Complex's Best Albums of 2020 (So Far)

One of the most heralded hip-hop artists of his generation, Lil Uzi Vert built no small part of his well-deserved reputation off of the promise of a record nobody had heard. For nearly two years, fans eagerly anticipated the release of *Eternal Atake*, a maddeningly delayed project whose legend grew while tragedy befell some of the Philadelphia native’s emo rap peers, including Lil Peep and XXXTENTACION. With the wait finally over, the patient listenership that made do with running back to 2017’s *Luv Is Rage 2* again and again can take in his glittering opus. Without relying on showy features—save for one memorable duet with Syd on the otherworldly “Urgency”—Uzi does more than most of those who’ve jacked his style in the interim. He imbues the post-EDM aesthetic of “Celebration Station” and the video-game trap of “Silly Watch” alike with speedy, free-associative verses that run from gun talk to sexual exploits. An obvious influence on Uzi’s discography, Chief Keef provides the woozy beat for “Chrome Heart Tags,” reminding that there are levels to Uzi’s artistry.

The theme of the fourth Tame Impala album is evident before hearing a note. It’s in the song names, the album title, even the art: Kevin Parker has time on his mind. Ruminating on memories, nostalgia, uncertainty about the future, and the nature of time itself lies at the heart of *The Slow Rush*. Likewise, the music itself is both a reflection on the sonic evolution of Parker’s project as it’s reached festival headliner status—from warbly psychedelia to hypnotic electronic thumps—and a forward thrust towards something new and deeply fascinating. On “Posthumous Forgiveness,” Parker addresses his relationship with his father over a woozy, bluesy bass and dramatic synths, which later give way to a far brighter, gentle sound. From the heavy horns on “Instant Destiny” and acoustic guitars on “Tomorrow’s Dust” to the choppy synths and deep funk of “One More Year” and “Breathe Deeper,” the album sounds as ambitious as its concept. There’s a lot to think about—and Kevin Parker has plenty to say about it. Here, written exclusively for Apple Music, the Australian artist has provided statements to accompany each track on *The Slow Rush*. **One More Year** “I just realized we were standing right here exactly one year ago, doing the exact same thing. We’re blissfully trapped. Our life is crazy but where is it going? We won’t be young forever but we sure do live like it. Our book needs more chapters. Our time here is short, let’s make it count. I have a plan.” **Instant Destiny** “In love and feeling fearless. Let’s be reckless with our futures. The only thing special about the past is that it got us to where we are now. Free from feeling sentimental…we don’t owe our possessions anything. Let’s do something that can’t be undone just ’cause we can. The future is our oyster.” **Borderline** “Standing at the edge of a strange new world. Any further and I won’t know the way back. The only way to see it is to be in it. I long to be immersed. Unaware and uncontrolled.” **Posthumous Forgiveness** “Wrestling with demons of the past. Something from a long time ago doesn’t add up. I was lied to! Maybe there’s a good explanation but I’ll never get to hear it, so it’s up to me to imagine what it might sound like…” **Breathe Deeper** “First time. I need to be guided. Everything feels new. Like a single-cell organism granted one day as a human. We’re all together. Why isn’t it always like this?” **Tomorrow’s Dust** “Our regrets tomorrow are our actions now. Future memories are present-day current events. Tomorrow’s dust is in today’s air, floating around us as we speak.” **On Track** “A song for the eternal optimist. The pain of holding on to your dreams. Anyone would say it’s impossible from this point. True it will take a miracle, but miracles happen all the time. I’m veering all over the road and occasionally spinning out of control, but strictly speaking I’m still on track.” **Lost in Yesterday** “Nostalgia is a drug, to which some are addicted.” **Is It True** “Young love is uncertain. Let’s not talk about the future. We don’t know what it holds. I hope it’s forever but how do I know? When all is said and done, all you can say is ‘we’ll see.’” **It Might Be Time** “A message from your negative thoughts: ‘Give up now… It’s over.’ The seeds of doubt are hard to un-sow. Randomly appearing throughout the day, trying to derail everything that usually feels natural…*used* to feel natural. You finally found your place, they can’t take this away from you now.” **Glimmer** “A glimmer of hope. A twinkle. Fleeting, but unmistakable. Promising.” **One More Hour** “The time has come. Nothing left to prepare. Nothing left to worry about. Nothing left to do but sit and observe the stillness of everything as time races faster than ever. Even shadows cast by the sun appear to move. My future comes to me in flashes, but it no longer scares me. As long as I remember what I value the most.”

Midwestern by birth and temperament, Freddie Gibbs has always seemed a little wary of talking himself up—he’s more show than tell. But between 2019’s Madlib collaboration (*Bandana*) and the Alchemist-led *Alfredo*, what wasn’t clear 10 years ago is crystal now: Gibbs is in his own class. The wild, shape-shifting flow of “God Is Perfect,” the chilling lament of “Skinny Suge” (“Man, my uncle died off a overdose/And the fucked-up part of that is I know I supplied the n\*\*\*a that sold it”), a mind that flickers with street violence and half-remembered Arabic, and beats that don’t bang so much as twinkle, glide, and go up like smoke. *Alfredo* is seamless, seductive, but effortless, the work of two guys who don’t run to catch planes. On “Something to Rap About,” Gibbs claims, “God made me sell crack so I had something to rap about.” But the way he flows now, you get the sense he would’ve found his way to the mic one way or the other.

Musically, there are a number of things long familiar to fans of the Buffalo-hailing rap crew Griselda Records. There’s the fervent appreciation for both high fashion and professional wrestling; there’s the vivid and unending stories of local legacies built on the drug trade; and then, maybe most notably, there’s the incessant vocalized recreation of the sounds of guns firing (“Boom-boom-boom-boom,” goes a popular one). All of these are fully present on Westside Gunn’s *Pray for Paris*, an album which follows the crew’s hefty one-two punch of Gunn’s *Hitler Wears Hermes 7* solo mixtape and their *WWCD* Griselda compilation at the end of 2019. What fans might not have seen coming, however, are guest appearances from Wale, Joey Bada\$$, and Tyler, The Creator (among others), along with production credits from Tyler (separate from the song he raps on), hip-hop legends DJ Muggs and DJ Premier, and one-time Vine star Jay Versace. Gunn is clearly aiming to up the creative ante with *Pray for Paris*, having commissioned the project’s cover art from friend and admitted Griselda fan Virgil Abloh. It’s a lot to process at face value, but it all works under the discerning vision of Gunn, who has often said he is less a rapper than a proper *artist*. But lest we forget—amongst the wealth of artistic flourishes the MC has included here—who Westside Gunn actually is, he reminds us in his signature high-pitched delivery on “No Vacancy” that he is still the man who will “blow your brains out in broad daylight.”

The first time that Mac Miller and Jon Brion formally met, Miller was already hard at work on what would become 2018’s *Swimming*, an album that Brion would sign on to produce. “He comes in and he plays five or six things,” Brion tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “There was more hip-hop-leaning stuff, and it was great and funny and personal—the tracks were already pointing someplace interesting. After a couple of those, he goes, ‘I’ve got these other things I\'m not sure what to do with.’” Those “other things” were the beginning of *Circles*, a now posthumous LP that Miller had envisioned as a counterpart to *Swimming*—one that finds him exploring levels of musicality, melody, and vulnerability he’d only hinted at before. It feels more akin to Harry Nilsson than hip-hop, and the breadth of Brion’s CV (Kanye West, Fiona Apple, Janelle Monáe) made him the perfect collaborator. With the support of Miller’s family, Brion completed *Circles* based on conversations the two had shared before Miller’s death in September 2018, adding elements of live percussion, strings, and various overdubs. Here, Brion takes us inside the making of some of *Circles*’ key songs and offers insights on what it was like to work so closely with Miller on something so personal. **Circles** “That\'s what he played me. I added a brush on a cymbal, and a vibraphone. Throughout all of his lyrics, his self-reflection is much more interesting than some other people’s. ‘Circles’ and a few other songs on this record: You hear him acknowledging aspects of himself, either that he doesn\'t feel capable of changing or things he thinks are questionable. Things you\'ll hear in the lyrics directly—‘I’m this way, and I think other people might not understand how I think, but actually I\'m okay with that.’ It\'s so pointed. I was just a hundred percent in from the get-go.” **Complicated** “I think that vocal was done, if I recall correctly. He\'d play me things in various states, and the whole batch, meaning both albums’ worth of songs. He\'d play things, and I might just go, ‘That\'s great. All it needs is for the low end to be a little better.’ Almost every time I\'d make a suggestion like that, he\'d go, \'Oh, I\'m so glad you said that. I just didn\'t know how to do it with this type of thing.\' Other times, I might listen to something and go, ‘I love it. I love what you\'re saying. I like that vocal. I like the rhythm. In this case, about halfway through, my mind wanders, and I don\'t want the listener\'s mind to do that, because what you\'re saying is great.’” **Good News** “It was him singing over a very minimal track. The lyrics were incredible. It didn\'t have the chorus. He said, ‘I just think you should play a bunch of stuff on it.’ I gingerly asked, ‘Do you like the chords that are there?’ He\'s like, ‘No.’ I\'m like, ‘Okay. Well, I\'m going to play, and every time you hear something you like, let me know.’ I did with him what I\'ve done with a bunch of directors, which is watch the body language, when somebody\'s happy or not. He came into the control room, and he was really excited. He started singing over it in the control room, and he sang the chorus. I’m in the middle of the keyboard over top and I look up and go, ‘That\'s great. Go run onto the mic.’ After he first did it, he came in and he was still a little unsure, like, ‘Yeah, I don\'t know, maybe that\'s a different song.’ And thank god he lived with it and saw the sense in it. Again, that\'s not something I created—that\'s something he was doing. I think I did say to him when he was walking around in front of the speakers and he was singing that, like, \'Look, there\'s a reason that came to you right now.\'” **I Can See** “It’s not fair to give words to the heaviness of it, but I can tell you that the week I had to listen through stuff was a torture and a delight. Torture because of the loss. And then ‘I Can See’ would come up and I\'d be beyond delighted because I\'m like, ‘This is good by anybody\'s standards, in any genre, this human being expressing themselves well.’ It would turn back to a torture because you\'re like, ‘Oh my god, you were capable of that. I didn\'t even get to hear that one yet.’ I could sit there and wonder, would I have? Was it something he was nervous about, or because it was already so complete, did he not feel a need? No idea. You can ascribe all sorts of things to his sense of knowing. But people are going to have that experience because he was already self-aware and was unafraid of expressing it. But beyond that lyrical wonder of honesty, the melody just made me cry.” **That’s on Me** “He had come back from Hawaii. I was sideswiped by the song and the feeling of it. He usually said, ‘Oh, you should just play everything.’ I\'m like, ‘No, you\'re already great, I\'ll play along with that.’ Inevitably, he\'d finish a take and say, ‘Was that all right?’ And all I could do is honestly go, ‘Yeah, it was great. I\'m having a blast.’\" **Hands** “He wanted it big and expansive and cinematic, had no idea how he had one keyboard pad implying that. I said, ‘Oh, I\'ve got this notion of Dr. Dre-influenced eighth notes like he would have on a piano sample. Instead of it being piano or a piano sample, let\'s take the influence of that era, but I want to do it on orchestral percussion but a lot of different ones. So it\'s sort of subtly changing across the thing.’ And he was like, ‘Just put everything you want on it.’ So that\'s one where I went to town. He was really excited but had no idea how one would even go about that.” **Once a Day** “He came over, played two or three things—that was one of them, and it had a little mini piano or something. I couldn\'t believe the songwriting. I looked forward to his visits so much because every time, there was this new discovery of, ‘You\'re hiding this?’ Honestly. I don\'t know what else he\'s got undercover, but this thing is fully fleshed out. It\'s personal. It\'s heartbreaking. I went through the rigmarole to get him to play it and I did what I thought was the right production decision. I left the room, but I didn\'t close the door. I didn\'t leave, not even slightly. I stood in the door, basically a room and a half away from the control room with the door open. And he started playing and the vocal was coming out and I wasn\'t having to be in the room and he did a pass and I could hear there was something on the keyboard needing adjustment. It needed to be brighter or darker, and I just sort of came running in like, ‘Oh, sorry, just one thing.’ And I went back out and I stood in the hallway and I listened to a couple of takes. And this is how I can tell you I\'m not looking at it with the loss goggles: I bawled my eyes out. Heard it twice in a row. I kind of poked my head around the door and said, ‘Oh, I heard a little bit of that. That sounds good. Just do a double of that keyboard just right now while the sound’s up. Okay, cool.’ Boom. Ran out into the hallway and cried again and dried my eyes out and went back in and sat through the usual ‘Was that good? Are you sure you shouldn\'t just play it?’ Maybe it\'s something the rest of the world wouldn\'t see and I will be blinded by personal experience, but I don\'t fucking care. It\'s what happened. It\'s what I saw, and I just think it\'s great and doesn\'t need any qualifiers, personally. So there.”

If we’re comparing it to the year prior, 2019 was something of a quiet one for Atlanta MC Lil Baby. Sure, he featured on singles by DaBaby, Lykke Li, and Yo Gotti, among others, but ever since 2018’s *Street Gossip*, Lil Baby seemed content simply to share the sauce with collaborators. With the release of *My Turn*, however, Baby has declared that he’s finished letting anyone else spread their wings and is ready to reclaim his spot atop hip-hop’s throne. *My Turn* is of course built on Lil Baby’s verbose and ever formidable bar construction and under-heralded wordplay. Songs like “Grace” and “No Sucker” find him in fine form, rapping, as he admits outright on track 13, that he’s still got “Sum 2 Prove.” Guests on the project lean toward animated yet high-caliber MCs like Future, Lil Uzi Vert, and Lil Wayne, while frequent collaborators Quay Global, Twysted Genius, and Tay Keith hold down the production. Songs like “Emotionally Scarred” and “Hurtin” show a more vulnerable side of the MC, but their respective follow-ups “Commercial” and “Forget That” show us that the turn-up is never far. “Woah,” the 2019 hit that gave an already popular dance a proper anthem, is here, as is the Hit-Boy-produced “Catch the Sun,” which first appeared on *Queen & Slim: The Soundtrack*—two songs Lil Baby may have included to remind us that we’ve always gotten the best of him, even when we’ve wanted more.

When Polo G released his sophomore project *THE GOAT*, MCs declaring themselves the \"greatest of all time” was as ubiquitous in hip-hop as claiming to be desirable to the opposite sex. But within the project, the still-ascending Chicago MC presents a version of himself matured enough beyond 2019’s *Die a Legend* that he’s entitled to a little confidence. *THE GOAT* features somber piano lines throughout (“Don’t Believe the Hype,” “33,” “No Matter What,” “Be Something”), but Polo is considerably bigger here than the “pain music” descriptor his work often gets lumped in with. He is reflective storyteller on “Heartless,” smitten lover on “Martin & Gina,” and equal parts technical rap show-off and riot-starter on “Go Stupid” (which also features Stunna 4 Vegas and NLE Choppa). The album contains additional appearances from Mustard, Lil Baby, and BJ the Chicago Kid, but it’s “Flex,” a collaboration with fallen comrade Juice WRLD, that delivers some of the best rapping of Polo’s young career.

Pop Smoke opened the title track of his 2019 debut *Meet the Woo* with a series of bars that distill exactly what the Brooklyn MC is all about: “Baby girl, come and meet the Woo/She know we keep a tool/Big knockin\' on my body/Watch who you speaking to.” The album—propelled by the breakout single “Welcome to the Party”—made a star out of a previously unknown MC, at once familiarizing the rap game with this promising voice, as well as the Canarsie hood he came from. *Meet the Woo 2*, as its title suggests, is another helping of the consistently intimidating, endlessly catchy contemporary Brooklyn drill music that gave Pop Smoke his fame. Success has only served to fortify his earliest claims of citywide dominance (“Invincible,” “Christopher Walking,” “Element”), but he isn’t too self-important to share the mic with several of New York City’s most celebrated young voices (A Boogie wit da Hoodie, Fivio Foreign, Lil Tjay), spreading love in the Brooklyn tradition.

The first verse we hear on Jay Electronica’s *A Written Testimony* comes from JAY-Z. The God MC opens “Ghost of Soulja Slim,” the second track on the album, which follows an intro comprising mostly remarks from Minister Louis Farrakhan—adding an extra four minutes to the decade-plus many fans have waited to hear Jay Electronica rap on his debut album. Having Jigga bat leadoff registers as much less of a stunt in the context of the full project, and only helps build the anticipation. JAY-Z appears on nearly every song on *A Written Testimony*, assuming a partner-in-rhyme role not unlike the one Ghostface Killah played on Raekwon’s seminal *Only Built 4 Cuban Linx*. The Jays sound likewise inspired by each other, yielding the mic for continuous intervals of elite-level MCing, delivering bars both forthright and poetic, and also steeped in phrasings uncommon outside of the written word. “If you want to be a master in life, you must submit to a master/I was born to lock horns with the Devil at the brink of the hereafter,” Electronica raps on “The Neverending Story.” Electronica is credited with the bulk of production on the album, with additional contributions from No I.D. and The Alchemist, along with the all-star team (Swizz Beatz, Araabmuzik, Hit-Boy, G. Ry) responsible for “The Blinding.” The MC raps in Spanish on “Fruits of the Spirit,” and though he shouts out Vince Staples, Marvel villain Thanos, and cosmetic butt injections, there are very few references on *A Written Testimony* that could date the album long-term. The goal here was very clearly to make a timeless project, one we should appreciate considering there’s no telling if or when we will get another.

The title for Gunna’s heavily anticipated *WUNNA* album—his first full-length project since 2019’s *Drip or Drown 2*—is an acronym for “Wealthy Unapologetic N\*gga Naturally Authentic.” The Atlanta MC has also claimed that it represents an alternate identity, a chance to step away, if only momentarily, from the franchises that made his name, *Drip Season* and *Drip or Drown*. Thankfully for Gunna fans, however, the MC we get in *WUNNA* isn’t all that different from the man who taught us the meaning of drip. Across beats from a veritable wish list of can’t-miss producers including Wheezy, Turbo The Great, and Tay Keith, Gunna raps in effortless non sequitur about clothing, jewelry, and women. He’s joined by frequent collaborators Lil Baby, Young Thug, and Travis Scott, and also Roddy Ricch, who guests on “COOLER THAN A BITCH,” a song dedicated to anyone mistakenly believing that they’re operating on the same plane as he is. Across 18 tracks, *WUNNA* is everything fans could have wanted from an MC who’s dedicated his career to establishing himself as a trendsetter. In fact, the only place the drip is missing is in the title.

“I’m honored that people have accepted these songs, that my fans enjoy and that have such feeling in them,” Bad Bunny tells Apple Music about the success of “Ignorantes” and “Vete,” the two hit singles that preceded the surprise Leap Day release of *YHLQMDLG*. The album’s title is an acronym for “Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana,” or “I Do What I Want,” and Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio spends his highly anticipated follow-up to 2018’s *X 100PRE* living up to that promise, luxuriating in the sonic possibilities, presenting exemplary versions of Latin trap and reggaetón while expanding the genres in new directions with elements of rock and global pop. While *X 100PRE* featured a relatively small number of credited vocal guests, the follow-up embraces música urbana’s love of collaboration, pairing El Conejo Malo with an impressive array of features. Reaching back towards reggaetón’s 1990s roots, he taps veteran Yaviah for the hypnotic “Bichiyal” and the inimitable Daddy Yankee for “La Santa,” while linking up elsewhere with contemporary Latin R&B wave runners like Mora and Sech. Bad Bunny talked with Apple Music about a few of his favorites off the album and some of the people who helped make *YHLQMDLG* a reality. **Si Veo a Tu Mamá** “All of my songs come from my experience or are based on a real-life experience of mine. Everyone falls in love in life. Everyone has relationships. Everyone has had someone. There’s something so natural in writing about love, because we all feel love every day and share love.” **La Difícil** “What I like most about collaborating with \[producer duo\] Subelo NEO is how talented they are. They are such humble people who know how to work as a team. They understand the good vibes that I’ve built my fame on, because we shared them at the beginning of my career. I like what they do.” **La Santa** “This was a very special track for me. Working with Daddy Yankee is always an honor and a pleasure. I’ve learned a lot from him in the studio. This one inspired me so much. Always, always, always when I do something with Daddy Yankee, it’s just so exciting, fabulous, and makes me feel very happy and proud.” **Safaera** “This was something that I have always wanted to do. It is a very much a part of Puerto Rican culture and the roots of reggaetón. It was special because I made it with one of my best friends in my entire life, someone I started out with in music and who supported me a lot from the beginning and to this day, DJ Orma. He fell in love with this music just like me, with this type of rhythm—reggaetón, perreo old-school.” **Hablamos Mañana** “I love this one. It’s the most energetic of the album and the most different. In general, there’s a lot of strength and feeling in rock music. I’ll make whatever music that God allows me to. At some point, if I felt like making a rock en español album, I would. If I wanted to make a bachata album, I would.”

Released in June 2020 as American cities were rupturing in response to police brutality, the fourth album by rap duo Run The Jewels uses the righteous indignation of hip-hop\'s past to confront a combustible present. Returning with a meaner boom and pound than ever before, rappers Killer Mike and EL-P speak venom to power, taking aim at killer cops, warmongers, the surveillance state, the prison-industrial complex, and the rungs of modern capitalism. The duo has always been loyal to hip-hop\'s core tenets while forging its noisy cutting edge, but *RTJ4* is especially lithe in a way that should appeal to vintage heads—full of hyperkinetic braggadocio and beats that sound like sci-fi remakes of Public Enemy\'s *Apocalypse 91*. Until the final two tracks there\'s no turn-down, no mercy, and nothing that sounds like any rap being made today. The only guest hook comes from Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Mavis Staples on \"pulling the pin,\" a reflective song that connects the depression prevalent in modern rap to the structural forces that cause it. Until then, it’s all a tires-squealing, middle-fingers-blazing rhymefest. Single \"ooh la la\" flips Nice & Smooth\'s Greg Nice from the 1992 Gang Starr classic \"DWYCK\" into a stomp closed out by a DJ Premier scratch solo. \"out of sight\" rewrites the groove of The D.O.C.\'s 1989 hit \"It\'s Funky Enough\" until it treadmills sideways, and guest 2 Chainz spits like he just went on a Big Daddy Kane bender. A churning sample from lefty post-punks Gang of Four (\"the ground below\") is perfectly on the nose for an album brimming with funk and fury, as is the unexpected team-up between Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha (\"JU$T\"). Most significant, however, is \"walking in the snow,\" where Mike lays out a visceral rumination on police violence: \"And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, \'I can\'t breathe.\'\"

You don’t need to know that Fiona Apple recorded her fifth album herself in her Los Angeles home in order to recognize its handmade clatter, right down to the dogs barking in the background at the end of the title track. Nor do you need to have spent weeks cooped up in your own home in the middle of a global pandemic in order to more acutely appreciate its distinct banging-on-the-walls energy. But it certainly doesn’t hurt. Made over the course of eight years, *Fetch the Bolt Cutters* could not possibly have anticipated the disjointed, anxious, agoraphobic moment in history in which it was released, but it provides an apt and welcome soundtrack nonetheless. Still present, particularly on opener “I Want You to Love Me,” are Apple’s piano playing and stark (and, in at least one instance, literal) diary-entry lyrics. But where previous albums had lush flourishes, the frenetic, woozy rhythm section is the dominant force and mood-setter here, courtesy of drummer Amy Wood and former Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg. The sparse “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is backed by drumsticks seemingly smacking whatever surface might be in sight. “Relay” (featuring a refrain, “Evil is a relay sport/When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch,” that Apple claims was excavated from an old journal from written she was 15) is driven almost entirely by drums that are at turns childlike and martial. None of this percussive racket blunts or distracts from Apple’s wit and rage. There are instantly indelible lines (“Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up” and the show-stopping “Good morning, good morning/You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”), all in the service of channeling an entire society’s worth of frustration and fluster into a unique, urgent work of art that refuses to sacrifice playfulness for preaching.

You don’t make a 22-track album without experiencing doubts—even when you’re Britain’s biggest band. “We kept laughing to ourselves,” The 1975’s Matty Healy tells Apple Music. “‘Can we really put out a record like this? Can we really be where we are?’ The success of \[2018 album *A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships*\] didn’t change us, but it certainly made us think, ‘God, this is a lot of responsibility. To be compared to Radiohead. Fucking hell. What are we going to do?’” The way they saw it, there were two options. The first was to play to expectation and try to become even bigger. The second—the path they chose—was to return to when they were smallest. “Go back to when we were wearing Spider-Man T-shirts,” says Healy, “and the reason I wanted Ross \[MacDonald\] to play bass was not because we could eventually be in some culturally informative, cool thing but because that noise sounded cool with this noise.” On an album that begins with an address by Greta Thunberg and winds down with a song written by Healy’s dad, Tim, the noises that sound cool together include folk, UK garage, Max Martin-inspired pop, and hazy, discolored indie. Over that questing backdrop, Healy digs further into his inner self. “It has a lot of heart, this record,” he says. “A lot of the ideas have evolved. There was stuff like \[2015 single\] ‘Love Me,’ earlier work, which was about ego; those ideas are still there, but it’s now more about self-love in the truest sense—that people only change when it’s too hard not to. You’ve got to look out for yourself, accept that you’re not a Superman. There’s a lot of self-reflection. It’s the most me record. It’s the truest.” Here, he talks us through that truth track by track. **The 1975** “We were talking about how we were going to do *that* statement—the same statement that we always make musically—and we wanted it to be us at our most modern. That first track always has to be us checking in. That got us into the conversation of what is the most modern statement, or who has the most modern statement, and Greta was the decision. I think it sounds like how a lot of us feel. There’s a lot of hope in it, but it’s quite a somber piece of music. It’s very 1975 in the way that it’s quite beautiful superficially but also quite sad, quite pretty but also quite ominous. Greta has a lot of reach, but I really wanted to see her exist formally in pop culture, not just as an anecdote of somebody.” **People** “This song is right back to where we came from—almost what we were like in our first incarnation of the band. Very inspired by bands like Refused and Converge and stuff like that. It was around the time of the Alabama abortion bill and we’d just played a show in Alabama. It was the feeling of oppressive, conservative religion. It happened up on the tour bus. It was kind of like our ‘Youth Against Fascism’—\[UK journalist\] Dorian Lynskey said that. I was definitely thinking about that Sonic Youth song. I think that it’s about fear and apathy and referencing how annoying responsibility can feel. I wanted there to be like a slapstick madness to its urgency.” **The End (Music for Cars)** “The actual reason that it\'s called ‘(Music for Cars)’ is because...I wasn\'t going to tell anybody, but there was a song called ‘Hnscc,’ which was an ambient piece of music about death, the death of one of my family members, that was on the \[2013\] EP *Music for Cars*. And ‘The End’ is a reinvention of that, basically an orchestral version. And yeah, ‘Music for Cars’ has kind of become the umbrella title for this whole era.” **Frail State of Mind** “\[During our early teens\], we were super into hardcore and making noise and, like most people in the UK, super into dance music. I think Burial is quite an obvious one that you can hear on this, and even people like MJ Cole. That darker side of garage is something that I’ve always really loved. It’s very dreamy and sounds like driving down the M25 at night with the passing of lights and the smoking of stuff. Mike Skinner spoke about how garage clubs and the actual garage scene was always a bit intimidating to him as a late teen, so he would experience these things at his mates’ houses or in cars with his mates smoking weed. That’s what my experience was—with so much time spent in my car listening to music and then going home and making music with George \[Daniel, drummer and co-producer\] and then going out in my car and listening to it for context. That was one of the happiest times of my life.” **Streaming** “Sonically, it’s a tribute to our formative years and what we were into–Cult of Luna and Godspeed \[You! Black Emperor\] and Sigur Rós, all of these big ambient artists. And UK garage music. This record is like a bit of that with a bit of Midwest emo thrown in. What we love in ambient music, we call it Pinocchio-ing: It’s stuff that’s trying to sound like a real boy. Sigur Rós sounds like it’s striving to sound like a river or a landscape. All of the kind of visuals that you get with that kind of music. It really takes you back to one’s relationship with nature and texture and temperature. To be honest with you, we took quite a lot of that off. A lot of that made way for more actual songs.” **The Birthday Party** “It was the first thing that I wrote for this album that I knew was great. And it was the first thing that we got excited about. Inherently, excitement equals projection, \[so it was originally going to be the first single\]. And then we went off on tour and I wrote ‘People.’ And we were like, ‘Right, well. If we don’t start with this, where are we going to put it?’” **Yeah I Know** “I fucking love ‘Yeah I Know.’ I don\'t know what it reminds me of. It\'s kind of like Hyperdub. I remember super, super minimal ravehead music when I was growing up. It was just a synth and a drum kit. We’re also big Thom Yorke fans, outside of Radiohead, so I think there\'s probably a bit of that.” **Then Because She Goes** “It doesn\'t have a bridge or anything. It’s just this little moment. But this is how I feel about life. There’s so many fleeting moments of beauty on the record, which was really important because most of my favorite records always have them. Especially if we’re talking about shoegaze records. I think a lot of that comes from the slacker mid-’90s thing of Pavement or Liz Phair. There’s a lot of Life Without Buildings and stuff like that, especially in this song. And it’s like faded splendor, as I always call it. I love pop songs that sound like they’re drowning. Like My Bloody Valentine. Like a Polaroid that’s gasping for air. That really sunny but sun-flared feeling is quite across the record because—for the time and for the kind of person that I am, and my political views—it’s inherently quite a warm record.” **Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America** “This song happened quite early in the record. It reminded me of America so much in its ambience. It even goes back to \[*A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships*\]—I think I wrote it around that time. There’s quite a bit of folk music on the record. I’ve never really collaborated with anybody before, and it was so easy making music with \[guest vocalist\] Phoebe \[Bridgers\] that every time I had an idea or I wanted a slightly different texture to the vocals, I just got her to do it. Phoebe does all the backup vocals on ‘Roadkill’ and then ‘Playing on My Mind.’” **Roadkill** “‘Roadkill’ is about touring America, it’s about getting burnt out and searching for things. Anecdotal things that happen on the road—pissing myself on a Texan intersection, all those kind of things. I don\'t know what it sounds like—maybe like Pinegrove, or there’s a band called Limbeck that I used to love.” **Me & You Together Song** “We’ve gone full circle–this album is very like the early EPs: dreamy, hazy, and quite broken and deconstructed. A lot of our hardcore fans emotionally relate to our EPs and see them as our first albums, so it’s nice that we’ve ended up back there. Our favorite music is music that’s kind of inherently beautiful. It’s not pretty but kind of fractured or a bit jangly or overly distorted. I think the whole record is like that, and this is a stark example of that idea.” **I Think There\'s Something You Should Know** “It’s explicitly about impostor syndrome, depression, that kind of a sense of isolation. I think there’s a lot of that in this record. I think it’s also about the lack of desire to communicate about those things as well—like, if I’m talking to someone close to me who’s not aware of what’s going on. And I think the reason for that is normally because it’s exhausting to take it out of your head and put it on the table.” **Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied** “It’s quite a lo-fi hip-hop track. It came from George jamming on the piano, and I was putting a really low-resolution breakbeat over the top of it. Stuff like that is really fun for us sometimes. If it’s really simple and you’ve got a loop to work with, you can kind of just go into producer mode. And—like any producer normally is—we’re huge J Dilla fans and all that kind of stuff. Lyrically, it’s just more self-reflection. I think it’s about also doing your bit as an artist—if you give people nothing to work with, if you say nothing, then you leave room for people to project anything. I find that a lot of people who are out there doing their thing musically, who aren’t challenging any ideas, are only made interesting through association or projection. I don’t feel like a lot of people stand by stuff.” **Tonight (I Wish I Was Your Boy)** “This is the anomaly on the record for me. I don\'t know where it came from. That was me fucking around when the record was feeling really, really relaxed. It reminds me of all the kind of proper pop music that I grew up listening to, like Backstreet Boys. And it’s like an ode to early Max Martin, late-\'90s pop. I don\'t think we ever do anything retro. We never do anything pastiche-y. But there’s definitely a reflection on a certain time of our musical upbringing. And that was very much part of that. And it’s got a great Temptations sample at the beginning, and kind of reminds me of Kanye or something.” **Shiny Collarbone** “Cutty Ranks did all those vocals for us. It started out as a sample, but then we spoke to him to clear it and he was like, ‘Oh, I’ll just do it again.’ That’s Manchester, that tune, to me, man. That just sounds like going to town—that kind of dreamy, deep, dreamy, slow deep house music. Again, it’s like a fractured shard. There’s so many shards on this record. A lot of that is George. George always talks about how I’m quite expressive, how I have the ability, or even the desire, to express myself outside of music. And that can be in lyrics or in conversation. Whereas, because he’s not like that, he takes a really big responsibility on himself to express himself through sonics. That’s a really good way of explaining why a lot of our records are almost OCD in their detail. It’s because that’s George’s language.” **If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)** “If your vibe is instilled in people’s brain from what your earlier work is like, then probably \[it is the most 1975 song on the record\]. When I hear bands that are sounding—or are trying to sound—like The 1975, it’s normally *that* 1975 that they’re trying to sound like—that reference to post-punk pop, ’80s pop. And that does come out quite naturally in \[the album\] sometimes, because that’s very much in our blood. This song is very on-the-nose for this album. But I like that, because it’s another completely different tone to the album and it kind of comes out of nowhere.” **Playing on My Mind** “This takes us back into that American, James Taylor-y, Jackson Browne-y kind of sound. Again, Phoebe is just great to have there. As soon as I write something, if I get her to put a harmony on it or to just do something over the top of it, it completely changes. And that was really easy and really natural. I think this is my funniest record; there’s some lines in there that still make me smile when I listen to it. \[With\] ‘Playing on My Mind,’ there’s one line I really like: ’I won’t get clothes online ’cause I get worried about the fit/That rule don’t apply concerning my relationships.’ I thought that summed up me really, really well.” **Having No Head** “This is George, man. All George. It’s the only thing that George titled as well; he\'s very much into his Eastern philosophy. You can ask him what it\'s about. I don\'t fucking know. That\'s just George meditating. That\'s what that sounds like to me. That is how George gets it out, this big, sprawling ambience, his artwork, like tapestries.” **What Should I Say** “Bane of my fucking life. Honestly, for two years. This was going to be on *A Brief Inquiry*. It was just this piece of house music that we never really quite got right. I think it\'s about social media. It was kind of like Manchester again; we always thought about New Order when we were making this, for some reason. I’ve seen New Order, I’ve been a couple of times during the making of this record. I mean, we even met Brian Eno recently. The reality that we get to fuck with these people now: Whether it gives you a confidence...it gives you a *something*.” **Bagsy Not in Net** “We finished \[the album\] and after we’d done all of our deliberations, the record came down to 21 tracks. Now, we were looking at it and thinking, ‘But hold on: It *was* 22 tracks.’ It’s not that we didn\'t want to lose the preorders, it’s just that it didn\'t really make sense to me. But we weren’t just going to make up an interlude or something for the sake of it and put it on what we want to be our best album. We’d been with Mike Skinner recently, and I was talking to him about this tune, which is basically using that string sample. The conversation just turned to that, and then George started doing it, making the beat, and it was so fucking exciting. So we set the mic up and recorded the whole thing in, like, a day. It’s about wanting to die with your partner. Don\'t want to lose someone that I love. If somebody wanted to know what the album sounded like in a clip, I would play them this. We knew exactly what \[the album\] was just at the very end, whereas during the creation of it, we just didn’t.” **Don’t Worry** “‘Don’t Worry’ is the first song that I ever heard, I think. In 1989, 1990, our dad was in a band, just a fuck-around band, and he had this song that he wrote for my mum about her postnatal depression. It’s a song that I remember because my dad would play it on the piano. Looking back, in the way that \[this album\] is about me and my family and my life, it just felt right \[to do a version of the song\]. It was written 30 years ago, and it’s me and my dad singing—that was just a really special moment. He’s a good songwriter, my dad. It’s a very 1975 interpretation of his work. And he loves that. He’s very, very proud to be on the record.” **Guys** “There\'s not many love songs about some of the most beautiful, powerful relationships in your life. Especially straight guys or whatever in rock music, \[they\] tend not to write about how much they love their mates, or how this would be impossible and frivolous and completely pointless if we weren\'t all doing it together. One of the things we say to each other all the time is ‘Imagine being a solo artist. Imagine being here, now, on your fourth day in Brisbane, waiting to go…’ It’s hard out here if you’re just constantly traveling. And we’ve been a band since we were 13, and they’re my best friends. And we\'ve never fallen out. It’s a really true song. They’re the thing that gives me purpose.”

“This album was so many albums before it was this one,” Kehlani tells Apple Music of *It Was Good Until It Wasn\'t*. Yet her second proper studio album arrives perfectly suited for this moment that is filled with uncertainty—when so many are taking stock of the things we often take for granted and yearning for closeness we can\'t have, whether due to physical or emotional separation. As she aptly sums up in the initial seconds of “Toxic,” the slick opening track, “I get real accountable when I\'m alone.” A central and familiar theme emerges early: the eternal war between need and want, between the sentimental and the carnal. Songs like “Can I,” a lurid come-on, and “Water,” an astrological seduction, smolder with sexual appetite that masquerades as control and confidence. But she offsets the posture in turns—“Hate the Club,” gilded by Masego\'s golden saxophone lines, is passive-aggressive; “Can You Blame Me” reflects the push-pull of desire at odds with pride, and “Open (Passionate)” portrays the insecurity of emotional nakedness. Taken together, it\'s a revelation about how easily, as she proclaims on “F&MU,” “\'I hate you\' turns into \'I love you\' in the bedroom.” But the whole picture isn\'t one that is so neat or simple; the album\'s real feat is its depiction of how we are all many things at once, often contradictory but sincere nonetheless. Kehlani\'s rendering of the personal as universal is a matter of course, but it\'s when she mines her experiences with unblinking specificity that she becomes transcendent. “I\'m kind of in a relationship that has put me in a space of almost processing my parents a little bit,” the Oakland-born singer says, adding that her father passed away from a “gang-related situation” when she was young. “I started diving into \[that\] headspace with the music I was making.” That link emerges most explicitly on “Bad News,” one of the album\'s most poignant performances, which finds her pleading with a lover to choose her over a lifestyle which threatens to pull them apart. Kehlani has always been powerful when she\'s vulnerable—the essence and through line of her music is in the way she allows that which makes her weak to make her strong again. *It Was Good Until It Wasn\'t* arrives in May 2020 as many people remain under orders to stay at home and practice social distancing, but this music can be a vehicle to another place, even if that place is your own head. Kehlani shrewdly captures the tangled intricacies of connection in a time defined by disconnect—a hurdle not just to relationships but to productivity as well. “The biggest thing about this whole quarantine was that I impressed myself,” she says. “That\'s why no matter what happens with this album, this might be my favorite project I\'ve ever put out.”

You don’t listen to KA albums so much as you sink into them: the hushed, laser-focused flow, the dense imagery and virtually drum-free production, the sense of darkness lurking quietly around every corner. Loosely organized as a metaphorical play between Cain’s murder of his brother Abel and KA’s own violent memories of youth in east Brooklyn, *Descendants of Cain* is, yes, deadly serious and noir to the marrow. But between the whiplash-worthy observations—“All our Santas carried them hammers/Our guidance counselors was talented scramblers” (“Patron Saints”), “The meek heard ‘turn the other cheek’/I got different advice” (“Solitude of Enoch”)—is a sense of almost meditative calm, the sort of resolve that comes not from the heat of youth but from the steadiness of middle age. The pace is measured, the tone is cool, but the past still haunts him.

Life for St. Petersburg, Florida, singer Rod Wave has changed very little in the wake of the government-mandated social distancing of April 2020. “This dude was asking me about quarantining,” he tells Apple Music ahead of the release of *Pray 4 Love*, “but I haven’t changed the way I live. I don\'t really like to go to places. I\'ve been quarantining for the past two years.” This might be something of a hard sell coming from someone whose popularity and acclaim has risen steadily since 2019’s “Heart on Ice”—notably, a song about retreating into yourself—but *Pray 4 Love* carries much of the same thread. On songs like the title track, “Thug Life,” and “I Remember,” Wave details some of the scenarios that have contributed to his self-imposed pre-pandemic isolation. There are not only stories of having been done wrong, but also instances of Wave taking responsibility for his mistreatment of others. “Made her fall in love, then begged for distance,” he sings of a lover on “Thief in the Night.” “That\'s what happened,” Wave says. “I\'m not going to try to lie and be like, ‘She was tripping, so I—’ No. I\'m gonna keep it real. That\'s all I know.” It’s certainly gotten him this far. And if it wasn’t for his honesty, he might not have his biggest hit to date. “Before the albums, and people talking and liking and following, all I had was the music,” he says. “The music helps me talk about \[my problems\]. I don\'t regret going through none of it, because if it hadn’t went down like that, \'Heart on Ice\' wouldn’t have even been a song. It would have been \'Wrist on Ice.\'” Thank god for hard times.

Arriving amid a veritable springtime surge of Brooklyn drill projects, *One and Only* finds regional pioneer Sheff G intently pushing forward the burgeoning sound he helped to popularize. An early sign of how well he achieves that, “2nd Intro” integrates a classic Roc-A-Fella-era vibe with his established aesthetic. Disinterested in resting on his laurels, he dismisses the copycat competition on “Moody” and goes for the jugular on the long-awaited “No Suburban” sequel. A prominent presence on 2019’s *The Unluccy Luccy Kid*, Sleepy Hallow once again proves a forbidding adjunct on “Lil Big Bro Shit” and the head nodder “Weight on Me.”

*F\*\*k the World* is a curious title for a half-hour-long project that not only features a voice so inviting that it sounds like it was meant to sell dreams, but also revels in earthly pleasures like expensive clothing, casual sex, and the luxury of unencumbered travel. But it’s likely just the phrase that happened to be on Brent Faiyaz’s mind the day he decided to name it; at least, that’s how the verses on *F\*\*k the World* come off. Across the project, the 24-year-old Maryland native seems beholden only to a sort of Socratic whimsy, with songs like the title track and “Clouded” playing out like audits of his personal life, while “Skyline” and “Let Me Know” allow him to question the world at large. Then there is the after-party-perfect “Lost Kids Get Money,” which sounds in the very best way like a freestyle off the top of the dome. His voice—accompanied in most instances by very minimal production—sounds particularly naked here, and as such hard to reconcile with the nihilistic title.

When Drake released the dance-routine-ready “Toosie Slide” roughly a month ahead of his *Dark Lane Demo Tapes*, fans were near incredulous that he’d discovered yet another musical frontier in which to stake his claim. (Those who weren’t busy choreographing TikTok videos to the song, anyway.) With the release of *Dark Lane Demo Tapes*, Drake delivers a handful of additional forays into the sound of right now. The project, per Drake’s own Instagram, features music compiled by OVO cohorts Oliver El-Khatib and Noel Cadastre, and comprises “some leaks and some joints from SoundCloud and some new vibes.” Found within are Drake-helmed masterpieces of post-regional drill music (“Demons,” “War”), linkups with Future (“Desires”) and Chris Brown (“Not You Too”), and a Pi’erre Bourne-produced Playboi Carti collaboration (“Pain 1993”), as well as the kind of hazy, regret-steeped R&B that so many contemporary playlists are built on (“Time Flies”). In its approach to these familiar vibes, this particular collection of music is the most of-the-moment Drake has ever sounded—more present than his usual prescient.

Even after his *Slimeball* mixtape series and the corresponding 2019 *Sli’merre* with Pi’erre Bourne positioned Young Nudy as the next to pop from Atlanta’s trap music incubator, his long-anticipated official album debut stands out for one-upping that impressive streak. Adorned with highlights like the raunchy “Blue Cheese Salad” and the ultraviolent “Marathon,” *Anyways* gives the rapper an ideal set of unapologetic and 808-heavy tunes to demonstrate how far he’s come and how much he’s enjoying it. On opener “Understanding” he dwells on haters and snakes from the elevated vantage point of success, and he later spends “Cap Dem” explaining the sort of bad fate due to those who stand in his way now.

A couple of months after releasing 2019’s *ZUU*, MC Denzel Curry joined the hardcore band Bad Brains for a rerecording of their 1986 classic “I Against I.” The point was clear: For as steeped as Curry is in the regional vernacular of southeastern rap, he also understood rap’s spiritual link to punk—music that channels the raw, noisy energy of youth. At eight tracks in 18 minutes, *UNLOCKED* is even shaped like a hardcore record, with tracks that mutate, Hulk-like, from sturdy weight-room rap to tangles of warped vocals and dissonant samples that play like experiments frothing over in real time (“Take\_it\_Back\_v2,” “DIET\_”). As exciting as Curry is—to paraphrase an old chestnut about great singers, one could listen to him yell the phone book—the anchor here is producer Kenny Beats, whose tracks mix the feel of classic boom-bap with a sample-splattered approach that captures the tabs-open fever of now.

“I’m from where the kids don’t get a new jacket in fall/Roach in the cereal and every spoon black in the drawer.” Good to see you too, Conway the Machine. Really, could these guys get any grimier? How about making your mom sell food to afford your coffin (“14 KI’s”)? Or scattering your body across the grass like leaves in fall (“Calvin”)? As with all Conway’s best stuff—and the best of the Shady Records-affiliated Griselda crew in general—the violence here isn’t explosive or cathartic but atmospheric, hypnotic, the flicker of a badly wired lightbulb or a weird hum from the apartment downstairs. And it’s hard to think of a better match for the Buffalo rapper\'s unhurried slur than LA producer The Alchemist, whose beats don’t boom or bap so much as creep, grimace, and circle in the waters like a bad mood.

Stephen Bruner’s fourth album as Thundercat is shrouded in loss—of love, of control, of his friend Mac Miller, who Bruner exchanged I-love-yous with over the phone hours before Miller’s overdose in late 2018. Not that he’s wallowing. Like 2017’s *Drunk*—an album that helped transform the bassist/singer-songwriter from jazz-fusion weirdo into one of the vanguard voices in 21st-century black music—*It Is What It Is* is governed by an almost cosmic sense of humor, juxtaposing sophisticated Afro-jazz (“Innerstellar Love”) with deadpan R&B (“I may be covered in cat hair/But I still smell good/Baby, let me know, how do I look in my durag?”), abstractions about mortality (“Existential Dread”) with chiptune-style punk about how much he loves his friend Louis Cole. “Yeah, it’s been an interesting last couple of years,” he tells Apple Music with a sigh. “But there’s always room to be stupid.” What emerges from the whiplash is a sense that—as the title suggests—no matter how much we tend to label things as good or bad, happy or sad, the only thing they are is what they are. (That Bruner keeps good company probably helps: Like on *Drunk*, the guest list here is formidable, ranging from LA polymaths like Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Louis Cole, and coproducer Flying Lotus to Childish Gambino, Ty Dolla $ign, and former Slave singer Steve Arrington.) As for lessons learned, Bruner is Zen as he runs through each of the album’s tracks. “It’s just part of it,” he says. “It’s part of the story. That’s why the name of the album is what it is—\[Mac’s death\] made me put my life in perspective. I’m happy I’m still here.” **Lost in Space / Great Scott / 22-26** \"Me and \[keyboardist\] Scott Kinsey were just playing around a bit. I like the idea of something subtle for the intro—you know, introducing somebody to something. Giving people the sense that there’s a ride about to happen.\" **Innerstellar Love** \"So you go from being lost in space and then suddenly thrust into purpose. The feel is a bit of an homage to where I’ve come from with Kamasi \[Washington, who plays the saxophone\] and my brother \[drummer Ronald Bruner, Jr.\]: very jazz, very black—very interstellar.\" **I Love Louis Cole (feat. Louis Cole)** \"It’s quite simply stated: Louis Cole is, hands down, one of my favorite musicians. Not just as a performer, but as a songwriter and arranger. \[*Cole is a polymathic solo artist and multi-instrumentalist, as well as a member of the group KNOWER.*\] The last time we got to work together was on \[*Drunk*’s\] \'Bus in These Streets.\' He inspires me. He reminds me to keep doing better. I’m very grateful I get to hang out with a guy like Louis Cole. You know, just me punching a friend of his and falling asleep in his laundry basket.\" **Black Qualls (feat. Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington & Childish Gambino)** \"Steve Lacy titled this song. \'Qualls\' was just a different way of saying ‘walls.\' And black walls in the sense of what it means to be a young black male in America right now. A long time ago, black people weren’t even allowed to read. If you were caught reading, you’d get killed in front of your family. So growing up being black—we’re talking about a couple hundred years later—you learn to hide your wealth and knowledge. You put up these barriers, you protect yourself. It’s a reason you don’t necessarily feel okay—this baggage. It’s something to unlearn, at least in my opinion. But it also goes beyond just being black. It’s a people thing. There’s a lot of fearmongering out there. And it’s worse because of the internet. You gotta know who you are. It’s about this idea that it’s okay to be okay.\" **Miguel’s Happy Dance** \"Miguel Atwood-Ferguson plays keys on this record, and also worked on the string arrangement. Again, y’know, without getting too heavily into stuff, I had a rough couple of years. So you get Miguel’s happy dance.\" **How Sway** \"I like making music that’s a bit fast and challenging to play. So really, this is just that part of it—it’s like a little exercise.\" **Funny Thing** \"The love songs here are pretty self-explanatory. But I figure you’ve gotta be able to find the humor in stuff. You’ve gotta be able to laugh.\" **Overseas (feat. Zack Fox)** \"Brazil is the one place in the world I would move. São Paulo. I would just drink orange juice all day and play bass until I had nubs for fingers. So that’s number one. But man, you’ve also got Japan in there. Japan. And Russia! I mean, everything we know about the politics—it is what it is. But Russian people are awesome. They’re pretty crazy. But they’re awesome.\" **Dragonball Durag** \"The durag is the ultimate power move. Not like a superpower, but just—you know, it translates into the world. You’ve got people with durags, and you’ve got people without them. Personally, I always carry one. Man, you ever see that picture of David Beckham wearing a durag and shaking Prince Charles’ hand? Victoria’s looking like she wants to rip his pants off.\" **How I Feel** \"A song like \'How I Feel’—there’s not a lot of hidden meaning there \[*laughs*\]. It’s not like something really bad happened to me when I was watching *Care Bears* when I was six and I’m trying to cover it up in a song. But I did watch *Care Bears*.\" **King of the Hill** \"This is something I made with BADBADNOTGOOD. It came out a little while ago, on the Brainfeeder 10-year compilation. We kind of wrestled with whether or not it should go on the album, but in the end it felt right. You’re always trying to find space and time to collaborate with people, but you’re in one city, they’re in another, you’re moving around. Here, we finally got the opportunity to be in the same room together and we jumped at it. I try and be open to all kinds of collaboration, though. Magic is magic.\" **Unrequited Love** \"You know how relationships go: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose \[*laughs*\]. But really, it’s not funny \[*more laughs*\]. Sometimes you—\[*laughing*\]—you get your heart broken.\" **Fair Chance (feat. Ty Dolla $ign & Lil B)** \"Me and Ty spend a lot of time together. Lil B was more of a reach, but we wanted to find a way to make it work, because some people, you know, you just resonate with. This is definitely the beginning of more between him and I. A starting point. But you know, to be honest it’s an unfortunate set of circumstances under which it comes. We were all very close to Mac \[Miller\]. It was a moment for all of us. We all became very aware of that closeness in that moment.\" **Existential Dread** \"You know, getting older \[*laughs*\].\" **It Is What It Is** \"That’s me in the middle, saying, ‘Hey, Mac.’ That’s me, getting a chance to say goodbye to my friend.\"

GRAMMYs 2021 Winner - Best Progressive R&B Album Thundercat has released his new album “It Is What It Is” on Brainfeeder Records. The album, produced by Flying Lotus and Thundercat, features musical contributions from Ty Dolla $ign, Childish Gambino, Lil B, Kamasi Washington, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, BADBADNOTGOOD, Louis Cole and Zack Fox. “It Is What It Is” has been nominated for a GRAMMY in the Best Progressive R&B Category and with Flying Lotus also receiving a nomination in the Producer of the Year (Non-Classical). “It Is What It Is” follows his game-changing third album “Drunk” (2017). That record completed his transition from virtuoso bassist to bonafide star and cemented his reputation as a unique voice that transcends genre. “This album is about love, loss, life and the ups and downs that come with that,” Bruner says about “It Is What It Is”. “It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but at different points in life you come across places that you don’t necessarily understand… some things just aren’t meant to be understood.” The tragic passing of his friend Mac Miller in September 2018 had a profound effect on Thundercat and the making of “It Is What It Is”. “Losing Mac was extremely difficult,” he explains. “I had to take that pain in and learn from it and grow from it. It sobered me up… it shook the ground for all of us in the artist community.” The unruly bounce of new single ‘Black Qualls’ is classic Thundercat, teaming up with Steve Lacy (The Internet) and Funk icon Steve Arrington (Slave). It’s another example of Stephen Lee Bruner’s desire to highlight the lineage of his music and pay his respects to the musicians who inspired him. Discovering Arrington’s output in his late teens, Bruner says he fell in love with his music immediately: “The tone of the bass, the way his stuff feels and moves, it resonated through my whole body.” ‘Black Qualls’ emerged from writing sessions with Lacy, whom Thundercat describes as “the physical incarnate of the Ohio Players in one person - he genuinely is a funky ass dude”. It references what it means to be a black American with a young mindset: “What it feels like to be in this position right now… the weird ins and outs, we’re talking about those feelings…” Thundercat revisits established partnerships with Kamasi Washington, Louis Cole, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Ronald Bruner Jr and Dennis Hamm on “It Is What Is Is” but there are new faces too: Childish Gambino, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, plus Ty Dolla $ign and Lil B on ‘Fair Chance’ - a song explicitly about his friend Mac Miller’s passing. The aptly titled ‘I Love Louis Cole’ is another standout - “Louis Cole is a brush of genius. He creates so purely,” says Thundercat. “He makes challenging music: harmony-wise, melody-wise and tempo-wise but still finds a way for it to be beautiful and palatable.” Elsewhere on the album, ‘Dragonball Durag’ exemplifies both Thundercat’s love of humour in music and indeed his passion for the cult Japanese animé. “I have a Dragon Ball tattoo… it runs everything. There is a saying that Dragon Ball runs life,” he explains. “The durag is a superpower, to turn your swag on. It does something… it changes you,” he says smiling. Thundercat’s music starts on his couch at home: “It’s just me, the bass and the computer”. Nevertheless, referring to the spiritual connection that he shares with his longtime writing and production partner Flying Lotus, Bruner describes his friend as “the other half of my brain”. “I wouldn’t be the artist I am if Lotus wasn’t there,” he says. “He taught me… he saw me as an artist and he encouraged it. No matter the life changes, that’s my partner. We are always thinking of pushing in different ways.” Comedy is an integral part of Thundercat’s personality. “If you can’t laugh at this stuff you might as well not be here,” he muses. He seems to be magnetically drawn to comedians from Zack Fox (with whom he collaborates regularly) to Dave Chappelle, Eric Andre and Hannibal Buress whom he counts as friends. “Every comedian wants to be a musician and every musician wants to be a comedian,” he says. “And every good musician is really funny, for the most part.” It’s the juxtaposition, or the meeting point, between the laughter and the pain that is striking listening to “It Is What It Is”: it really is all-encompassing. “The thing that really becomes a bit transcendent in the laugh is when it goes in between how you really feel,” Bruner says. “You’re hoping people understand it, but you don’t even understand how it’s so funny ‘cos it hurts sometimes.” Thundercat forms a cornerstone of the Brainfeeder label; he released “The Golden Age of Apocalypse” (2011), “Apocalypse” (2013), followed by EP “The Beyond / Where The Giants Roam” featuring the modern classic ‘Them Changes’. He was later “at the creative epicenter” (per Rolling Stone) of the 21st century’s most influential hip-hop album Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp A Butterfly”, where he won a Grammy for his collaboration on the track ‘These Walls’ before releasing his third album “Drunk” in 2017. In 2018 Thundercat and Flying Lotus composed an original score for an episode of Golden Globe and Emmy award winning TV series “Atlanta” (created and written by Donald Glover).

To record her meditative third album, Jhené Aiko retreated to the lush hills of Hawaii and surrounded herself with crystals, incense, and singing bowls. It was an experiment in self-discovery and the healing powers of sound: Every song on *Chilombo*, which is also the R&B singer’s last name, features the transcendental tones of the ancient bowls, which are said to balance chakras and soothe anxiety. They seemed to have worked: For a project about heartbreak, these songs are impressively, and infectiously, zen. Lead singles “Triggered (freestyle)” and “None of Your Concern” (featuring Big Sean) wrap intense, defiant messages in chill lullaby beats, and “Mourning Doves,” an intimate confessional that uses wind instruments to mimic soft bird calls, toes a line between bedroom ballad and New Age hymnal. Aiko is so deep in her vibe that even her heavyweight guests—which include Nas, Ty Dolla $ign, Miguel, and Future—can’t lure her out of her peaceful, low-key center. Instead, they go to her. “Lightning & Thunder,” her dreamy duet with John Legend, is densely atmospheric and psychedelic, like a love song in a daydream.

Coming a mere year and a half after *Tha Carter V* freed the Young Money star from years of purgatorial label/legal exile, *Funeral* dispels any lingering notions that his career wouldn’t recover from the prolonged delay. The 24-track (!) outing bears hallmarks of both Mixtape Weezy and Album Weezy, along with some welcome studio experimentation. On disparate sung tracks like “Sights and Silencers” and “Never Mind,” he shows off more of the range that has rightfully kept him in the G.O.A.T. debate for decades. He doles out cautionary wisdom on the opening title track with voice-cracking urgency, while the pugilistic “Mama Mia” finds his already pliant tone somehow finding strange new registers as he lands his punchlines. He careens purposefully between brighter styles on *Funeral* as only he can, embracing NOLA bounce on “Clap for Em” and teasing commercial palatability on the intergenerational “I Do It” with Big Sean and Lil Baby. By the end, it’s clear that Lil Wayne has emerged fully from the darkness of the period preceding *Tha Carter V*, ready to redefine his legacy in the best way possible.

For someone who spent the better part of his career celebrating the chaos his drug use enabled, the title of Future’s eighth studio album, *High Off Life*, reads like an attempt at a rebrand. But it isn’t. For one, he’ll claim to still very much be getting “high off” drugs. But further to that, life as Future knows it is the same high-octane carousel ride it’s been since he began telling us his story, spinning continually through declarations of invincibility (“Touch the Sky,” “Solitaires,” “Trillionaire”), reflections of past trauma (“Posted With Demons,” “One of My,” “Pray for a Key”), encounters with beautiful and exclusive women (“Too Comfortable,” “Outer Space Bih”), and, yes, heavy drug use (“Trapped in the Sun,” “HiTek Tek”). Future on *High Off Life* is who he told us he was on the title track of his second album, *Honest*: “I\'m a rock star for life, I\'m just being honest.”

Houston MC and Travis Scott collaborator Don Toliver released what should have been his breakout mixtape *Donny Womack* on August 2, 2018. The problem is that Travis Scott’s *ASTROWORLD*, an album to which Toliver also contributed, arrived the next day. Roughly a year and a half later—the dust fully cleared from Scott’s magnum opus—Toliver releases his *Donny Womack* follow-up, *Heaven or Hell*. If you missed it around the time of *Donny Womack*, Toliver’s influence on Scott and contribution to songs like *ASTROWORLD*’s “CAN’T SAY” is easy to recognize here. Even saturated in Auto-Tune, Toliver’s melodies are refined and identifiable, especially soaring over heavy synth stabs on “Cardigan,” “Can’t Feel My Legs,” and “Candy.” His MCing is likewise bolstered by the uncommonly high register of his voice. Providing more bang for the buck are features from JACKBOYS cohorts Sheck Wes and Scott himself, along with Migos members Quavo and Offset. But the mission for Toliver here is likely the same as it was the last time: to be the next voice to blow out of Houston.

After the brutal one-two punch of 2018’s *Book of Ryan* and the DJ Premier team-up *PRhyme 2*, the game needed time to recover. Yet as his trio of ferocious features on Eminem’s *Music to Be Murdered By* made clear, Royce da 5’9” can’t stay away from the mic. Coming mere weeks after that surprise Shady set, *The Allegory* offers that raw pugilistic rhyme style across a selection of uncompromising and enlightening tracks and interludes. He finger-wags fly-by-night fad rappers on “Pendulum,” exposes the racist history of a famous jingle on “Ice Cream,” and gives sweeping condemnations across “Rhinestone Doo Rag.” His multiple New York connects come through too—swapping off with Griseldan Buffalo kids BENNY THE BUTCHER, Conway The Machine, and Westside Gunn, as well as with Queens’ own Grafh on the swirling street soul of “I Play Forever.”

Back when he exploded onto the Chicago drill scene in 2012 with “Kill Shit” alongside frequent collaborator Lil Bibby, the baby-faced, grizzled-voiced Herbo established himself as one of its deftest pens. Seeking therapy years later, the hometown hero was diagnosed with PTSD, the subject to which he dedicated his fourth studio album, hoping to raise awareness among kids who grew up like he did. Herbo’s raps remain hard as ever, but *PTSD* is his most tender offering to date: “It ain’t nothing wrong with seeing gangstas cry,” he spits on the BJ the Chicago Kid collab “Gangstas Cry.” The most heart-wrenching moment is saved for the title track, whose chorus arrives via the late Juice WRLD, a close friend of Herbo’s; it’s hard not to get chills when Juice sings, “I got a war zone inside of my head/I made it on my own, they said I’d be in jail or dead.”

“To love ‘bulletproofly’ is unconditionally—no matter your conditions, no matter the circumstances, no matter what you\'re going through, no matter what society looks at you as,” Mozzy tells Apple Music. “So I\'m saying it\'s *beyond* bulletproof for me.” The Sacramento MC sounds like he’s in a great place as he explains the title of his latest album; 2019 saw him deliver no less than five separate projects, and the first of 2020 is rightfully steeped in gratitude for the many comforts he currently enjoys. “I think right now, just the state of mind I’ve been in, and me being blessed beyond measurement—I\'m in the dopest place I\'ve ever been, I’m the highest I ever been,” the MC says. “I’m enjoying life, I got two little girls that fulfill me, I’m full of love. If you pay attention to the albums before—it was *Bladadah* and *Hexa Hella Extra Head Shots*—I was expressing what I was going through. I look out for so many, whether it\'s paying for funerals or bailing n\*ggas out, or putting a n\*gga in a better predicament or position to win—*Beyond Bulletproof*, once more, I\'m just expressing what I\'m going through.” Below, Mozzy talks about how some of his favorite tracks from the project came together. **Unethical & Deceitful** “I got to give it to Granny—she was very militant, very pro-black. She always taught me to just make sure I had substance in my music. It\'s not something I think about. I don\'t say on this song, \'I\'m going to try to incorporate this or I\'m going to do that.\' I just naturally do it.\" **So Lonely** “I function with everything Shordie Shordie got going on. We just naturally click. I done ran into him in numerous of places, from the Valley to the Bay Area to LA—\[last\] studio session we cooked up about two or three of ’em. I was in love with ‘So Lonely’ and I begged that n\*gga for a week straight, ‘Let me get that muthafucka.’ He said it was Gucci and I threw another verse on that motherfucker, and there you have it.” **Betrayed** “It used to be death before dishonor, and now it\'s becoming a norm to betray the homie or cross a n\*gga. The consequences ain\'t as severe as they used to be. Just by me having unconditional love for n\*ggas, I don\'t want to see n\*ggas hurt. I don\'t want to knock a n\*gga off for nothing like that, so I just turn the other cheek. But it\'s crazy, because it’ll have a n\*gga in his feelings, a n\*gga feeling genuinely betrayed. I ain\'t like these n\*ggas.” **Boyz to Men** “This is straight *activity*. You know that\'s mandated, \'cause that\'s what my core fanbase—that’s what they enjoy from me. That\'s what they function with. I felt like the album was becoming slow, so I had to speed it up and put that Activated Mozzy in there. It\'s damn near mandatory to say that this song is the foundation, it’s the core. It\'s me.” **Can’t Let You Go** “My n\*gga threw the beat on and I wasn\'t feeling it at first. A lot of shit I don\'t be feeling, but I be considerate of my management team and their vision. And it\'s worked in my favor. I don\'t be wanting to be talk about no bitches. I want to talk about gang-banging, but I got in there, and once I just started scribbling a little bit, that shit just started oozing out. I recorded it, and I was in love with it. Soon as I recorded, like before Eric Bellinger was on there, I was already in love. And now it\'s one of my favorite songs.” **Overcame** “I was in love with this song as soon as I made it. It\'s real life, it\'s Mozzy. I was debating whether or not I should put it on this album, but it fit the story. Just expressing love and putting young n\*ggas on and putting them in position, and giving a fuck about the young life and the culture. It\'s one of the ones that I could cry to. I could vibe to it and cry to it.” **The Homies Wanna Know** “It’s a lot of shit that I done cooked up that\'s off-limits. I\'ve tweaked a lot of shit. I might say something in a song and then \[remove\] it, just being considerate of others and how they might feel. But nine times out of ten, I let the beat control the whole vibe of everything. I don\'t never prep what I\'m going to say or what the song is going to be about. I just go in that motherfucker and record. The beat talks to me and I talk to the beat. It’s gotta talk to me. It gotta tamper with my soul. If it don\'t, then it probably won\'t make the album.”

After a few years under the mighty wing of rapper Young Dolph, Key Glock is ready to fly solo. And with *Yellow Tape*, an album devoid of the features we’ve come to expect from young artists’ offerings, the Paper Route Empire protégé does exactly that. With semi-staccato Memphis flows bouncing over the murky timbres of Tennessean producer Bandplay’s slow and syrupy beats, the legacy of hometown heroes Three 6 Mafia and Project Pat looms over the project. Yet much like his previous mixtape offerings, Glock uses the dark and trippy Hypnotize Minds spirit more like a jumping-off point than pure tribute, filling his double cup to the brim on the retrospective opener “1997” and letting loose from there. Freed from sharing the spotlight, he emerges as a man in full, speaking directly to the hustlers on “Dough” and sneering at the haters on “Look at They Face.”

Fresh off fostering a movement like #HotGirlSummer, one would think Megan Thee Stallion had little if anything left to prove, but her *Suga* EP tells a bit of a different story. Megan uses the moment to level up as an increasingly important voice of female empowerment and at the same time remind us how easily she can traverse some of the most beloved sounds of contemporary rap. First, she sounds extremely comfortable in a Detroit street rap vibe courtesy of producer Helluva on “Ain\'t Equal.” A little further in, she dips her toes in West Coast G-funk for the Kehlani collaboration “Hit My Phone.” She channels the legendary 2Pac on “B.I.T.C.H.,” which takes inspiration from the late MC’s “Ratha Be Ya N\*\*\*a,” and then teams up with ATL drip music innovator Gunna for “Stop Playing.” As for who she is as an MC, Thee Stallion has a couple choice ways of describing herself on “Savage” (“Classy, bougie, ratchet/Sassy, moody, nasty”) which, grouped together, only remind us that this is who we need to be listening to.

The Oakland native had yet to be born when Too $hort debuted in ’85, but the funky, freaky spirit of her hometown’s rap history is at the core of Kamaiyah’s music. After years of label drama and delays, *Got It Made* is independently released, and the rapper’s sense of relief is visceral: “I love myself, I trust myself, I don’t need nobody else,” she crows on “Pressure.” Kamaiyah holds her own across the 10 laidback slappers here, but the handful of features are A1: Trina is the perfect foil on “Set It Up,” a strong contender for 2020’s best song about slashing your man’s tires, and when Too $hort himself pops in to talk his shit on “1-800-IM-Horny,” the cipher is complete.

Retreat to the forest where the moon don’t shine And the sun barely sweeps the floor ELUCID Shrines is the new album from Armand Hammer—ELUCID and billy woods—their first since 2018’s AOTY Paraffin. As ever, this release finds the duo treading fresh ground; swimming through rogue rhythms, rhymes skating over the abyss. Fourteen songs. A hundred glassine envelopes in a shoebox. A thousand stops on the train. Fire is stolen, not given. Shrines features contributions from Quelle Chris, Moor Mother, Earl Sweatshirt, Navy Blu, Andrew Broder, Fielded, Messiah Muzik, August Fanon, KeiyaA, Kenny Segal, Nicholas Craven, Akai Solo, Curly Castro, Pink Siifu, Steel Tipped Dove, Fat Albert Einstein, Nosaj and R.A.P. Ferreira.

As far as hip-hop is concerned, 2019 was near unanimously the year of DaBaby. The Charlotte MC turned himself into a bona fide superstar through a combination of near ubiquitousness and unprecedented consistency in the fun-to-bar ratio of his verses. *BLAME IT ON BABY*, then—his first project of 2020 (2019 brought us two, along with an inordinate amount of guest verses)—is DaBaby forging onward despite a year marked by the inescapable calamity of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time of *BLAME IT ON BABY*’s release, DaBaby appeared on six separate songs within Apple Music’s influential Rap Life playlist; this is clearly a man who stays in the studio. Which is not to say that he’s any more in love with his own voice than his contemporaries. In fact, *BLAME IT ON BABY* features an all-star list of collaborators including Quavo, Future, A Boogie wit da Hoodie, Roddy Ricch, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, and even early-aughts R&B princess Ashanti. If there is anything at all to blame DaBaby for, it’s the much-appreciated sense of normalcy that hearing a song like “TALK ABOUT IT”—where he brags about being nominated for a Grammy and draping his daughter in designer jewelry—might provide for hip-hop fans in the moment.

The original 2018 *Just Cause Y’all Waited* mixtape was a way for Lil Durk to stay in touch with his fanbase while between label deals, but the stakes for the sequel are just a bit higher. “It was just an idea we came up with to see how can we get past this quarantine situation with everyone needing to stay in the house,” he says. The MC is continuously working on music and continues to record during the nationwide quarantine, but needed fans to know he hadn’t forgotten about them, even as he works toward another higher-profile release. “Me and Metro Boomin supposed to be doing a joint album called *No Auto*, but with the quarantine going on, it kind of slowed everything down,” Durk says. “So I was just being creative and felt like, while y\'all waiting on me and Metro, let’s feed ’em this.” Below, the prolific Chicago MC talks us through *Just Cause Y\'all Waited 2* track by track, going deep on what we get for our patience. **Different Meaning** “If I\'m in a relatable mode, I\'ll make all music to relate to the trenches, or to the streets, or just to the world. Whatever people are going through. This is not necessarily about somebody, it\'s just more relating and putting my thoughts together: what I\'ve been through or somebody around me been through.” **Street Affection** “I was just in a mode where it’s like, people will be lying saying they your brothers and you put people that you just met before your \[actual\] brothers. As soon as you meet some people, they say, ‘I love you.’ It just be fake. Some people just use the word. ‘Love’ is a strong word.” **3 Headed Goat (feat. Lil Baby & Polo G)** “Me and Lil Baby was in a studio and we did not finish the song. So I had the song on my hard drive. And then my hard drive crashed. I didn\'t have no sessions, only had \[what I had recorded on my\] phone and a little bit of the beat left playing. And then I just decided Polo G going crazy right now, I got to put Polo on there.” **All Love** “‘All love,’ that\'s how we brush shit off in Chicago. When somebody do something fake and they try to explain themself, you be like, \'It\'s all love.\' What I got in my mind is, \'I ain\'t ever fucking with you no more.\' It\'s like a nice way to dismiss somebody. It\'s really two ways: Somebody played you and you got love for them, you just tell them, \'Bet. It\'s cool. It\'s all love. We gon\' get through it.\' Or \'It\'s all love \[meaning\] I ain\'t fucking with you.\'” **Gucci Gucci (feat. Gunna)** “I like Gucci, I like Rhude, I like different clothing lines, but it\'s like, if you an artist, you let the music talk to you. As soon as the beat came on, all I heard was \'Gucci.\' So it ain\'t directly saying that \[Gucci is\] my favorite. It\'s just what I had on at the time.” **Viral Moment** \"I know some real ones that would lose it all for a viral moment. You would probably betray your friend just to go viral. You would probably do something goofy that\'s not in your character just to go viral. You would probably tell, just to go viral. You would probably expose a girl or just do anything just to go viral.” **248** “I got the title from how long the song is. I was really just putting bars together and just riding the beat. Just feeling it. Whatever came to my head, honestly.” **Triflin Hoes** “Me and my brother Chief Wuk, we was in the studio. He was telling me, ‘Oh man, this female playing with me.’ She calling his phone private, telling him, ‘Woo woo woo…’ And a couple of the guys had hit her already. So instead of him being like, ‘I\'m finna go on Instagram and put her on blast,’ I just made a song out of that.” **Internet Sensation** “You know how you have people look at people’s relationships and be like, ‘Oh, I want to be him,’ or ‘Well, look what she doing, look what he doing,’ and I\'m just saying, \'Stick to it. Don\'t let the internet break it up.\' So it’s just like a fun song, and it\'s for the females and anybody who’s open in their relationship on the internet.” **Street Prayer** “We was in the studio having a conversation about Muslims, Christians, Jews, and it\'s like, everybody makes it a big deal like, \'Oh, he\'s Muslim, he can\'t hang with no Christian.\' It\'s so crazy, because people say stuff like that. I just put my creativity with it \[to say\] the streets need a prayer. The kids need a prayer who are out here dying. People who locked up, they need prayers. No matter what your religion is. Everybody needs a prayer.” **Chiraq Demons (feat. G Herbo)** “I don\'t know what their \'demon time\' is, or \'demon talk,\' I just know ours is, like, them old Chicago evil ways. Them days where we were just so turnt up. Not even the violence, just having fun and being able to be outside without being shot at. Metro Boomin had just left the studio and I was in \'no Auto-Tune mode,\' so Herb was like, \'Let\'s do something like that,\' and we just rocked it.” **Doin Too Much** “\[This is for\] the doubters. The haters. Everybody\'s saying, \'You ain\'t going to go as far. You ain\'t going to do this. You ain\'t going to achieve.\' I grew up, look at me now. Basically like I\'m shitting on them.” **Broke Up in Miami** “This is about me and India \[Durk’s longtime partner\]. She\'s in Miami with her friends—it’s so petty—she called me twice, I ain\'t answer. And I called her back and literally 10 minutes later, \'Why you ain\'t answer the phone!?\' That’s why I said we broke up for \'five minutes.\' Just another mood. When I was making the song, we already were cool.” **Turn Myself In** “I made this song a day before I turned myself in on my recent case. I wanted to let the world hear me and let them see what type of time I\'m on before I go in. We got past it so we on a new vibe, but that song just means a lot.” **Fabricated** \"When we do do good things, the media don\'t cover it. You gotta let it be known. And it ain’t just for the kids. I want doctors, I want judges, I want lawyers—different people to look at me like \[in a positive light\]. I want to be able to come to a doctor\'s house and have a conversation with them, or a lawyer house and have a conversation. I don\'t want to never be stuck on one level where it\'s like I can\'t talk to them or relate to them.”

There\'s never been any effective way to prepare for a Childish Gambino project from Donald Glover; over a decade-long discography, they\'ve oscillated between quirky raps, electro-pop, and strands of funk and R&B. This remains true with his new release, *3.15.20*, which he also has released as a single-track opus, which may explain the decision to have most of the individual tracks here titled as timestamps. That mischievous, mercurial nature carries over to the music itself—he explores the darker hues of the outré, playing with genre as much he does disjointed sound effects—atmospheric noise, glitches, distortion, uncanny Auto-Tune. The soulful \"24.19\" and the optimistic closer \"53.49\" tread worn but welcome territory, while the foreboding futurism of \"Time\" and the sensory overload of \"32.22\" don\'t land like songs so much as cinematic collages brimming with ideas. Unsurprisingly, the one familiar track, \"Feels Like Summer\" (titled here as \"42.26\"), which was officially released in July 2018, is also the album\'s most accessible. *3.15.20* is a logical progression from his experimental inclinations of the past that latches onto some of his most eccentric impulses and thrusts them into overdrive. He basks in the spaces between restraint and rebellion, genius and madness, forcing listeners to find the freedom in chaos. The axiom \"expect the unexpected\" doesn\'t quite capture what Gambino has put together here—perhaps, this time, it\'s better not to expect anything at all.