Electric Spanish” he sings “I say I’m electric Spanish, electric French” over a Doyle Bramhall II guitar lick, naming himself a guitar (the Gibson ES) and a doubled nationality, not quite from either country. — Asa McKenzie

Rosco P Coldchain & Nicholas Craven, Play With Something Safe

After spending fourteen years in prison, Play With Something Safe is Rosco P Coldchain’s first proper full-length since his release, produced entirely by Montreal’s Nicholas Craven, whose drumless soul-loop flips stay out of the way and let the stories run long. And the stories are staggering. On “Prayer Group,” he’s ten years old, lying in bed next to his sleeping mother, wondering if he can sell what the man in the Troop jacket and Lee jeans sells. He wore a kufi to school; kids called him Pookie, Pork Chop, Saddam Hussein. He dropped out in ninth grade. He was tired of powder milk and welfare cheese and boiling water on the kerosene heater, and watching his mother starve was eating him up, so he ran away from home, put on his LA Gears, and copped a buck-thirty pack from Brunroni at 17th and Ingersoll. On “Hold My Hand,” a mother’s crosswalk warning, “look both ways before you cross the street, hold my hand,” sits between two verses about brain matter on Louis Vuitton and buying outfits for closed caskets. Ab Liva and Jimmie D show up on the title track, both Re-Up Gang affiliates, and rap about filing serial numbers off guns and scraping pots in trap houses as if they’d all been sentenced to the same room at different times. Rosco’s grandmother shared blood with David Porter of Stax Records, and Premier kept calling the jail every year for fourteen of them. — Phil

Earl Sweatshirt, MIKE & SURF GANG, POMPEII // UTILITY

Late in 2023, at the Warp studio in Los Angeles, MIKE fell asleep in a corner while Earl Sweatshirt and a handful of SURF GANG producers kept recording. Other bodies were scattered around the room—exhausted, stiff, barely moving. Someone cracked that it looked like Pompeii. The joke became a title. The sessions stretched another two years, split between Tony Seltzer’s New York studio and various rooms in L.A., and the album that came out of them is enormous: 33 tracks across two discs, MIKE’s 15 on one side, Earl’s 18 on the other, every beat from SURF GANG’s Harrison, Evilgiane, and affiliates. MIKE writes tighter under the noise, compressing his mother’s death and the count of hundred racks into four bars on “AFRO,” then dashing through traffic with packages on “Minty,” telling a friend to take their talents off LinkedIn. On “Shutter Island” he speed-reads a whole childhood of damage in couplets: “Those crooked slums, a thug’s resort/...She shouldn’t trust my stubborn love/They never gave your son a choice.” Earl, on his disc, is funnier and more plainspoken than he’s been in years. On “Charli 2na” he compares himself to the Jurassic 5 MC and admits the bottle bent him out of shape in the same verse. On “:( again :)” he draws a line in the sand with a stick, takes account of the damage he did, and decides to fix it. On “AOK” he says he wants his kids, calls the people keeping them from him clowns, and remembers a time when all he wanted was a tub and his pops. When they finally trade bars directly on “Leadbelly”—“I told Twin, ‘you better than me/I still got vendettas to see through’”—both of them are grinning. Wiki introduced these two in 2016. — Koda Lin

VINSON, Raw Honey

Two of Brenton Andre Vinson’s great-uncles sang in Motown-era vocal groups. His uncle and cousin rapped with Chuck D and Public Enemy. He grew up in Detroit getting played everything from every era, and when he finally left for Los Angeles in 2019 at twenty-seven or twenty-eight, he’d never lived anywhere else longer than a few weeks. The pandemic hit a year later, and he recorded through it. EPs came steadily between 2020 and 2025, each one on a different frequency: Loose Rap with the Ayuvir beat collective, Break a Sweat with Santiago Salazar from Underground Resistance, Rhythmic Pool with .Coffee. He started curating a quarterly showcase in LA called Good Company, booking Koreatown Oddity and Qu’ran Shaheed and Silas Short. VINSON had been circling his debut full-length for half a decade. On “Bout 2 Flourish,” the opener, he’s spreading cheese on a baguette in Europe, having sweaty sex behind curtains, praying to Yemaya in all white. His ex called him eighty times, spread eighty lies in a small city, was it because they made a baby and then it died? AshTreJinkins’ beats run tighter, more insistent, and “Feel Crazy” opens on a spoken-word sample declaring anger at racist transgressions the only sane response, then VINSON says he sees with both eyes and isn’t trying to see both sides. On “Never or Now,” his father only talked about his Beamer and his Benz and his many wins, never about anything else, and Nappy Nina takes the third verse: “Growing bitter in winter, said this was just enough/Times I couldn’t eat much.” — Darryl Keyes

bbymutha, rent due

Brittnee Moore was twelve years old when she got committed to a psychiatric ward in Pensacola for hitting a teacher. They diagnosed her with depression and ADHD, expelled her, and sent her back to Chattanooga, where she’d spend the next two decades becoming one of the funniest, meanest, most stubbornly independent rappers in the country, mostly without anyone outside of Bandcamp and SoundCloud knowing her name. On “mainstream,” bbymutha admits her Louis bag is fake, says she fired her managers for giving her headaches, and notes that her boyfriend DJs for her both downstairs and on stage. “personally” lists everything she hates about the industry—signing deals, starting over, working with people who see her as a check. Then she asks why she always has to be the gangster, always the bitch, when she’s a hero to her kids and her neighbors. “runnin” is the one where she wants to escape but can’t, so the hook just says it flat: “Fuck it, I’m mother, so I gotta handle it anyway.” She has been doing this since Muthaland. She can rap “I’m a goofy goober” on a song called “mutha massacre’s mental mania!” and mean it as hard as anything on the record. She learned from Gucci Mane and Trina and La Chat and Gangsta Boo, Southern rappers who understood that talking wild shit and talking real shit are the same conversation, just different volumes. “threat” has a pre-chorus where she walks through every identity that costs her points in public: too country, too old, a mother, a witch. — L. Ari James

Fat Ray & Raphy, Santa Rosa

Detroit’s underground has been quietly running on its own current for years, the kind of scene where Fat Ray who watched Proof run battles at the Hip-Hop Shop window in the ‘90s can spend a decade off the grid, resurface in 2018 with a mixtape and a sophomore album in the same calendar year, and still feel like he’s just getting warmed up. He put out Santa Barbara in February 2021 as the second-ever release on Danny Brown’s newly minted label. Santa Rosa is the sequel, made entirely with Bruiser Brigade in-house producer Raphy, who Brown has compared to a young RZA for his ability to tailor beats to whichever Bruiser is at the mic. Raphy chops soul and funk samples into hard, unhurried loops; Fat Ray fills every pocket. On “Rap City in the Basement,” he wakes up berating his own reflection for living in the basement when he’s supposed to be on Melrose, then flips mid-verse and crowns himself Ray Hova. When billy woods walks into “Change Us” with a Pontiac fishtailing on black ice and rigor mortis waiting on him but moving too slow. He raps about street economics with no sermonizing—“Lockdown” has fiends copping even when the price of the stock drops, “Big Worm” warns you not to cross your plug if the plug has Indian blood and runs with the Aztecs—and addresses younger Detroit kids on “K-Dot Pool” with the directness of someone who’s been watching the same patterns repeat for twenty years: “Why is you sellin’ blues?/Hangin’ with niggas hatin’ and waitin’ to tell on you.” — Harry Ford

Stu Bangas & A.G., Selfy

The Diggin’ in the Crates mythos, like the Wu or the Juice Crew before it, is the sort of lineage that gets invoked more often than the catalog that built it actually gets played. Andre Barnes, one of its founding voices and the half of Showbiz & A.G. still putting out solo records thirty-six years in, uses Selfy (his seventh solo cover, and his first handed entirely to one outside producer) to remind anyone still listening that the crew’s reputation was earned in the writing, not the shirts. Stu Bangas produced this tape. What does a sixty-year-old MC do with that much runway in front of him? He reaches straight for his contacts list, apparently dictated from memory. “All These Things All These People” gets read aloud as if he’s flipping through the phone in real time: Antho in Athens, Lizzie in Aspen, Killer Tone in Baton Rouge dancing with his gun the way Jamaican shooters do. Winston from Kingston married marijuana and found religion before getting recorded snitching. And you hear the Japan address even when he isn’t pointing at it, which is why “Megatron Bronx, reside in Tokyo” lands on “Suspense” as a fact. Near the close of “Real Hip Hop,” over a loop that samples KRS-One’s “Ova Here,” A.G. raps about making it home as if he stole dirt, now eating hors d’oeuvres at a five-star dinner he can afford. The Bronx is still where the verse comes from when somebody asks him where he’s from, and the answer, apparently, points down with the thumb. — Lance “LX” Brooks

Jai’Len Josey, Serial Romantic

Before she had a label deal, Jai’Len Josey co-wrote a platinum single for Ari Lennox, held writing credits with SZA and Babyface, and left a Broadway role as a teenager to go make music in Atlanta. When Tricky Stewart heard six songs she’d written and produced on her own, he added six of his and stitched a debut from both batches, giving Serial Romantic a tonal restlessness that a single-session record wouldn’t have. It is an album about wanting (every permutation of the word), and none of it comes with an apology. On “Housewife,” she’s trading the Hennessy and the six-inch Pleasers for a honeymoon in Bali, singing “I ain’t never, ever think I’d submit to no nigga” with genuine surprise at her own willingness. On the title track, she’s reserving a table at Benihana’s for three and listing her ideal lovers like a dinner order. Halfway through, a phone skit about her man at Nobu with another woman splits the record in half, and the restaurant upgrade is the wound. Josey never reconciles any of it. She’s a self-described hot girl playing Lois Lane on one cut and ordering the buffet on another, and Serial Romantic holds all of those women in the same tracklist. The only complete track produced by Josey is the last song. On the last song, Josey has reached a point where she chooses to stop giving. Under twelve tracks created in collaboration with Tricky Stewart, The-Dream and Leon Thomas, the last song is an expression of what Josey chose to save for herself as she walks into the vocal booth alone and sings the lyric, “How silly would I be if I had none left for me?” After giving everything she has on thirteen tracks, the last track represents an act of acceptance of what she has chosen to keep for herself. — Sydni Carter-Reed

Liam Bailey, Shadow Town

Amy Winehouse heard a demo and signed Liam Bailey to Lioness Records in 2010. Polydor shelved his debut over disagreements. He co-wrote Chase & Status’s “Blind Faith” and watched it hit No. 5 on the UK Singles Chart, then gave the next decade to records with Salaam Remi, Leon Michels, Sleaford Mods, Lee “Scratch” Perry, and Paul Weller while the industry kept trying to file him under one genre at a time. Bailey’s the son of an English mother and a second-generation Jamaican English father; he grew up speaking Patois with extended family, a Nottingham accent at home, and something closer to London everywhere else. For the length Shadow Town arrived, five studio albums deep and released independently through his own Home for Us imprint, Bailey had already been reggae (the Big Crown records with El Michels Affair), folk (the Thrill Jockey album with The Accidental), and soul (the Hogarth-produced debut that Polydor tried to own). Bailey freestyled the songwriting in Jimmy Hogarth’s Hampstead living room, and “Trauma” came from a psychology book he picked off the studio shelf, its clinical definitions of childhood damage (“Child’s sense of self is repeatedly threatened/But the child in no way possesses protection of essence of themselves”) feeding straight into a chorus where he chants “Trying to kill it, kill it, kill it/Killing your life away.” On “Got to Love You,” he croons, “It’s okay, now honey, I won’t change,” and then the culmination arrives: “Break me/Call me/And I beg you, beg you, beg you.” — Alexandria Elise

Daniel Son & Futurewave, Shattered Glass

When Daniel Son was eleven years old, he taught himself to write bars through text battles on internet message boards—the early-2000s rap forums where anonymous handles would post sixteen-bar rounds and vote on winners. He grew up in Toronto’s Northside, a part of the city that has about as much to do with the Drake-era image of the 6ix as Staten Island has to do with Manhattan tourism brochures. He started Brown Bag Money, a collective that includes his frequent collaborator Asun Eastwood, a Belizean-Canadian rapper raised in Toronto, and Saipher Soze. No frills in the name, none in the music. Futurewave, his most frequent production partner, works a day job, has a family, and still records, mixes, and masters everything himself. He chops samples the way a projectionist might splice damaged celluloid. Shattered Glass is the first set of fully new material from the pair since 2022, and it sounds like neither of them took a day off. On “Shipping Containers,” Daniel Son is at an airport bar with Swiss bankers while the product crosses borders in cargo holds; a few songs later, on “Ticket Sales,” he’s tipping scales and covering tracks so the trail goes cold. “Your life’s movie got low ticket sales/Just a bunch of trash on display,” he tells someone, mid-verse, between lines about forging invoices and ducking mall trips. Compare him to the Roc Marciano school, where the mink coat and the murder live in the same sentence, and Daniel Son fits. He just does it from a colder latitude, and the mink is probably a Canada Goose. — Xavier Thomas

Buddy, Simmie Sims III

For fifteen years the name on every album cover has been Buddy. But before that, it was Simmie Sims III—a kid in Compton named for his father and his grandfather (both also Simmies), signed to Pharrell’s i Am Other at fifteen and rechristened on the spot. The fourth album puts the original name back where you can read it. The first song opens with an uncle dead and Buddy’s father on the phone grieving. Through the third verse Buddy is counting what it cost. He pushed family away, grinds too hard, drinks too much. And the son credited further down on “House Jam” is Simmie Sims Jr. Three generations of Simmies on one jacket, counting Buddy himself, and the rapper who arrived as a teenager with one nickname is stepping out from under it. “Round Me” demands distance from haters in its first verse and counts angels and homies as around him by the last. “Pray for a Blessing” has Buddy walking through what shows up in one week, a lotta love, a lotta hate, a lotta salt, a lotta shade, a lotta praise, every line landing on the title request. Jay Rock answers with refusals: heaven is what he wants, hell is a hole, he ain’t selling his soul, ain’t stabbing the bros, ain’t taking a life. Indigo Boys produce the saddest love song, “Marmalade,” where Buddy chases an ex through Chateau Marmont puns until a second vocalist interrupts to admit her departure had a name on it (“I think I made a monster, I’m scared, and I feel it down in my soul”). On “Hopped Out” with Long Beach’s Huey Briss, the verses sprint through more L.A. real estate than most West Coast rap songs know what to do with. Compton to Watts to Slauson to Dover Street Market, plane to whip to chopper. — Javon Bailey

Cult of the Damned, SIMONY

Lee Scott grew up on a council estate in Runcorn, Cheshire, that got demolished. He started rapping at eighteen, formed the Antiheroes with his mate Salar in 2003, and by 2006 the two of them had cofounded Blah Records out of walking distance from the engineer’s house, recording in bedrooms and annoying his mum. The label’s roster expanded into Children of the Damned, then reformed as Cult of the Damned with a shifting cast of MCs from Runcorn, Manchester, Liverpool, the Wirral, Blackburn, and London. In 2018, the British Library offered to preserve all Blah releases for posterity. SIMONY came with a structural first for the group: every beat produced by one outsider, Chicago’s Spectacular Diagnostics, a sample-digger named Robert Krums who’d told Bandcamp Daily he preferred “not trying to overdo it.” Earlier Cult records split production across the roster; this one handed the keys to a guy from another continent and told him to drive. Krums’ beats give the ten-MC chaos a glue it never had. On the opener, “EXT. CAR PARK - NIGHT,” all ten rappers take a verse; King Grubb drops the album’s title pun in his: “Simply selling this shit is considered simony,” the sin of profiting from sacred things. He later declares himself “occasionally awestruck by my own divinity” and claims to have more bars than Mallorca has spas. Lee Scott, given two solo verses on “Covenant” with no hook, raps about drowning his sorrows “in the riverside stand, swearing on the Bible with your whiskey in me right hand” and rhymes Gary Coleman with Different Strokes to get two punchlines out of one setup. — Brandon O’Sullivan

Eddie Kaine & BhramaBull, Still Trying to Figure Me Out

The one-rapper, one-producer full-length has been a pillar of post-2015 indie-rap work, a form borrowed loosely from the Premo-and-Guru or Pete-Rock-and-CL-Smooth template and retooled for Bandcamp economics. A producer holds down every beat, a rapper walks through a dozen songs, the tape goes up for pre-order, the vinyl sells out in a month, and the pair moves on to the next one. Eddie Kaine has been working inside that form almost exclusively since he was nineteen, pressing his own CDs out of Bed-Stuy and putting out a new paired record almost every year.What sets this tenth paired full-length apart from his previous ones is a quieter decision: he has stopped drawing any line between how the outside reads his life and how he accounts for it himself. Kaine puts his strongest writing on “Pray for Me,” where a homophone couplet most rappers would quietly retire on (“Had to realize the lies lie beneath the truth, real eyes be seein’ through the real lies”) shares the song with a loss verse that places a brother’s death in the third line (“Lost my little brother, been a year, still ain’t clicks”) and a Bed-Stuy scene three verses later (“Kickin’ it on Quincy Street, chattin’ over weed and brew”). On “Cups Up,” he compresses a Mitchy Slick nod, a Sacramento Kings callback, and a verb-noun pun on “Mitchin” into ten syllables. “Thieves” remembers Bushwick Bill and Tommy Strong in the same verse where Kaine writes himself free of the spectacle grid. Reek Osama drops in on “Smoking Burner” with the strongest guest verse on the tape, a West Adams Blood talking about slipping into a Crip lady once in the blue and watching his OG cook rock in a light bulb, while BhramaBull’s soul-heavy samples and deceptively low-profile drums pace the whole record to Kaine’s mid-tempo, talkative flow. — Miles Everette

CK The Spitta, Strictly 4 the Underground

CK The Spitta signed a football contract before he ever recorded a song. He dribbled to applause, scored goals, caught a red card Balotelli style, the goal and the punishment in the same afternoon, and then didn’t go pro. The toll sent him to his friend Mansa’s kitchen, where Mansa had recording equipment, and CK stood there with one foot in, not wholehearted, unable to decide if music was really his. He admits this on “Fruits of My Labor,” the three-verse autobiography at the center of Strictly 4 the Underground, and the song is the whole record in miniature: a rapper who got to hip-hop late, through failure, and brought the language of the sport that discarded him along for the ride. He curls the ball “to the left like Foden” on “Karl Kani Freestyle.” He’s “Project Mbappé” on “Wavy Art,” shoots “like Bukayo Saka.” On “Tribute to Rap” he calls himself “Francesco Totti, captain of the game, Daniele De Rossi”—picking captains and leaders, players who stayed loyal to one club, and the selection says everything about what kind of MC he’s decided to be. CK pulls his from the sport he actually played, and the physical memory is in the rhymes. On “Fruits of My Labor” he’s at a party uninvited, vodka in hand, insecure feelings drifting off with the drinking, arguing with friends whether Kanye is better than 50 while The College Dropout plays in the background. With “Tribute to Rap,” he accounts his injuries and his persistence in the same bar, he raps, “From mud I rose, the ACL went click-clack,” the sports career that ended and the rap career that started, collapsed into six words and a sound effect. — Miles Everette

Jessie Ware, Superbloom

The third and final installment of her disco-pop trilogy stays entirely inside her own marriage. Superbloom is Jessie Ware’s sixth album, her third consecutive pleasure-mode outing, and the first one where the conceit is that two people in a long marriage pretend, for one night, they haven’t met. She A&R’d it herself, and she has said in interviews that the next thing she makes will move toward “synth and electronic and kind of blue and crooner-y” territory—which means the disco ends here, and she chose to end it at home. Her husband is the “you” on half the record, and a child’s voice opens “16 Summers” asking “Mom? Are you jumping, Mommy?” before Ware counts the summers she has left before the kid pulls away. The tour that closed That! Feels Good! had kick lines and sequins and an audience chanting “pleasure is a right” back at her across festival fields; this one settles for the living room, and the scale works. The disco history behind Superbloom runs through Larry Levan’s pre-Studio-54 Continental Baths and Ennio Morricone’s coyote-howl from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Stuart Price (Madonna, Pet Shop Boys) and Karma Kid take the Continental Baths onto a dance floor for “Sauna,” with Ware calling for “wood dropping, God-given love” over the steam. “Ride” loops the Morricone sample under a stallion fantasy, and she asks for a partner “who can go all night” over the beat. James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Depeche Mode) takes the solo chair for “Don’t You Know Who I Am?,” the break-up fantasy at the center of the marriage record. Barney Lister produces eight of thirteen. He builds the mythology around what Ware has called “a garden full of gods and goddesses.” — Charlotte Rochel

Propaganda & ProducerTrentTaylor, This Is Our Fellowship

Jason Petty’s father was a Black Panther. Petty grew up as the only Black kid in a predominantly Mexican neighborhood in Los Angeles, took up graffiti and breakdancing, went to college and came out with degrees in illustration and intercultural studies, then taught high school for six years before he quit to rap full-time under the name Propaganda. His collaborator here, ProducerTrentTaylor, bought an MPC4000 on Amazon while deployed in Afghanistan, made beats between shifts servicing A-10 Warthogs, and got dishonorably discharged for smoking weed in his final week of service. He ended up homeless in the Phoenix area, knocking out beat tapes from couches. They connected through the underground West Coast network (Propaganda guested on TrentTaylor’s Fashawn collaboration YOU OWE US WITH INTEREST in 2024), and This Is Our Fellowship is what happened when two men with wildly different routes to the same room decided to make a record about what boys become when nobody teaches them how to feel. On “I Didn’t Leave You,” he goes after the institutional church by name, says good theology was supposed to crush arrogance but he got stuck in one-upmanship, says a place where a gay daughter is unwelcome is a non-starter, then delivers a four-bar indictment of Trump, then names Derek Minor and Lecrae at the end, calls them his dogs till the wheels fall off. — Phil

Blu & Exile, Time Heals Everything

A kid from the west side of Los Angeles famously made a rap album in 2007 about praying to the sky and believing the sky was listening back. Below the Heavens has been lionized on underground-canon lists every year since (which, admittedly, is the kind of reception most rappers would sell a kidney for), and the writer responsible, Blu, has put out records with his producer Exile all through the two decades since while the mythology of the debut kept collecting interest no royalty check could match. But what happens to a rapper who’s been understood to matter more than he’s actually been paid for? On “In My Window,” the 37-year-old Blu writes about that exact predicament, that while he didn’t get the money he envisioned, he’s “blessed enough to pay my rent with this.” Time Heals Everything, his sixth with Exile, is the record on which the duo apparently stops pretending the myth and the working rapper are the same person (and it’s about time), writing directly from the life of the guy paying rent. He separates “R-A-P” from “hip-hop” and claims the second, then spoils the claim by admitting his first Exile record was built to get shorties on the floor naked. On “Crumbs,” Rome Streetz and ICECOLDBISHOP get on a song with Blu to argue the machinery of prison and poverty from two different coasts at once. Black Thought, on the three-MC centerpiece, prays to the Lord for lighter skin and finer hair, a couplet that in most other mouths would curdle into a bad tweet but sits here inside a verse about being “out of pocket” for pride. Mach-Hommy reshapes “My Favorite Things” into an informant manual on the same track. Exile’s horns and Rhodes and chopped-soul loops still refuse every production trend since 2007. Blu has figured out how to be 37 inside the sound that made him at 24, and the harvest of hay of doing that is the whole engine of the record. — Phil

April + VISTA, Traditional Noise

A mock pharmaceutical ad opens the album: “Are you restless? Afraid? Can’t seem to focus? Reduce your existential panic today with traditional noise for anxious adults.” It sounds like someone rehearsed the gag on index cards. Then the actual music hits. The duo (April + VISTA), who met at a Busboys and Poets after April George found one of Matthew “VISTA” Thompson’s beats on SoundCloud, both fresh out of Hampton University, and they’ve been making EPs and singles for over a decade, including a 2023 project with Little Dragon, without ever committing to a full album. April writes about interior collapse using trees, brine, tides, sap, crystal lakes—the physical world doing the emotional work that abstract language won’t. On “Grotto,” she admits she ran so fast she left herself behind, then spends four and a half minutes looking for a grotto that might wipe her clean. She doesn’t find it. “The silence I pursued emptied out my mind,” she sings, and the cleansing she came for turns into another kind of loss. On “Bless My Heart,” April sings “Lost myself there, bless my heart” while TonyKILL’s ad-libs crowd the background and the song tilts toward “Flush it down the barrel of a gun.” The pharmaceutical ad promised a cure. The songs hand you the diagnosis. — Imani Raven

The Troubles, The Trouble Is…

Craig G has been rapping since the mid-1980s (Marley Marl’s Juice Crew). Alongside Ruste Juxx and Flow Hypnotic on “Knock Knock,” and strikingly, on “Droppin’ Science,” which was made in ‘86, Craig G has neither gained nor lost momentum. The Michigan production duo JB Swift and Agent Smith 78 recorded The Trouble Is… as a collection of seventeen rooms, all of which have mid-tempo, snack-y, and kick-heavy boom-bap drum samples that have been aggressively prepared and have horn samples that have been malleted into a blunt lean. The best part of the record’s overall collection, as conservative as it seems, is that the art has not been lost. Vic Spencer travels from the East side of the Chicago rap community and snaps on “Words from Vic,” counting 5 years of the pain that he himself has caused in a duration that’s normally reserved for a prison sentence. Dudley Perkins appears on “Life Sentence” and sounds like he strolled in from a parallel universe. DJ Rugged One scratches some of the tracks here, and his scratches do what scratches have done in the boom-bap era—they connect the verses, punctuate the bars and make the turntable visible as a plank as an instrument. “FAFO” is filled with a wonky guitar riff, Rugged One scratches some brass, and the song is pushed into the territory of funk, with the drums remaining heavy. “Iron Sharpens Iron,” with its unbothered backbone flows, The Bad Seed and Vstylez raps. In “Quadruple the Trouble,” we have MENTaL da God and Northeast Beast, with Rugged One cutting between the two, and everyone, again, residing in some place and in no hurry to leave. — Harry Brown

Wendy Eisenberg, Wendy Eisenberg

Rhetorical questions pile up across the ten songs on the Brooklyn songwriter’s first record released under just their name. None of them expect answers; the asking is the operating mode. Eisenberg has put in a decade across Squanderers with David Grubbs and Kramer, Bill Orcutt’s Guitar Quartet, the noise-punk outfit Birthing Hips, and the rock trio Editrix; 2024’s Viewfinder built a song cycle around recovery from corrective laser eye surgery. This one, produced with their wife and frequent collaborator Mari Rubio, settles into a folk-rock idiom of Willie Nelson balladry and Joanna Newsom phrasing without ever giving up the avant tendencies that made the noisier work worth following. Rubio (who records as more eaze) co-produced the record and arranged the strings, and her pedal steel turns up almost everywhere there’s a memory to color. “Another Lifetime Floats Away” rides one of those memories, a Proustian drift through highway driving and a mother making breakfast, time pulled forward and back at once. “Meaning Business,” an ode to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, walks a Lô Borges-shaped chord progression so warm it practically hums; the recovery it describes slides into the harder work of grieving the self that didn’t survive it. “Vanity Paradox” catches the absurdity of writing about yourself for so long that you can no longer see yourself, and the melody opens on a patch of dissonance before the lyric tumbles out plainly. Whatever those questions go on to ask, Rubio’s pedal steel stays in the room. — Charlotte Rochel

Action Figure 973 & Artificer, What Would Harley Race Do?

Halfway through “Harley and Nash Driving Thru the Hood,” the audio breaks for a story Kevin Nash told about Harley Race in his sixties, reigning NWA champion, barreling the wrong way up a Washington D.C. one-way at 90 miles an hour past an open-mouthed cop. Nash’s voice has a dry weariness. He got out of that car once and never climbed back in. That’s the operating image of What Would Harley Race Do?, the third record from Belleville, New Jersey rapper and producer Action Figure 973, who goes mainly by Aklo and who signed up Race (dead since 2019) as a working partner. Race’s archival audio closes the bookend songs and lives inside the body of the record, so that whenever Aklo’s verses finish, Race comes on to tell another war story. Artificer is the album’s sole producer, and his beats are the sound a Griselda record would be if Conway were better read. Dusty sample chops, shuffled drums pitched low, horns tuned so Aklo’s voice carries above them like a heat signature. Inside those narrow lanes, Aklo ricochets through knots, wrist locks, Faith Evans apologizing to Tupac, Babe Ruth’s Dominican heritage, a Spanish-language Trump insult, even a Rashad Jackson reference by way of the Syko Stu squared-circle death (the kind of obituary you only name if Cagematch is in your daily tabs). — Harry Brown

Adrian Younge, Younge

With Younge, Adrian Younge delivers an album that commits fully to his own form of musical thinking, and in doing so develops a remarkable coherence. Anyone familiar with Younge knows not to expect polished, digital jazz or funk productions here. Instead, a dense, analog-minded, orchestral soundscape unfolds, one deeply rooted in the traditions of eclectic jazz, psychedelic soul, and cinematic funk, all threaded together through the framework of hip-hop’s now 50-plus-year remix culture and methodology. The arrangements, down to every detail, feel perfectly coordinated and composed. What sets him apart is the way composition and production interlock. String beds, organs, dry drum grooves, and warm basslines fuse into a sound that aims less at individual songs than at a larger atmospheric portrait. Equally striking is the consistency with which modern production standards are abandoned. Originally working as a film composer, he drew early attention through his devotion to analog production methods. Projects spanning film and television, along with collaborations with international artists (notably Jazz Is Dead), have made him a sought-after architect who works deliberately against the digital mainstream and has developed an unmistakable signature in the process. — Noura Haddad

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Farma G is the son of Peet Coombes, songwriter and guitarist of The Swimmers, whose “Fool (If You Think It’s Over)” became a transatlantic hit in 1978; Robin and his brother Chester P grew up in Northside London drawn to hip-hop as children, Beatstreet, Breakdance, Roxanne Shanté battles, and by 1993 they had formed Bury Crew, which became Task Force, which produced the Music from the Corner series, which became one of the few UK underground rap catalogs anyone still argues about with real feeling. Nearly Nothing’s Enough is his second album on High Focus Records, produced entirely by Brighton-based Relense, and he has been rapping since 1985, became a father at eighteen and again to twins at thirty-eight, stepped away and came back and stepped away again and came back again, and still calls himself “The prince of psychedelia.” Dorothy who kills properly, Tripitaka with the marker, Sun Wukong born from a stone—these are not allusions; this is how he talks, Beatstreet and Kerouac and Slick Rick’s “La Di Da Di” and the Air Max 1s on the estate all feeding the same mouth, and nearly every song here is thick with it.

The distance between that mythology and the body it lives in closes entirely on “Mr. Moany,” where Jazz T joins Farma G for a track that the latter wakes up knackered, rolls out of bed and “the bugs scatter,” straps a spliff, stares at himself in a dirty mirror; his breath smells “like a row of broken gravestones.” The phone only rings when someone is chasing a debt. He plays Call of Duty, doesn’t want to do chores, and the cat food is still on the floor. In the second verse he hasn’t washed in a week, reaches for the Lynx and “a gargle of bleach,” stuffs himself with five Mr Kipling Angel Cakes, watches the news and turns it over, it’s boring, plays the lottery, writes his name in the grime on the window. The chorus says “I’m depressed, I can’t seem to leave the house, and my life is a mess,” and normally that would be platitude, but Farma G has just used two verses to count the empty sweet wrappers and the holes in his socks and the neighbors telling him to empty the bins, and millions of people in Britain are that man and most rap music has no interest in him.

The estate gets the same attention on “Peace Pipes.” He comes from “an estate, any old estate,” where kids can “Whip the coke to the crack but they can’t tie their shoelace on their Air Max 1s”; the field they used for run-outs is a new block of flats, the place they used to love is now a squat for the cats, and Farma G walks along the Thames at sunset with his thoughts “Drenched in revenge” directed at “Posh racketeers” who “Make careers out of poor men’s tears.” He calls out Eton school bullies as a class, and the run-outs and the Air Max 1s precede the sloganeering, which is why the chorus, “Fuck the police from here to suburbia, Fuck the politicians and their new world order,” lands the way it does. He has named the nighttime disease feeding addicts, the cops never reading your rights, the flats now full of strangers from different places.

That anger carries into “Makes Me Wanna...,” which opens with a Grim Reaper sample and says these rappers running around acting mad make him want to kill them, and “The Circus,” which calls the scene “a clown’s tea party, Barnum & Bailey’s without the trapeze” and arrives at the ventriloquist doll with a hand up your back, one of the razor-edge descriptions of a major-label rapper’s predicament heard in a song this year. The contempt in these tracks has curdled past rage into comedy, and you can hear the Task Force lineage in the disgust, thirty years of watching the UK rap industry and finding it funnier and sadder with every passing season.

Relense’s production holds the record in a single temperature, which is the right constraint for an MC who ranges from conspiracy theory (“X-Files,” whose intro says “tongue in cheek, baby,” and whose verses run through flat-earth, hollow-earth, Nephilim, chemtrails, the Anunnaki, and “free Palestine” before his friends remind him he’s paranoid) to Jack Kerouac on the sofa (“Ya Dead Now,” where he sips tea reading The Dharma Bums with “Emotions fully interlaced” and “Tears upon my pillowcase” and opens Pandora’s box) to industry funeral to mythological self-portrait. The beats thump at one pitch throughout, and the consistency suits the grounded tracks and holds steady under the rest; “Sun Wukong” wants vastness and gets the same room, but the room is solid enough that the myth still breathes inside it.

The devotional center of the record is “Sun Wukong”: the Monkey King trapped under a mountain is the only mythology in the song, and Farma G writes into it with concentration, “I lived with the weight of a mountain range on my shoulders, it helped me build the strength of mind to have composure.” He sat in lotus position with Nag Champa incense, “Asked the gods for my name and they replied with one word,” scattered the ashes of dead friends “In an ocean of remorse,” and the grief and the myth fuse until you can’t separate the legend from the man who’s been carrying it. “Matters of the Heart” provides the title: “When you’re born into a world without compassion and love, you live your life like somehow nearly nothing’s enough,” and the line sounds different coming from someone who also writes his name in the grime on his window and plays the lottery and curses the kids having fun outside.

Jazz T appears on “Never Be the Same,” where Farma G finds the coffee, references Cloudy and the dancing goats (the Ethiopian origin myth of coffee), plays ghost like the Flying Dutchman, holds the sword “like McCloud in the Square Gardens,” declares the meaning of life is forty-two “if the Hitchhiker’s Guide was right,” and names himself “Farmer Stargazer Interstellar Space.” “I drew the galaxy and joined the dots and smiled at the sun” has a sweetness the rest of the record has been building toward all along.

Farma G was born in 1974, started writing lyrics at eleven, producing beats on an AKAI MPC 60 by 1990, became a father at eighteen, produced for Mach-Hommy and Conway the Machine and Rome Streetz and Tha God Fahim during his years away, and came back to make two High Focus albums in two years with his blood still MUD and his hook still naming Purly Kings, Bury Crew, Northside until he dies. On “Till I’m Gone”, he asks, “Imagine Jaws without the soundtrack,” which is silence, which is what most people heard when Task Force was making Music From the Corner.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Mr. Monay,” “Peace Pipes,” “Sun Wukong”

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It’s a certain type of parenting that goes on in neighborhoods where there’s nowhere to grow up, kids adopted by adults whose biological parents are in prison or on drugs or dead or who know all of them somehow; the guardians don’t do any paperwork. They use money from the corner and from kitchens to buy the kids their school supplies and the line between love and money gets obliterated before any one could say it. Philip Anthony Bernard, who raps as Grafh, grew up in South Jamaica, Queens, when the crack wars were a reality, and saw his own mentor shot down right in front of him, followed by his father; he was a kid learning to be a man who knew how to take care of himself without really becoming anything beyond that. Sometimes Money Cost Too Much has that question in the title, although the answers are in his biography from years ago, scattered across lists of narcotics, declarations of love, posse tracks and the three-verse tale of a kid called Little Kenny that sums the whole thing up.

A looping New York vocal and a Wu-Tang paraphrase establish Grafh within the tradition of Queens rappers, who tend to refer to their borough as some sort of state of being; “Cash rules everything around me, Queens get the money.” He runs down his résumé-turnstile jumper, coke smuggler, gold chain, olive drab fatigues, presenting himself as an evidence submitter in a case he’s been building for twenty years; the tapes, shelved major-label releases, and independent works have culminated in this TCF Music Group collaboration. The litany feels tired, bureaucratic; “Give me six and I’ll make a dozen,” he says, taking the cooking metaphor for the deal, while the police in the second verse think he’s “just a thug in tan Timbs and construction gloves.” On “Squeeze First,” Benny the Butcher comes through with domestic details: a hundred thousand dollars in an Adidas box, the business setup in the pizza place, cards being played on a stained kitchen table. Where a lot of the dirty work takes place, the kitchen is the nexus of the business and family life: “Your own brother don’t like you, fuck around and go upstate, your own mother won’t write you.”

On the posse cut “Outside,” Styles P, 38 Spesh (who produced the track) and Mitchy Slick each bring their corner’s testimonial from Yonkers, Rochester, and San Diego; it’s as though they’ve been summoned to the same courthouse for a single hearing. Styles describes the scene where “silence is on the joint, they killing you with the sound off,” the muffled gunshot appearing like a weather report. The sharpest domestic detail comes from Grafh, with coke dust on the kitchen table and his baby mama needing allowance, so “we gon’ eat around it.” The table is where business and family both occur and no one flinches because it’s Tuesday.

Grafh opens “Brick By Brick” to find a Bible on one side of the bed and a loaded nine on the other and a devilish temptation, “go for mine.” He’s making it clear that the drug trade is simply shift work with lesser benefits. He confesses a dependence on the drugs-and then corrects himself, “Not on them, I sell them.” “Documented” re-establishes the self-mythologizing by citing Black Hand Entertainment and Chaz Williams by name, reducing his past life to rhyme after rhyme: a record deal still has the trap inside, “Phil Jackson in the mud field practicing run drills backwards,” an image that’s absurd and perfect, discipline used in a life without a script.

On “Twin,” over the R&B production from Kxvi, Grafh writes a love song, asking “baby, you look amazing all the time” and then in the next line saying “wish I could invoice all your exes for wasting your time.” The second verse is earnest, “We made it through the hard times, why? ‘Cause we prayed for each other. I broke your heart and you broke mine, but we stayed for each other,” with the climax: “I invest too much time with bitches I would never, ever marry, but you.”

Little Kenny’s mama was a crack addict. “Some Wounds Never Heal,” the closing track, tells his story over three verses and a Tish Hyman hook that asks “Can you hear it hollering without a sound?” “I look in his fridge, all I see is spoiled milk and baking flour,” Grafh says, “so he starving and he dirty, she ain’t make him shower, she be tryna cover up the smell with baby powder.” He’s in twelfth grade, still a kid himself, telling this woman how to raise her son, paying Kenny’s school fees, buying him real Nikes instead of the fakes Grafh had when he was not cool. He taught Kenny to fight, but the boy was always flinching, always scared, used to abuse. One day she beat him with a wooden spoon to the point he couldn’t move. Grafh took Kenny shopping when he got out of the hospital, shot hoops with him, kept blocking his shot until the kid couldn’t stop laughing. “I said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ but tomorrow never came, a black body bag with my whole world in it.” The title makes itself plain here. Money from the street paid for Kenny’s Nikes and school fees, and none of it kept him alive. The child is dead. Whatever Grafh provided, the cost exceeded the price.

Joyner Lucas stalls “Big League” in boilerplate competition raps: “Too hot, believe it or not, word to the Ripley,” and his verse about burning down a crib while gripping the Bible is hostile imagery with nothing underneath it. “Rollin’” is pleasant ride music carried by Dope Gang Porter’s Michelin-star-chef-and-cannoli-in-Sicily bragging, but it sits oddly next to the heavier material. “Suicide” pairs Grafh with Tech N9ne for a chopper exhibition that sounds imported from a different record entirely, a technical display that has no emotional business following “Better With Time,” where Bun B talks about linking up with Pimp C, hitting the road in a white Prelude, and doing it “for my mother and father, make a living for my son and my daughter, and a million out a motherfucking quarter.” The best songs could fill a devastating eight-song LP. The excess is the tax on independence; when you’re building without a major label, you keep everything.

Grafh has been on the margins for two decades, signed and shelved, co-signed and forgotten, given distribution deals through Sony and Roc-A-Fella and E1 that never produced a proper album during that era. He’s been praised by Drake, Busta Rhymes, Raekwon, and, ugh, Shia LaBeouf. None of it translated into the career his pen deserved. Sometimes Money Cost Too Much is his most personal record, and the question underneath every song is what happens when a twelfth-grader from South Jamaica decides to raise a child who isn’t his, using money the law won’t recognize, in a borough that will bury both of them. He said, “I’ll see you tomorrow,” but tomorrow never came.

Solid (★★★½☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Outside,” “Brick By Brick,” “Some Wounds Never Heal”

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The Maryland suburbs of DC produce musicians who get called yankees by the South and southerners by the North, who rap about PG County and Takoma Park to audiences that have memorized every block in Bed-Stuy and Compton but couldn’t locate Sago Creek with a search warrant. Oddisee, Sudanese-American, raised between Silver Spring and PG County, has been making this case across twenty years of albums and production credits; his first major placement was on DJ Jazzy Jeff’s The Magnificent in 2002, and his own label, Outer Note, was built by 2020. His mother, an activist from Southeast DC, said artists have the ability to reach people that are unreachable. And that instruction sits under everything he does as a producer (an almost parental patience in how he builds a beat and then steps back). Heno., first-generation Ethiopian-Eritrean, raised in Takoma Park, a generation younger, has been nomadic since leaving—Oakland and LA and back again—carrying a name he hid for years. Yihenew is Amharic for “this is what you see is what you get.” The period at the end of “Heno.” is the punctuation of reclaiming it. From Takoma With Love is their first record together, co-credited, and the town is all over it, street names and intersections and corners where things happened to children who are now old enough to rap about them.

Heno. opens “Woe Is Me” at Maple and Lee, where he caught his first fight and saw his first play on the pavement, and then his world broke: “I was mistaken to be a drug dealer pushing pills, I was only six, dog, how you cuffing up a child?” The question has no answer. He was young, gave up smiling, the undercovers kept riding through, and he would be lying if he said he was not still bitter. He grew weed, started making beats, never thought about how far they would take him. Oddisee takes the second verse and raps his own childhood in parallel, “Product of immigration and disengagement, a combination of food stamps and visas, not came in as a student and now the teachers is overstaying,” then adds, level, “Don’t define me by what’s behind me and what I been through.” Two men in their own decades of the same suburb, one Ethiopian-Eritrean, one Sudanese-American, placing their early years next to each other inside a single track.

The first minutes of “Right Steps” feel like any other success-story track, soul-inflected chords while Heno. talks fine print and alignment, remembering being broke in a Visa line, turning goals and dreams to life. Then the beat changes and the song changes with it. “Land of the free and the home of the brave, when it be the land that was seized and controlling the slaves.” And: “just a Black man with a few shots and a white man in a blue cop.” The beat switch is the difference between the version of your life you perform for employers and the version that comes out at 2 AM.

Oddisee’s own verses arrive from altitude. On “MIMS” he sounds ground down by the very success he chased, “Just today I had a rack of stress, I’m on a DND so I could catch a breath, kids crying, I was busy driving and my mother called me, so I had to text.” He almost ran a stop sign. He doesn’t rock with music that isn’t hitting, “your top five is not mine,” and if your hand is out with no pen in it and no notes taken, he takes offense. On “Round the Way” he names Largo High, Sago Creek, brothers in Merlin, family in Toronto, “my father in Sudan surviving janjaweed,” and declares he never feels alone. On “Guiding Me” something else happens: he remembers being alone and happy, then realizing a hole had opened that only family could fill, a void he didn’t recognize until it drew him close. Heno. writes from the scramble, trapping and robbing and getting out. Oddisee writes from the years after, when making it revealed its own kind of confusion.

The roll call happens on “Round the Way.” Heno. names himself: “I’m Amar, I’m a Roma, and I’m Tedraz, and I’m Eritrean too,” and follows it immediately with “it’s still free Palestine, they were rooting their land.” Family in the Bay who ghost ride, people in LA on both sides, women in VA who go both ways. Oddisee’s verse matches the reach (Largo High, Sago Creek, Berlin, Toronto, “my father in Sudan surviving janjaweed”) until both of them have covered most of a globe from inside one song. And on “Woe Is Me,” Heno. watches “Zionists debate about it” while he’s still bitter about getting cuffed at six. The personal and the political share a sentence on this record because in Takoma Park they always did.

Self-hate gets a name on “Guiding Me.” “Programmed this way, it ain’t no accident,” Heno. says, then goes specific: “offer up minimum wage and respect it,” memories of kitchens with bath holders, “started robbing in the tenth grade, thinking about it all give me headaches.” Did it occur to anyone that he shouldn’t have to fight for his own life mattering? Zaïna’s chorus, “I’ve been in my head too much, that’s a place I don’t like to be, hate anxiety, blame society, but I got angels at all angles guiding me,” gives the song a prayer’s cadence after a record’s worth of grinding and justifying and keeping score, faith and exhaustion sharing a breath for the first time.

Food stamps and jewelry pawning and moving units and the bando: “Trish Status” has momentum but recycles without the Maple and Lee precision or the “Right Steps” surprise. “Can’t Look Back” says what its title promises and not much beyond it, you can’t look back, you’ll crash, karma is true. These are songs where the I-made-it voice outruns the detail, where the writing says I outlasted my beginnings without specifying which block or which winter. Aurelius Street in Germany, herbal tea, a set nobody expected: on “Good Habits,” nobody there had heard of him, then he did a show and suddenly they urgently wanted to work with him, and he earned a fee, and he let his purpose feed from him. A kid from Takoma Park who learned a set of codes around the same time he was told to eat his vegetables, now halfway around the world, rapping about the same things to people who can’t pronounce his name either.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Woe Is Me,” “Right Steps,” “Round the Way”

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Translator’s Note: Written by Akira Obuchi for bmr (Black Music Review) in a February 2001 magazine issue number 270. Originally written in Japanese; translated into English for publication. All rights reserved.

On December 1st, Redman and Method Man performed at the Def Jam Japan launch party, held at Shinjuku’s Liquid Room. They had come to Japan for that single night alone.

The following day, we visited the “bling-bling” suite at a certain top-tier hotel where the two were staying, for our interview. What we found were two guys completely burnt out on press. Redman, paying no attention to the journalists in the room, had his headphones on, listening to an MP3 player and rapping along at full volume (for the record, the lyrics were almost pure wordplay, all rhyme and no meaning, and it was dope). Meth, meanwhile, was quietly absorbed in a handheld computer he’d confiscated from Def Jam president Kevin. Is a business PDA really that entertaining?

Still, we managed to get them talking, so we opened by praising their tight, fantastic set from the night before.

Redman (R): “Last night’s live set? That was a special menu, just for that party. When we tour in the US, it’s way crazier than that.”

Wait, seriously? Even better than last night? Over the past couple of years, large-scale hip-hop tours have been on the rise in the US, and Redman & Method Man have been sharpened by runs like the Hard Knock Life Tour, so their live show has clearly leveled up. But doesn’t all that work ever get to you?

R: “Right now, man, quit complaining and just handle your business when it’s time to handle it.”

Redman really did seem like he’d matured enormously compared to when I’d interviewed him four years earlier. A man in his thirties: when it’s time, you handle it. So, why are you two so close?

Method Man (M): “We’re close because Redman is cool.”

R: “Meth is cool too. It’s like, we’re on the same frequency, you know?”

They really do seem to communicate like actual brothers. Redman is the big brother, and Meth, the younger one, seems to follow Redman’s lead. But you must fight sometimes, right?

M: “Fight? Only bitches fight.”

R: “I fight with my girlfriend all the time, but never with Meth.”

The new albums each of them had scheduled for December release had been pushed back. Redman’s fifth solo album title was apparently set as Where Is Reggie Noble? (note: Reggie Noble is Redman’s real name). What does the title mean?

R: “You know my mascot, right?” (note: the CG-rendered miniature Redman used on the cover) “Where Is Reggie Noble? is his project. I’m not involved.”

Redman said this, and Meth listened, both stone-faced and dead serious. But of course, it was a joke. Devious, the both of them. So what about Meth’s third solo album, Tical 0?

M: “Haven’t started recording yet, so I couldn’t tell you.”

At this point, the two of them are undeniably stars. There must be things that have had to change.

R: “Stars?” (clowning, laughing) “What’s changed is my underwear.”

The whole room cracked up.

M: “Same here.”

R: “Nah, not much has changed. We got here by being ourselves. People mess with us because what we have is real talent, not something manufactured.”

M: “The fact that nobody knows what we’re gonna do next? That’s our appeal.”

R: “We just do us, and the popularity is just what comes back from that.”

But being a star means you have to do interviews like this one.

M: “Iyyo.” (Yes)

R: “Iyyooo.” (laughing) “Well, it’s the price of fame.”

So, has their rapping changed as they’ve built up their careers?

M: “Iyyo. It’s gotten more complex.”

R: “It’s not simple anymore. The rap game has gotten bigger, and there are a lot of good MCs out there. You’ve got to keep sharpening your skills.”

Southern artists are popular right now. Do you ever get inspired by someone like Mystikal?

M: “Mystikal inspiring ME? I’ve been on the scene longer than him. Why would he inspire me? It’s the other way around: he’s inspired by US! ...Hold on, you like Mystikal?”

Yeah, well, sure.

M: “I mean, he’s dope too. But why do we have to be the ones getting inspired?”

R: “You have to get inspired, man.”

R: “The South is the South.”

Redman, the more mature of the two, brushed it off casually, but Meth came at the question with his competitive streak fully exposed. These are MCs who live in the world of battle. There may be love between them and their peers (Mystikal actually has about as much career history as Meth), but don’t lump them together. That was clearly his honest feeling.

Meanwhile, hip-hop’s center of gravity is dominated by artists in their early thirties, and the culture is entering a genuine era of aging, at least compared to before.

M: “What I’m most interested in right now? Family. If my kid said they wanted to be a rapper, I’d allow it.”

R: “They’re getting bigger, and soon enough they start saying stuff like” (imitating his daughter) “’Hey, buy me a car, I need to get around.’”

As a parent, do you teach your kids anything about what kind of MC to be?

M: “I don’t teach them anything. Stand on your own two feet. That’s the lesson.”

R: “I tell them to take care of their family, to have a sense of responsibility. There’s a good role model right here, so just look at your father.”

That’s right: Redman and Meth are MCs, but they’re also fathers. Hip-hop isn’t just music for the young.

Interpreter: Kyoko Maruyama

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Welcome back to another issue of Wednesday Roundups! Diving into today’s music can be overwhelming with the constant influx of albums and singles, as 100,000+ tracks are uploaded daily. ​That’s where Shatter the Standards ​makes ​your musical ​navigation easier every ​Wednesday. They ​slice through the ​noise, bringing ​you a curated ​list of ​noteworthy new drops ​accessible on ​streaming platforms. They handpicked specific records from this past release week to curate ​a diverse lineup, ​including Jai’Len Josey, Ebony Riley, Gareth Donkin, Blu & Exile, Le$, April + VISTA, Rosco P Coldchain & Nicholas Craven, ADÉ, REASON, Joya Mooi, Liam Bailey, Yuna, Esa Williams, Marc Spano, Sir Michael Rocks, CRIMEAPPLE, NEMS & Ron Browz, Billy Danze, Bel Cobain, VINSON, Tom Funk, Budgie, LEÁ THE LEOX, Miyah, and Last Stat & Myka 9. If you’re struggling ​to keep ​up with the ​ever-evolving music ​scene, subscribing to ​the Shatter the ​Standards newsletter is ​your ticket ​to staying in ​the loop. ​They dive deep, bringing hidden gems to your inbox weekly (and saving this playlist below). If you don’t have Spotify, save it to your Apple Music account.

Jai’Len Josey: Serial Romantic [R&B/Soul]

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Ebony Riley: Beautiful Tragedy [R&B]

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Gareth Donkin: Extraordinary [R&B/Soul]

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Blu & Exile: Time Heals Everything [Hip‑Hop/Rap]

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Le$: Growth + Development [Hip‑Hop/Rap]

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April + VISTA: Traditional Noise [Alternative]

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Rosco P Coldchain & Nicholas Craven: Play With Something Safe [Hip‑Hop/Rap]

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ADÉ: Always Love (EP) [R&B]

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REASON: Moving Towards Love_PINK [Hip‑Hop/Rap]

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Joya Mooi: All the Things (EP) [R&B]

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Liam Bailey: Shadow Town [Soul]

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Yuna: The Valour Hour (EP) [Pop/R&B]

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Esa Williams: Dala What We Must [African]

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Marc Spano: Arrival Time (EP) [Hip‑Hop/Rap]

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Sir Michael Rocks: Rocks, Paper, Scissors: Choices [Hip‑Hop/Rap]

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CRIMEAPPLE: BEMMER ON BROADWAY[Hip‑Hop/Rap]

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NEMS & Ron Browz: I SHOULD BOOM YOU [Hip‑Hop/Rap]

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Billy Danze: The Answer [Hip‑Hop/Rap]

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Bel Cobain: Kizzy (EP) [R&B/Soul]

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VINSON: Raw Honey [R&B/Soul]

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Tom Funk: What’s It Gonna Be? [Funk]

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Budgie: Lovers On Ice 2 [Reggae]

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LEÁ THE LEOX: FatalAttraction (EP) [R&B]

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Miyah: Miyah (EP) [R&B]

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Last Stat & Myka 9: Obligatory Mindfulness [Hip‑Hop/Rap]

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Athletes who wash out of professional sports and turn to music carry a particular wound with them, a competitiveness rerouted but never fully discharged, and the language of the game they lost stays in their mouths long after the body has stopped performing it. On “Fruits of My Labor,” CK The Spitta raps about signing his first football contract, getting applause when he dribbled “like Zinedine,” scoring a goal and catching a red card “Balotelli style,” and then not going pro, the toll of which he describes as the thing that made him hellbent about rap. He ended up in his friend Mansa’s kitchen, Mansa had recording equipment there, one foot in the music, not wholehearted, and he admits on the song that he was the problem, couldn’t decide whether music was his next chapter, had to gather his thoughts before committing to being a serious rapper. That kitchen, the hesitation in it, the fact that he names it and owns the delay, is where you understand what kind of MC this is.

On “This Life of Mine” he talks about a balcony in Lisbon with his family, the wine is vintage, life is good. On “Majestic Tone” he wants to make a mark “like Diego out in Naples,” sits in favela plastic chairs sipping a margarita, calls his spouse “muy bonita,” invokes Santeria. On “S4TU” he pours Pinot Grigio, sleeps overseas while getting paid. On “Tribute to Rap” he compares his persistence to constantly building La Sagrada Familia. He drops “bombaclaat” and “dutty wine for the culture” and empanadas in different songs, and the cumulative picture, European, Caribbean, possibly Portuguese-speaking, certainly diasporic, won’t settle into a recognizable rap origin story. He never explains where he’s from, which is one of the more interesting choices on the record, and it means you have to take the world of the album on its own terms, not slot it into London or New York or Toronto. The Lisbon balcony and the Naples ambition and the favela chairs just sit there, and CK spits from inside them without footnotes.

The football references are his primary way of thinking. On “Karl Kani Freestyle” he receives the ball and curls it “to the left like Foden.” On “Wavy Art” he calls himself “Project Mbappe” and shoots “like Bukayo Saka.” On “Composure” the hook asks him to aim “accurate, Dirk Nowitzki.” On “Tribute to Rap” he’s “Francesco Totti, captain of the game, Daniele De Rossi.” The references span European football with a few basketball crossovers, Kobe, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Dirk Nowitzki, Andre Ingram, and what makes them distinct from the usual sports-bar-in-a-rap-verse is that CK played. He knows what it means to curl a ball left, he did it. He knows what a Balotelli-style red card feels, he got one. The similes that work best are the ones attached to physical motion, curling left and shooting and reaching heights, and they carry the muscle memory of an actual athlete. When he compares himself to Totti or De Rossi he is picking captains and leaders, players who stayed loyal to one club, and that selection says something about the kind of artist he intends to be.

With “What a Day,” CK writes about the block with a precision he doesn’t always reach. Boys who haven’t hit puberty are firing shots, not thinking straight. A friend wears a bulletproof vest, they killed his best friend, and the friend says that when he sees them it’s their last breath. CK tried to tell him to chill, said it’s up to God, but the friend said he’s in charge, and CK concedes there’s nothing he can do but say a prayer. He runs through the alternatives, county jail, numbing with prescriptions, putting hands on women, scamming, lies becoming an easy pattern, and then says plainly that he was never a gangster, never tried to act hard, had a two-parent household with morals intact, never felt the need to fabricate. His homie said he’d hold him accountable if he ever lied in his raps. That line grounds the whole song. The verse has been written under the condition of being checked, and the specificity of the images, summertime gunshots while kids are playing, the adults calming them down by saying it’s fireworks, the ghost face the kids saw, comes from somebody who watched the block and not someone who invented one.

The first verse of “Fruits of My Labor” has CK in junior high, jeans baggy, nine-to-fives, Talib Kweli in his headphones, pedaling his bike, cutting thighs and falling in love with Mary Jane. He goes to a party uninvited, vodka in hand, and the insecure feelings drift away with the drinking. His friends are arguing whether Kanye is really better than 50 while The College Dropout plays in the background, and the detail is so precisely mid-2000s it dates itself without trying. The second verse moves to the football pitch, Kendrick’s Overly Dedicated in his headphones now, older homies sneaking him into the club at 17, a girl grinding on him, asking his age while he lies. He wanted to dress as Pharrell but couldn’t afford four hundred dollars for a hoodie. He scored a goal and caught a red card, and the Balotelli quote spliced into the song, “Too many people speak about me bad, and now they have just to shut up,” gives you the cockiness and the punishment. The third verse is the kitchen at Mansa’s, the admission and the decision, and then the studio built at home, the throne declared. CK is narrating failures of nerve alongside accomplishments, telling you about the times he wasn’t wholehearted and the times he was the problem, and the albums playing in his headphones at each stage, Kweli, Kanye, Kendrick, double as a timeline of the rap he was absorbing while his own life kept shifting underneath him.

The Madlib-tribute “Qua$imoto” CK spits about Black power and Black Lives Matter and jokes two lines later about scamming a snow bunny, and the tonal collision feels accidental. On the same song, comparing his pockets getting fatter to “Lizzo ‘fore she realized health matter” is a punchline that contradicts the self-discipline the rest of the album preaches. “Proceed” and “Composure” share a mode, keep the composure, gray clouds but we proceed, a little taste of defeat never did harm, that is sincere and not embarrassing but also not particularly his. Those could be anyone’s bars. CK is most interesting when he can’t be anyone else, and the distance between his sharpest writing and his loosest is noticeable over a full LP. The Elon Musk punchline on “Proceed,” “Call her Twitter finger, had to let go, convert to X,” is the kind of bar that was probably funny in the booth and reads limp on paper, and there are a handful of those scattered through the record, moments where the freestyle muscle outruns the editorial instinct.

CK gives DJ Kool Herc credit on “Unapologetically Me,” “Without you, it ain’t possible,” and pays tribute to Prodigy, rest in peace, and takes the red pill from Morpheus, and speaks to two brothers who made the Forbes list who told him to block the noise. On “Wavy Art” he lists the elements of hip-hop, breakdancing, rhymes, DJs, mixing, scratching, wordplay, with the sincerity of someone who memorized those elements as a kid and still believes in the taxonomy. He titled a song after Quasimoto, Madlib’s pitched-up alter ego. He titled another after Karl Kani, the fashion designer who dressed ‘90s hip-hop. He references MF DOOM on “Unapologetically Me,” masks on the premises, MF DOOMs, and all these citations point to fidelity more than nostalgia, a rapper who learned hip-hop as a canon and raps inside it with the devotion of someone who memorized every lyric the day a song dropped and showed up the next day rapping every word to friends who couldn’t believe he already knew it.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Fruits of My Labor,” “What a Day,” “Karl Kani Freestyle”

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There’s a piece of advice that keeps circulating from an artist in Queens who teaches her friends, painters and illustrators and people who have never touched a drum machine, how to use an Elektron Digitakt. You need to write a song for your health. She means it literally. Candace Lee Camacho, who records as duendita, built existential thottie the same way: alone first, late at night, running beats on the Digitakt until the songs existed as demos before anyone else heard them. Harpist Samantha Feliciano, drummer Kobi Abcede, Bobby Hall on the keys, and MSkillz on the bass all came later (with additional vocals from Emily Apkan and Vanessa Camacho). The tracks on this album started as private acts. They sound like it.

There’s an early line on “Super Sad!” that sets up the whole record: “I’m in the club, super sad, so I threw it back.” Sadness and the dance floor at once, no choosing. She knows she’s bad like a wanted ad, she wants to cross the line with somebody, her life is a mess. “Wanna fuck, but I’m so depressed,” and that comma does all the work, no transition, no “and yet,” no irony. Same body. “Toxic and Evil” gets uglier, funnier. “How many dicks can I fit in my mouth?” she asks in the first verse, and “having your baby was my only dream,” and then the chorus drops everything: “No, no, I’m not okay. Need to be with myself today.” She is talking the way people actually talk when they’re in it, filthy and wrecked and not okay, all in the same breath.

She studied classical voice through high school and attended NYU’s Clive Davis Institute on scholarship. The training lives somewhere in the control she has over her singing, but none of the composure survived into the subject matter. “Once or Twice” is devoted entirely to wanting someone’s body, “I lick it every day,” “gotta hit it once or twice,” and a few songs later she’s wondering how many more years of therapy she needs before she can have a kid. The whole thing keeps lurching between those two places, and the lurching is the honesty.

Most songs won’t go where “As I Am” goes. She was injected and asleep for three days. Her father was silent, crying, and they’d switched places: she was the one in the bed now. A nurse asked to hear one of her songs and pulled up a video of her singing with Emily at a restaurant in Colby, and Camacho couldn’t place herself. “Who is this person? Why am I watching? She looks real familiar,” she says, and then, “Maybe I know her. I mean, maybe I knew her.” She’s still broken. She wants to love fully and can’t figure out if those two facts fit together. “Who’s gonna love a fucked up crazy bitch like me?” is a question without embarrassment and without an answer.

The body on existential thottie is always specific, always named. “Nexplanon” says what birth control hormones do to her mood, swinging like a wrecking ball, and she’s terrified of making life. “Beach” says she’s underpaid and overweight; “Head 2 Toe” and “Once or Twice” put the body in pleasure; “As I Am” puts it in a hospital bed, sedated against its will. Birth control side effects and orgasms and involuntary hospitalization all get the same amount of specificity, all things that happened to her body.

Camacho thinks most of this is funny, which is how existential thottie stays livable. “I’m in the club, super sad, so I threw it back” is a joke, always was. “Roasting That Ass” ends its second verse with her yelling at herself: “How about you fucking finish your tracks, bitch?” “Beach,” which she called her favorite song on the album, says “I give up” four times and then “I get up” four times over a dance beat. Doesn’t soften anything. It sounds like someone laughing through the worst story they have so they can get the words out.

At the close, “Real Better Soon” puts it plain: “So glad I didn’t die when my mind tried to flicker off the lights.” She nearly didn’t survive, she’s grateful, she’s still pushing. She said the album might be for her more than for anyone else. After songs on bleeding before writing, on fights and breakups and the state mental health system and really hot sex and the fear of becoming a mother, that sounds right. But the thing about a song written for your health is that it doesn’t stay private. Somebody else hears it and realizes they needed to hear it too.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “As I Am,” “Super Sad!,” “Beach”

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