Complex's Best Albums of 2022 (So Far)

When Kendrick Lamar popped up on two tracks from Baby Keem’s *The Melodic Blue* (“range brothers” and “family ties”), it felt like one of hip-hop’s prophets had descended a mountain to deliver scripture. His verses were stellar, to be sure, but it also just felt like way too much time had passed since we’d heard his voice. He’d helmed 2018’s *Black Panther* compilation/soundtrack, but his last proper release was 2017’s *DAMN.* That kind of scarcity in hip-hop can only serve to deify an artist as beloved as Lamar. But if the Compton MC is broadcasting anything across his fifth proper album *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers*, it’s that he’s only human. The project is split into two parts, each comprising nine songs, all of which serve to illuminate Lamar’s continually evolving worldview. Central to Lamar’s thesis is accountability. The MC has painstakingly itemized his shortcomings, assessing his relationships with money (“United in Grief”), white women (“Worldwide Steppers”), his father (“Father Time”), the limits of his loyalty (“Rich Spirit”), love in the context of heteronormative relationships (“We Cry Together,” “Purple Hearts”), motivation (“Count Me Out”), responsibility (“Crown”), gender (“Auntie Diaries”), and generational trauma (“Mother I Sober”). It’s a dense and heavy listen. But just as sure as Kendrick Lamar is human like the rest of us, he’s also a Pulitzer Prize winner, one of the most thoughtful MCs alive, and someone whose honesty across *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers* could help us understand why any of us are the way we are.

“You can’t come get this work until it’s dry. I made this album while the streets were closed during the pandemic. Made entirely with the greatest producers of all time—Pharrell and Ye. ONLY I can get the best out of these guys. ENJOY!!” —Pusha T, in an exclusive message provided to Apple Music

“Money made me numb,” Vince Staples repeats over and over again on “THE BLUES,” from his fifth full-length studio album. It’s not the song’s chorus and you can picture him saying it in the mirror, attempting to reckon with a truth he clearly understands but also maybe doesn’t quite know what to do with. At the time of *RAMONA PARK BROKE MY HEART*’s release, the Long Beach, California, MC was more popular and financially successful than he’s ever been. So, he chose—beginning with 2021’s *Vince Staples*—to release some of the most affecting and autobiographical music of his career. The decision sounds, across the album, much less a professional risk than a personal one, Staples utilizing production from Mustard, Cardo, and Coop the Truth, among others, to expose his innermost thoughts about turf politics, romantic relationships, and the ways money may or may not be changing him. More than anything else, he aims to honor those who have in some way contributed to his survival, often calling them out by name, holding especially close the memories of those no longer in his orbit. “Tryna make it to the top, we can’t take everybody with us,” he sings on “THE BEACH.” There are few artists who come off as comfortable as Staples does regarding their contributions to music culture at large, but what *RAMONA PARK BROKE MY HEART* makes abundantly clear is that few things mean as much to Staples’ art as the neighborhood that made him.

*“You are now listening to 103.5 Dawn FM. You’ve been in the dark for way too long. It’s time to walk into the light and accept your fate with open arms. Scared? Don’t worry. We’ll be there to hold your hand and guide you through this painless transition. But what’s the rush? Just relax and enjoy another hour of commercial ‘free yourself’ music on 103.5 Dawn FM. Tune in.”* The Weeknd\'s previous album *After Hours* was released right as the world was falling into the throes of the pandemic; after scrapping material that he felt was wallowing in the depression he was feeling at the time, *Dawn FM* arrives as a by-product of—and answer to—that turmoil. Here, he replaces woeful introspection with a bit of upbeat fantasy—the result of creatively searching for a way out of the claustrophobic reality of the previous two years. With the experience of hosting and curating music for his very own MEMENTO MORI radio show on Apple Music as his guiding light, *Dawn FM* is crafted in a similar fashion, complete with a DJ to set the tone for the segments within. “It’s time to walk into the light and accept your fate with open arms,” the host, voiced by Jim Carrey, declares on the opening track. “Scared? Don\'t worry.” Indeed, there is nothing to fear. The Weeknd packs the first half with euphoric bursts that include the Swedish House Mafia-assisted “How Do I Make You Love Me?” and “Sacrifice.” On the back half, he moves into the more serene waters of “Is There Someone Else?” and “Starry Eyes.” Despite the somewhat morose album cover, which reflects what many feel like as they wade through the seemingly endless purgatory of a life dictated by a virus, he’s aiming for something akin to hope in all of this gloom.

Thebe Kgositsile emerged in 2010 as the most mysterious member of rap’s weirdest new collective, Odd Future—a gifted teen turned anarchist, spitting shock-rap provocations from his exile in a Samoan reform school. In the 12 years since, he’s repaired his famously fraught relationship with his mother, lost his father, and become a father himself, all the while carving out a solo lane as a serious MC, a student of the game. Earl’s fourth album finds the guy who once titled an album *I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside*, well, going outside, and kinda liking it; on opener “Old Friend,” he’s hacking through thickets, camping out in Catskills rainstorms. There’s a sonic clarity here that stands apart from the obscure, sludgy sounds of his recent records, executed in part by Young Guru, JAY-Z’s longtime engineer. Beats from The Alchemist and Black Noi$e snap, crackle, and bounce, buoying Earl’s slippery, open-ended thoughts on family, writing, religion, the pandemic. Is he happy now, the kid we’ve watched become a man? It’s hard to say, but in any case, as he raps on “Fire in the Hole”: “It’s no rewinding/For the umpteenth time, it’s only forward.”

“I literally don’t take breaks,” ROSALÍA tells Apple Music. “I feel like, to work at a certain level, to get a certain result, you really need to sacrifice.” Judging by *MOTOMAMI*, her long-anticipated follow-up to 2018’s award-winning and critically acclaimed *EL MAL QUERER*, the mononymous Spanish singer clearly put in the work. “I almost feel like I disappear because I needed to,” she says of maintaining her process in the face of increased popularity and attention. “I needed to focus and put all my energy and get to the center to create.” At the same time, she found herself drawing energy from bustling locales like Los Angeles, Miami, and New York, all of which she credits with influencing the new album. Beyond any particular source of inspiration that may have driven the creation of *MOTOMAMI*, ROSALÍA’s come-up has been nothing short of inspiring. Her transition from critically acclaimed flamenco upstart to internationally renowned star—marked by creative collaborations with global tastemakers like Bad Bunny, Billie Eilish, and Oneohtrix Point Never, to name a few—has prompted an artistic metamorphosis. Her ability to navigate and dominate such a wide array of musical styles only raised expectations for her third full-length, but she resisted the idea of rushing things. “I didn’t want to make an album just because now it’s time to make an album,” she says, citing that several months were spent on mixing and visuals alone. “I don’t work like that.” Some three years after *EL MAL QUERER*, ROSALÍA’s return feels even more revolutionary than that radical breakout release. From the noisy-yet-referential leftfield reggaetón of “SAOKO” to the austere and *Yeezus*-reminiscent thump of “CHICKEN TERIYAKI,” *MOTOMAMI* makes the artist’s femme-forward modus operandi all the more clear. The point of view presented is sharp and political, but also permissive of playfulness and wit, a humanizing mix that makes the album her most personal yet. “I was like, I really want to find a way to allow my sense of humor to be present,” she says. “It’s almost like you try to do, like, a self-portrait of a moment of who you are, how you feel, the way you think.\" Things get deeper and more unexpected with the devilish-yet-austere electronic punk funk of the title track and the feverish “BIZCOCHITO.” But there are even more twists and turns within, like “HENTAI,” a bilingual torch song that charms and enraptures before giving way to machine-gun percussion. Add to that “LA FAMA,” her mystifying team-up with The Weeknd that fuses tropical Latin rhythms with avant-garde minimalism, and you end up with one of the most unique artistic statements of the decade so far.

From his formative days associating with Raider Klan through his revealing solo projects *TA13OO* and *ZUU*, Denzel Curry has never been shy about speaking his mind. For *Melt My Eyez See Your Future*, the Florida native tackles some of the toughest topics of his MC career, sharing his existential notes on being Black and male in these volatile times. The album opens on a bold note with “Melt Session #1,” a vulnerable and emotional cut given further weight by jazz giant Robert Glasper’s plaintive piano. That hefty tone leads into a series of deeply personal and mindfully radical songs that explore modern crises and mental health with both thematic gravity and lyrical dexterity, including “Worst Comes to Worst” and the trap subversion “X-Wing.” Systemic violence leaves him reeling and righteous on “John Wayne,” while “The Smell of Death” skillfully mixes metaphors over a phenomenally fat funk groove. He draws overt and subtle parallels to jazz’s sociopolitical history, imagining himself in Freddie Hubbard’s hard-bop era on “Mental” and tapping into boom bap’s affinity for the genre on “The Ills.” Guests like T-Pain, Rico Nasty, and 6LACK help to fill out his vision, yielding some of the album’s highest highs.

Melt My Eyez See Your Future arrives as Denzel Curry’s most mature and ambitious album to date. Recorded over the course of the pandemic, Denzel shows his growth as both an artist and person. Born from a wealth of influences, the tracks highlight his versatility and broad tastes, taking in everything from drum’n’bass to trap. To support this vision and show the breadth of his artistry, Denzel has enlisted a wide range of collaborators and firmly plants his flag in the ground as one of the most groundbreaking rappers in the game.

To call Conway the Machine’s raps gritty is akin to calling summer in Arizona hot. Take this passage from “Piano Love,” off *God Don’t Make Mistakes*: “We don\'t play fair, drive-bys right in front of the daycare/We spray hairpin triggers, that FN on the waist here/Yeah, garbage bags wrapped around the Ks here/Told you it\'s spooky, my n\*\*\*a, it\'s Camp Crystal Lake here.” He’s long had a way with words, but in 2022, with well over 20 projects to his name, the Buffalo-hailing MC is opening up in a way hasn’t before. Too many lines on *God Don’t Make Mistakes* were likely painful to record. “Not too long after my cousin hung his self/I never told nobody, but I lost a son myself/Imagine bein\' in the hospital, holdin\' your dead baby/And he look just like you, you tryna keep from goin\' crazy,” he raps on “Stressed.” “You don\'t know the feeling of never seein\' your kid again/And it\'s a Russell Wilson-type n\*\*\*a raisin\' your lil\' man/Real shit, I know the feeling, ain\'t seen my son in a minute/BM don\'t answer for me, so fuck her, I\'m in my feelings,” he says on “Tear Gas.” A single like the Daringer- and Kill-produced “John Woo Flick,” with its claims of Conway having “enough shooters on my team to embarrass the Pistons” and a “door on my bedroom thick as a vault,” likely delivered plenty of new ears when it was released in advance of the album. But if it succeeded in bringing listeners all the way through *God Don’t Make Mistakes*, they’ll be leaving knowing as much about the Machine’s life—if not more—as those who’ve heard everything before it.

The New Yorker has finally gotten his flowers as one of the finest MCs in the contemporary underground after a cool couple decades grinding it out with his label, Backwoodz Studioz; 2021’s *Haram*, from Woods’ Armand Hammer duo with E L U C I D, felt like a high watermark for a new NY scene. On *Aethiopes*, Woods’ first solo album since 2019, he recruits producer Preservation, a fellow NY scene veteran known for his work with Yasiin Bey and Ka; his haunted beats set an unsettling scene for Woods’ evocative stories, which span childhood bedrooms and Egyptian deserts. The guest list doubles as a who’s who of underground rap—EL-P, Boldy James, E L U C I D—but Woods holds his own at the center of it all. As he spits on the stunningly skeletal “Remorseless”: “Anything you want on this cursed earth/Probably better off getting it yourself, see what it’s worth.”

DIGITAL VERSION OF THE ALBUM DROPS ON APRIL 8, 2022. Aethiopes is billy woods’ first album since 2019’s double feature of Hiding Places and Terror Management. The project is fully produced by Preservation (Dr Yen Lo, Yasiin Bey), who delivered a suite of tracks on Terror Management, including the riveting single “Blood Thinner”. The two collaborated again on Preservation’s 2020’s LP Eastern Medicine, Western Illness, which featured a memorable billy woods appearance on the song “Lemon Rinds”, as well as the B-side “Snow Globe”.

It wasn’t long after his debut mixtape, 2020’s *No Love Lost*, that Blxst was being heralded as the preeminent voice of Los Angeles R&B. His style—a seamless mix of croaky harmonizing and nimble flows—made him the perfect counterpart for collaborators both local (Mozzy, Drakeo the Ruler, 1Take Jay, Bino Rideaux) and global (Nas, Rick Ross, Fireboy DML). *Before You Go* picks up right where *No Love Lost* left off, striking a balance between pledges of unending allegiance to his life partner (“Never Was Wrong,” “Pick Your Poison,” “Sometimes”) and professions of gratitude for every moment of his journey (“Couldn’t Wait for It,” “Still Omw,” “Talk to Me Nicely”). The tape contains a handful of songs that seem like direct continuations of ideas he debuted on *No Love Lost*—“About You” refurbishes a vintage R&B melody in the vein of “Be Alone,” “Every Good Girl” has a strong “Wrong or Right” energy, and “Be Forreal” features cadences that recall “Gang Slide”—all of which serve as reminders of how great his debut was and affirmations of how committed the singer is to establishing the Blxst sound.

“I know one song won’t change everything, but all I have is my voice,” Koffee tells Apple Music. “So, that’s what I’ll use to speak out. I might not be affected by certain injustices directly, but living in a place like Jamaica, you can’t avoid the truth of it. There’s youths here that have grown up with violence right on their doorstep, and I’m not just representing myself now—I also must speak out for them.” In 2019, the world bowed as Koffee—real name Mikayla Simpson—unveiled her innovative blend of reggae, dancehall, and sculpted rap flows on the Grammy-winning EP *Rapture*. That was a historic victory, too, seeing Koffee become the youngest and first female winner of the Best Reggae Album award. The pandemic could’ve threatened to slow her rise, but she instead leaned into the rich musical heritage of Jamaica (the spirit of Bob Marley is present on “x10,” while “Lonely” is a stunning ode to ’80s lovers rock) and the expertise of her live band to help craft a gorgeous, rich debut album. “It was about recreating those uplifting vibes that I had in my mind,” she says. “And I’m so happy we were able to, especially during a time that people need us to spread this message. I feel honored when I listen back to these songs, perfectly arranged and beautifully done, feeling like, ‘Yeah, I am gifted.’” Read on for her track-by-track guide to *Gifted*. **“x10”** “I came up with this song after a show in Antwerp. I was listening to my Bob Marley playlist, with \[1980 single\] ‘Redemption Song’ on repeat, alone in my room. In Jamaica, he is pretty much a permanent part of the culture. And we all experience his music from a young age, one way or another. I laid these lyrics down that night as a voice note, and the message is still so true. ‘It’s a pleasure to be outside’ was about coming from Jamaica and having my music take me far away overseas to Belgium. I put that down in 2019; now it’s even more relevant, coming off the pandemic. It’s a *real* pleasure to be back outside now.” **“Defend”** “In my heart, I didn’t want this project to be too heavy. On *Rapture*, the songs are more political, but this one is short and simple—and represents for the fans that love that vibe. I also worked \[in the studio\] with Kendrick Lamar on this track, which was a really dope experience.” **“Shine”** “The first part of this song tells a story, a real ghetto story. ‘Sun’s rising, gun violence, police sirens’—that’s a regular day for the youths. This song speaks to them, especially with the Jamaican and Caribbean scene right now pushing this vibe of senseless crime. These artists probably think it doesn’t affect anyone, and some don’t even care if it does. So, consider this song here a counter to that: if someone’s coming with that vibe, cool, I’ll come with this vibe and show you what’s good.” **“Gifted”** “This one’s a little bit more lyrical, but still very fun. It’s a very Jamaican vibe and a self-affirmation, a simple reminder that whatever happens, you’re ‘guided and gifted.’” **“Lonely”** “I’ve been trying not to ruminate too hard on lyrics lately, just keep the vibe and let it flow. And I was inspired by John McLean’s music, its real lovers rock vibes, and one of my favorites of his: \[1988 single\] ‘If I Gave My Heart to You.’ I really love his music, and I would listen to this particular song, thinking, ‘Man, I’d love to pull this off in my own style,’ and together with my band, we came up with our version.” **“Run Away”** “The vibe that runs through this song—escaping to paradise, running away—is probably as we were away at writing camp. Sat by the seaside, literally. I was thinking, ‘What if we could just get on a boat, go out into the ocean, and just live there with everything we need?’” **“Where I’m From”** “This is a more hardcore, dancehall track dedicated to Jamaica. When I’m away, I miss the warmth—especially in Europe, where it’s freezing. But I also miss the people. There’s a quote from Martin Luther King. He says, ‘In Jamaica, I feel like a human being.’ And it’s because of the way the people relate to everyone and make you *feel*. There’s a certain warmth to it that I love.” **“West Indies”** “During the pandemic, I got the chance to link up with \[Jamaican producer and DJ\] Iotosh, who I’ve been a fan of for a while, and this beat is so sick. This song represents me in the way that, of course, I’m not immune to sadness or frustration, but I also love to laugh and make the best of any situation. This is about having fun, whatever mood you’re in.” **“Pull Up”** “Trust me, even if it’s not my reality at the time, or there’s no party, I consider myself a happy enough person to find the vibe within me. Making this was a fun experience. I had a session with JAE5; we had just recorded ‘Shine,’ and we both weren’t done. He’s playing me more and more beats, trying to get another one in—and I knew I would find the right lyrics once we found it, the right one, with this beat. This was a really fun experience in London for me.” **“Lockdown”** “This was a song I wrote during the pandemic, obviously, but it came really spontaneously. Just as my shows were being canceled, it was also a good time to hit the road and connect with people. I received a call from Popcaan, to come by his studio, hold a vibe, and there I met \[Jamaican producer and artist\] Dane Ray, who’s responsible for some of \[Popcaan’s\] biggest hits. I already knew exactly what I was gonna do with this one, and it helps that he’s a great engineer too.”tes go here.

Broken glass, revving engines, barking dogs, burnt rubber, and roaring guitar riffs open Action Bronson’s seventh album, *Cocodrillo Turbo*, making it feel like the listener’s been plopped in the middle of some ‘70s B-movie chase scene rather than a rap album. The grindhouse vibe fits the NYC rapper’s preposterous action sequences and punchlines; one imagines he finds equal inspiration in Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal as in oft-cited influence Ghostface Killah. Case in point: On the opening “Hound Dog,” Bronson runs 100 miles in a downpour with six giraffes on his back. Elsewhere on the album—over colorful loops from Daringer, The Alchemist, and Roc Marciano—he somersaults out of a jet plane (“Jaguar”), tosses someone off a bridge in the style of wrestler Razor Ramon (“Estaciones”), and tear-gasses a room while rocking a Jheri curl (“Subzero”). As always, Bronson balances the comic violence and luxury with hilarious humility: On “Storm Of The Century,” he admits that driving his speedboat gives him tendinitis. Over a decade into his career, he remains one of hip-hop’s most entertaining lyricists.

Cocodrillo Turbo Tracklisting 1. Hound Dog 2. Tongpo ft. Conway the Machine 3. Estaciones ft. Hologram 4. Jaws 5. Subzero 6. Turkish ft. Meyhem Lauren 7. Jaguar prod by Roc Marciano 8. Zambezi ft. Roc Marciano 9. Ninety One 10. Storm of the Century

Each installment of Benny the Butcher’s celebrated *Tana Talk* mixtape series lifted his star just a little bit higher, and the Buffalo-hailing MC went into the release of *Tana Talk 4* expecting nothing less. “*Tana Talk* 1, I took over the hood,” he told Apple Music’s Ebro Darden. “I was on some mixtape, neighborhood…*Tana Talk 2*, I was still in the hood. I took over the city, though. *Tana Talk 3*, I took over the underground. *Tana Talk 4*, I feel like I\'m taking over the world, honestly.” The Butcher’s profile has never been higher (and his jewelry never brighter), as the MC has spent the past half decade helping to build the Griselda Records brand—alongside cohorts Westside Gunn and Conway the Machine—into the industry standard for streetwise lyricism. *Tana Talk 4*, which fulfills any and all contractual obligations with the Griselda label, sets the table for the MC’s forthcoming Def Jam debut in a way that only the 2022 version of Benny the Butcher could have done. “I\'ve been rapping since I was 16, professionally,” Benny says. “So I had war stories, but I don\'t got the stories I got now. Who knew I\'d be on songs, naming them after my girl, India? Who knew I\'d be on songs talking about going through a divorce, talking about a daughter, or saying I got a stepdaughter? Just grown-people shit. That just comes with age. And I feel my listeners make me feel comfortable to talk like that.” But if there’s anything Benny does, it’s keep it real, and he does that continuously over production provided by Daringer and The Alchemist, comparing himself in one instance to the movie character Scarface, Death Row Records cofounder and cocaine kingpin Harry-O, and Joe Pesci (“Guerrero”); lamenting the time he spent in a wheelchair after being shot (“Bust a Brick Nick”); and then also claiming on the J. Cole collaboration “Johnny P’s Caddy” that he “can never leave the scene without checkin\' \[his\] mirrors visually.” “I got three felonies, I\'ve been to state prison, been to federal prison—this is my life,” Benny says. “My daughter spent her first birthday when I was in the feds. My brother passed away. I\'m one of them guys! So the most I could do—or the least I could do—is just, in my music, let them know both sides to this.”

In recent years, both Jay Worthy and Larry June have established themselves as what might be called lifestyle rappers. Over their respective individual projects, these Californian lyricists go beyond luxury tropes to build new lexicons for living one’s best life and living it well, with the lushest beats to match. For this inevitable team-up, their similarities outweigh their contrasts as they revel in the wink-and-mid behind their chosen punny title. Admittedly, the pimp game interplay on *2 P’z in a Pod* gets gleefully over the top, evident on “Hotel Bel-Air” and “Vanilla Cream” along with the explicit segues. To that end, Worthy’s production duo LNDN DRGS outdo themselves here, calling back to electro-funk and ’80s R&B boogie on “Sock It 2 Me” and the Roc Marciano-laced “Maybe the Next Time.”

The Maryland rapper/producer dropped *learn 2 swim* on his 18th birthday, which explains the preoccupation with the bittersweetness of growing up: “Sit and watch my youth wash away/Wish that I could say that I know things will be okay,” goes the hazy hook on “shoulder.” But redveil thrives in the liminal space of teenage uncertainty, translating it through searching bars and dreamy homemade sample collages. His sound feels fully realized already—not quite a throwback, but warm and rich and lived in (probably because he’s been doing this since he was 11, banging out Fruity Loops beats and studying the craft of fellow old soul Earl Sweatshirt). redveil doesn’t pretend he’s got all the answers just yet; like he suggests on the jazzy, breezy “diving board,” the best way to figure it out is to jump in headfirst.

For hip-hop fans hearing $NOT’s “Doja” for the first time—a song that features the notoriously collaboration-picky A$AP Rocky—there were likely two reactions. Either they recognized $NOT from his appearance on fellow Floridian Cochise’s underground hit “Tell Em,” or they wondered who $NOT was and how he got A$AP Rocky on a track. Across the 14 tracks of *Ethereal*, $NOT’s third proper project, the South Florida MC attempts to answer the first question as completely as he can, and as for the second? Well, that’s probably as simple as Rocky having been a fan. And he’s hardly the only one. *Ethereal* features none other than Kevin Abstract, Trippie Redd, Juicy J, and Joey Bada\$$ in addition to Rocky—artists likewise known to have their fingers on the pulse of new music. “Tell Em,” even, was a reintroduction of sorts, $NOT having first broke with “Gosha” in 2018 and also having scored a spot in the pilot episode of HBO’s *Euphoria* with “Billy Boy.” On *Ethereal*, though, the $NOT universe expands, the MC opening up about his demons (“My World \[Intro\],” “5AM”), women who’ve stolen his heart (“ALONE,” “Halle Berry,” “Fighting Me”), and even friends he’s lost (“How U Feel”). Vocally, he goes from the raw aggression we associate with SoundCloud rap 1.0 (“Go,” “BENZO”) to a vulnerability that allows him to sing softly over acoustic guitar (“BLUE MOON”), indicative together that whatever your particular flavor is, you’ll know exactly who he is at next listen.

EARTHGANG are proud, boundary-pushing Atlantans, celebrating the city’s rap legacy with eclectic hybrids of soul, funk, trap percussion, and alien electronic textures that bump beneath their often-melodic delivery and idiosyncratic cadences. Backed by that modernized Southern sound, the Dreamville duo continue to exist as insightful yet laidback stoners, the affable and cloud-shrouded deep thinkers who see through the smoke blown by politicians, police, and the like while trying to find their joy. Olu and WowGr8 will show up for a protest and show out for a pool party, their verses juggling incisive social commentary with comedy and the pursuit of physical pleasures. On *GHETTO GODS*, their second major-label effort, they dissect trauma (on the title track), mental health (“STRONG FRIENDS”), the ills of capitalism (“LIE TO ME”), and the lingering ramifications of slavery (“AMERICAN HORROR STORY”) with assists from Dreamville compatriots JID and J.Cole and fellow Atlantans like Future. Throughout, EARTHGANG maintain their impressive gift for addressing heavy subjects on bouncing songs that don\'t kill the vibe.

Harry Styles’ third solo album, *Harry’s House*, is the product of a chain reaction. Had the pandemic not thrown his world into a tailspin in early 2020, he would’ve continued to tour behind *Fine Line*, his critically adored sophomore album, and played its songs hundreds of times for sold-out crowds around the world. A return to the studio was planned, of course, but when COVID-19 canceled those plans too, Styles faced an empty calendar for the first time in a decade. The singer opted to use this free time carefully, taking a solo road trip through Italy and visiting with family and friends for rare long, drawn-out stretches. It was an important moment of reevaluation. “You miss so many birthdays,” he told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And eventually it\'s just assumed you\'re unable to be at stuff. Finally I was like, ‘I want to balance my life out a bit. Working isn’t who I am, it\'s something I do. I want to be able to put that down.’” His upbeat, lightly electronic third LP riffs on the concept of home, viewing it less as a geographical location and more as a state of mind—his mind. “Imagine it’s a day in my house, a day in my mind,” he said. “What do I go through? I’m playing fun music. I’m playing sad music. I have doubts. I’m feeling stuff.” Because of the pandemic, Styles recorded the songs with a small handful of longtime friends and close collaborators who gathered in a single room to drink wine, write, and play. That intimacy is reflected in the songs, which are conversational and casually confessional, as if he’s thinking out loud. Blending vintage folk rock with flickers of disco and a generally more relaxed sensibility, they illustrate a turning point in Styles’ career as he transitions even further towards career singer-songwriter. “For a while it was, how do I play that game of remaining exciting?” he says. “But I finally had a moment where I felt like, ‘Okay, I’m not the young thing, so I would like to really think about who I want to be as a musician.’” Read on for the inside story behind a handful of standout selections from *Harry’s House*. **“Music for a Sushi Restaurant”** “After *Fine Line*, I had an idea of how I thought the next album would open. But there\'s something about ‘Sushi’ that felt like, ‘Nah, *that\'s* how I want to start.’ It becomes really obvious what the first song should be based on what you play for people when they’re like, ‘Oh, can I hear a bit of the music?’ It\'s like, how do you want to set the tone?” **“Daylight”** “We were like, ‘We have to find a way to stay awake and finish this, because if we all go to bed, then this won’t turn out the way it would if we finished tonight.’ So we powered through, finished it, and went down to the beach as the sun was coming up and it was like, ‘Okay. Yeah.’ It felt correct that we\'d finished it in that place. Life, and songs in particular, are so much about moments. In surfing, for example, sometimes you don\'t get the wave and sometimes the wave comes and you haven\'t practiced. But every now and again, the wave comes and you’re ready, you\'ve practiced enough that you can ride it. Sometimes when the songs write themselves like that, it feels like, ‘Okay, there\'s a reason why sometimes I sit out there, falling off the board a bunch. It\'s for this moment.” **“As It Was”** “‘As It Was,’ to me, is bittersweet. It’s devastating. It\'s a death march. It’s about metamorphosis and a perspective change, which are not necessarily things you have time with. People aren’t like, ‘Oh, we\'ll give you a couple more days with this moment and let you say goodbye to your former self,’ or whatever. No. Everyone is changing, and by the time you realize what’s happened, \[the moment\] is already gone. During the pandemic, I think we all at some point realized that it would never be the same as it was before. It was so obvious that it wouldn’t. You can\'t go backwards—we can’t as a society and I can’t in my personal life. But you learn so much in those moments because you’re forced to face things head-on, whether they’re your least favorite things about the world or your least favorite things about yourself, or all of it.” **“Matilda”** “I had an experience with someone where, in getting to know them better, they revealed some stuff to me that was very much like, ‘Oh, that\'s not normal, like I think you should maybe get some help or something.’ This song was inspired by that experience and person, who I kind of disguised as Matilda from the Roald Dahl book. I played it to a couple of friends and all of them cried. So I was like, ‘Okay, I think this is something to pay attention to.’ It\'s a weird one, because with something like this, it\'s like, ‘I want to give you something, I want to support you in some way, but it\'s not necessarily my place to make it about me because it\'s not my experience.’ Sometimes it\'s just about listening. I hope that\'s what I did here. If nothing else, it just says, ‘I was listening to you.’” **“Boyfriends”** “‘Boyfriends’ was written right at the end of *Fine Line*. I\'d finished the album and there was an extra week where I wrote ‘Adore You,’ ‘Lights Up,’ and ‘Treat People With Kindness.’ At the end of the session for ‘Lights Up,’ we started writing ‘Boyfriends,’ and it felt like, ‘Okay, there\'s a version of this story where we get this song ready for this album.’ But something about it just felt like, no, it’ll have its time, let\'s not rush it. We did so many versions of it. Vocal. Acoustic. Electric guitar. Harmonies on everything, and then we took them out for chunks and put them back in for chunks. You try not to get ahead of yourself when you write a song, but there was something about this one where I felt like, ‘Okay, when I\'m 50, if I\'m playing a show, maybe there\'s someone who heard me for the first time when they were 15 and this is probably the song they came to see.’ Because I\'m learning so much by singing it. It’s my way of saying, ‘I’m hearing you.’ It’s both acknowledging my own behavior and looking at behavior I\'ve witnessed. I grew up with a sister, so I watched her date people, and I watched friends date people, and people don\'t treat each other very nicely sometimes.” **“Cinema”** “I think I just wanted to make something that felt really fun, honestly. I was on a treadmill going, ‘Do-do-do-do-do-do.’ I tend to do so much writing in the studio, but with this one, I did a little bit here and then I went home and added a little bit there, and then kind of left it, and then went into the studio to put it all together. That was a theme across the whole album, actually: We used to book a studio and be like, ‘Okay, we\'ve got it for two months, grind it out.’ But some days you just don\'t want to be there, and eventually you\'ve been in the studio so long, the only thing you can write about is nothing because you haven\'t done anything. So with this album, we’d work for a couple of weeks and then everyone would go off and live their lives.” **“Love of My Life”** “‘Love of My Life’ was the most terrifying song because it\'s so bare. It\'s so sparse. It’s also very much in the spirit of what *Harry\'s House* is about: I wanted to make an acoustic EP, all in my house, and make it really intimate. It’s named after \[the Japanese pop pioneer Haruomi\] Hosono, who had an album in the \'70s called *Hosono House*. I immediately started thinking about what *Harry’s House* might look like. It took time for me to realize that the house wasn\'t a geographical location, it was an internal thing. When I applied that concept to the songs we were making here, everything took on new meaning. Imagine it\'s a day in my house or a day in my mind. What do I go through? I\'m playing fun music. I\'m playing sad music. I\'m playing this, I\'m playing that. I have doubts. I’m feeling stuff. And it’s all mine. This is my favorite album at the moment. I love it so much. And because of the circumstances, it was made very intimately; everything was played by a small number of people and made in a room. To me, it\'s everything. It\'s everything I\'ve wanted to make.”

Chicago rapper/producer Saba’s first full-length since 2018’s critically acclaimed *CARE FOR ME* looks existentially inward instead of projecting outward. Whereas its predecessor was often perceived through the lens of grief, with his cousin John Walt’s tragic death weighing considerably on the proceedings, his third album explodes such listener myopia with a thoughtful and thought-provoking expression of American Blackness. Though its title might suggest scarcity on a surface level, these 14 songs exude richness in their textures and complexity in their themes. “Stop That” imbues its gauzy trap beat with self-motivating logic, while “Come My Way” gets to reminiscing over a laidback R&B groove. His choice of collaborators demonstrates a carefully curated approach, with 6LACK and Smino bringing a sense of community to the funk-infused “Still” and fellow Chicago native G Herbo helping to unravel multigenerational programming on the gripping “Survivor’s Guilt.” The presence of hip-hop elder statesman Black Thought on the title track only serves to further validate Saba’s experiences, the connection implicitly showing solidarity with sentiments and values of the preceding songs.

LA-based MC Yeat might only be getting his feet wet in the rap game, but he’s already long on confidence. “Everything I’m doing is just better than you,” he sings to doubters on *2 Alivë*’s “Jus bëtter.” *2 Alivë* is the MC’s first project of 2022, after having released three in 2021 alone (*Up 2 Më*, *4L*, *Alivë*). Fans of viral selections like *4L*’s “Sorry Bout That” will recognize Yeat’s penchant for slipping in and out of vintage Young Thug flows, but if the YSL general himself takes no issue with it (Thugger appears on the album’s “Outsidë”), how could we? As a young star on the rise, Yeat chooses mostly to rap about a life full of drugs, money, and mayhem, but what he says is less important than how he says it. The rapping (and singing) here is rarely hurried and mostly delivered over what sounds like 1990s video-game-inspired production. And still, full verses can be difficult to understand, a clear reminder that even as the flagship MC of burgeoning label Field Trip Recordings and maybe the most buzzed-about MC of the post-SoundCloud generation, Yeat is but a medium for the vibes.

What better vessel for Lil Durk’s most personal raps to date than an album named for the address of his beloved grandmother’s home? “7220, that’s where I went through it,” Durk says on the album’s “Headtaps.” “Like my first life experience, know what I mean.” He then goes on to rap about the time he wished he could watch cartoons with his children when he was locked up and how news of a cousin’s passing once sent him into a state of disbelief. Durk has seen more than his fair share of loss over the course of his young life, and *7220* is peppered with references to the many friends and family members he’s already outlived. Music-making has functioned as therapy for nearly every MC who’s ever picked up a mic, but you can’t help but feel for Durk listening to him talk about a real-life home invasion he suffered on “Shootout @ My Crib,” remind listeners that tomorrow isn’t promised to anyone on “Love Dior Banks,” or live out a revenge fantasy for friend and collaborator King Von on “AHHH HA.” Guests on *7220* include stars like Future, Gunna, Summer Walker, and, most peculiarly, country singer Morgen Wallen, who more than anything else serve as emblems of how far the MC has come since his childhood address.

Before this album even had a name, Buddy says he had always been working on it, always making music. He estimates it was around 70 percent complete before he even began to think about what to call it. “I’ve always just been trying to make the best songs and then consolidate,” the Compton rapper tells Apple Music. He describes his recording process as “sporadic,” but really it seems more like alchemy—a collection of minds transforming silence into magic, culture combusting into sound. “I was really just trying to assemble an amazing team of producers and instrumentalists,” he says. “Whether we jam out over a bunch of live instruments, or a producer comes and plays a bunch of different beats, I would just freestyle, catch a vibe instantly, and just double back and flush it into full records.” *Superghetto* is some of Buddy’s most engulfing work. His West Coast rap DNA is prevalent, as always, but it sounds more universal than ever, blended with jazz, R&B, and beachy pop. The cadences (“whatever’s on my heart in the moment”) and subject matter (“my day-to-day experience, remembering how things made me feel”) are varied and colorful. Sometimes, it’s the political ferocity of “Black 2”; at other times, it’s the carefree levity of “Happy Hour.” In his exploration and experimentation, he lands on something that signals evolution, both personal and creative. “These songs sound and feel bigger,” he says, “but it still sounds and feels like me at the same time—the instrumentation, the versatility, and the risks that I’m taking this time around.” Below, he explains the inspiration and production behind each of the album’s tracks. **“Hoochie Mama”** “I just feel \[‘Hoochie Mama’\] is what is known to be super ghetto. That is the most ghetto song on the album, I feel like. It’s just the essence of what I’m really trying to change the narrative of—because once you get into the album, it just feels a little different.” **“Ghetto 24” (feat. Tinashe)** “Me and Tinashe was working on music, and we made a bunch of different songs, and it was just one of those moments where we didn’t know what to work on, but we wanted to work on something. I was going through a bunch of beats, and we really liked that beat. It was the homie Axl Folie made that beat. She went in there and did her parts, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s hard.’ I started writing—I was trying to rap real good and just kind of got into it. I stepped away for a while to get the second verse and fine-tune the first to make it more album-worthy because it felt so current and ready for people to hear. We just caught a crazy vibe that day.” **“Wait Too Long” (feat. Blxst)** “Me and Blxst, we’ve been overdue to work for a while, and he really just carved his own lane and sound so perfect, it’s crazy. And for me to just resurface and start dropping music again, it just felt so right. It felt serendipitous that the song is called ‘Wait Too Long,’ because I feel like everybody’s been waiting too long for moments like this, for me and Blxst together. Only we can stand in the light that’s there for us. We was kicking it—Hollywood Cole made that beat. It was crazy. And Blxst did the hook. We was just vibing out, watching movies, playing chess, hanging out with a bunch of friends. I had to, again, step away and just really give my verses some love. I think I wrote three different verses just so it would be as good as the hook. I was listening to that hook by itself for a couple of weeks.” **“Black 2”** “It’s so funny because I don’t know what type of mode I be in when I be making these ‘Black’ records. I just am Black, so I’m always thinking about Black trauma, Black pride, Black enjoyment, Black excellence, Black everything all the time. It was just another day—I think it was during February, so I was just in the mood. The homie Roofeeo made that beat, and it was so tight. I was rapping real good that day, but I just try to talk about it from my perspective, which is less political and just more communal. From where I stand, on the inside looking out, everybody else is always trying to do some Black stuff that we be on in the first place. So, that’s the perspective that I was taking that day. I was working with the homie Kent \[Jamz\]—he helped me write the hook. We was paying homage to Malcolm X and Paul Mooney.” **“High School Crush”** “Shout-out to Axl Folie—he made that beat again. It was him and Leon Thomas. I was just in the singing mood that day. I was feeling all lovey-dovey—I don’t know, I might’ve had a new boo thing or something. It was just the same feeling as when you got that high school crush. So, I tried to turn a current event—just bridge it with a memory to capture the whole feeling of interest turning into infatuation into a full-on obsession in the heat of the moment. I just wanted to capsulize it and stay there in that moment forever. I was just rapping hella good. I was trying to sound like André 3000 on the rap.” **“Happy Hour” (feat. T-Pain)** “I just feel so honored to provide a canvas for such an artist to put some paint where it ain’t. T-Pain is such a legend, and I do enjoy myself a nice happy hour. I remember when I first turned 21, and I even found out about the concept—just being in a position to have my own money, hang out with friends, and just go out and buy food and drink for cheap. I was really just trying to capture that moment. We was for sure drinking when we made that song, and it was a bunch of live instrumentation. D’Mile made that beat, but we had Brody Brown come through with the bass, and then Robert Glasper did some stuff on there, Terrace Martin, Derrick Hodge played some guitar. It just happened so organically. It came together so cold. And then we got the T-Pain vocal, and he T-Pained it—Mr. Bartender, Mr. Buy U a Drank.” **“Coolest Things” (feat. Ari Lennox)** “I was working with D’Mile, and he made that beat so crazy, he barely talked that day. I was working with Jesse Boykins. He wrote the hook, and it resonated with me so deep. I feel like I’ve been cool before it was cool to be cool, and then cool got oversaturated, and now everybody trying to figure out what is this cool thing that anybody even speaks of because everything is just so watered down and not cool at all. I just was rapping about that and trying to talk about past love and just keep it super vague so people could attach their own moments to the same feelings that I am talking about in my verses.” **“Ain’t Fair”** “Organized Noize made that beat, and they some legends. They are just legendary producers. They lost the files and remade the beat, and it sounded even better. I was just trying to—it was a stream of consciousness that day when I was rapping. The beat-switch was so crazy. It was two separate beats that we pieced together because it just sounded tight. And I was just talking about how unfair it is to be in the position—just as artists or anybody in the public eye, it just seems like whatever happens, it don’t really make a difference for the consumer or the listener, but it always has to translate into an amazing song or some amazing art. It’s just not taking into account mental health or just a person’s emotions, all the invisible things that nobody really sees. It’s just not a fair position to be in. And everybody else, too, just a crazy, evil world we live in.” **“Bad News”** “\[Production trio\] 1Mind came to the studio, and I was just trying to try something different. They was playing a bunch of different beats, but when this one came on, I was just jamming out. The hook was there instantly, and I was like, ‘Hold on. Load this up. We need to do this.’ And then, I started mumbling different cadences for the verse, tried to paint a picture of some ghetto scenario that could happen in this amazing vibe of music. It just sets the tone for fun, but it’s just a crazy story, like how people who ain’t from the hood try to glorify hood shit.” **“Superghetto”** “I feel like I haven’t really put too much out there about my upbringing or myself in my raps. A lot of my raps are super vague and not really detailed of my story, so I just tried to be more introspective. I really set an intention to talk about things in my personal life that I haven’t talked about for whatever reason and just put it all in the music. I think it came out good. The beat is super—it’s not that many sounds, so it’s a lot of space for people to just hear what I’m saying.”

*I NEVER LIKED YOU*, the first Future project since his and Lil Uzi Vert’s *Pluto x Baby Pluto* and his first solo outing since 2020’s *High Off Life*, was likely titled to cause a stir. Future has been a poster boy for the kind of toxic romantic engagements that turn well-intentioned social media users into self-certified relationship experts since about the time of his split with one-time fiancée Ciara. But rather than defend his lifestyle choices in earnest or make a case for himself as misunderstood, he drops an album whose title posits him as either a vindictive lover or a victim of a betrayal. But Future is nobody’s victim. With *I NEVER LIKED YOU*, he\'s more likely a master of marketing. The album has far less to do with the rhetoric that surrounds his dating life than it does the MC’s lifestyle, drawing open the blinds within a single bar of “HOLY GHOST”: “I was in my big truck, my wrist up, getting my dick sucked.” The MC sounds as happy as ever across *I NEVER LIKED YOU*, lamenting only—in the rare instance that he laments—a perceived lack of credit for his stylistic influence (“I\'M DAT N\*\*\*A,” “PUFFIN ON ZOOTIEZ”). There are two instances, however, wherein his influence is wholly undeniable: “I’M ON ONE” and “KEEP IT BURNIN,” where Drake and Kanye West each take a turn paying tribute to one of their most cherished collaborators, rattling off volatile non sequiturs in classic Future style.

Rising MCs 42 Dugg and EST Gee may have declared themselves the *Last Ones Left* on their latest LP, but contextualizing what that means for the uninitiated isn’t the easiest thing to do. “It\'s like a group of people that\'s a certain type of way,” EST Gee told Apple Music\'s Ebro Darden just ahead of the album’s release. “And it ain\'t a whole lot. So it ain\'t just speaking of me and Dugg specifically, but like the group of us. Like it might not be no more members like us after.” Dugg and Gee, who hail from Detroit and Louisville respectively, built their fanbases over the past half decade in near lockstep, frequently appearing in the same playlists and also guesting on each other’s projects and those of peers they both enjoy. “We got so many songs together,” Gee says. “Both of us is artists in demand—in our general area, it\'s like a tie, Michigan and Kentucky. So it just makes sense.” With *Last Ones Left*’s robust 17 tracks, it’s clear the two enjoy making music with each other and are operating on a very similar wavelength. The project contains a handful of back-and-forth verses that express, in tandem, a penchant for forging their own mythology (“Spin,” “All 100s,” “Can’t Be Fucked With,” “Who Hotter Than Gee”), fair warning to their detractors (“Skcretch Sum,” “Everybody Shooters Too”), a considered regard for the people who look up to them (“My Yungin”), and a shared longing for loved ones locked behind bars (“Free the Shiners,” “Free Zoski”). Though they were unable to coordinate for the interview—Dugg, allegedly having missed three separate flights, dialed in by phone from a Prada store—they know each other well enough that Gee was able to predict (before Dugg joined the call) that he’d name the riotous “Thump Shit” as his favorite song from the project. “That\'s his theme song,” Gee said. “He wake up in the morning, they just start playing it over his house, as soon as he get up out of the bed.” Dugg confirmed it just as soon as he got on the phone. “If I was wrong, I was going to leave,” Gee added. But he wasn’t, so he didn’t. And they’d have one more thing to joke about the next time they got back in the studio with each other.

Latto (Alyssa Michelle Stephens) started rapping at 10, won Jermaine Dupri’s *The Rap Game* at 17, and released her debut album, *Queen of Da Souf*, at 21. Now 23, with a new rap moniker (dropping the controversial Mu- at the front of her title), she’s back with her sophomore LP, recorded across two years in Miami, LA, and Atlanta. “I’m reintroducing myself to the world on a clean slate,” she tells Apple Music. “I was adamant about its versatility, standing out as an artist—not just a female, but an artist in general.” And she’s accomplished that, with A-list collaborators (Lil Wayne and Childish Gambino on “Sunshine,” the Pharrell Williams-produced “Real One”), hard-as-hell empowerment bangers (“It’s Givin,” “Trust No Bitch”), and surprising sonic detours (Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” sample on her biggest track to date, “Big Energy”). “I hope people hear the passion,” she says of *777*, which she named as a reference to God and the lottery —“hitting the jackpot” in two different ways. “I’m serious about what I do. My heart is really in the music.” Below, she walks Apple Music through the album, track-by-track. **“777 Pt. 1” and “777 Pt. 2”** “I wanted to set the tone of the album. I knew the intro was going to be something very unique, heavy punch lines, very aggressive—real rapper aesthetic. I actually recorded ‘Pt. 2’ first, and as soon as I did that one, I knew that was the intro. Then, months after, I ended up doing a special \[song\] with Sonny Digital, what is now ‘777 Pt. 1.’ It gave me intro vibes, but I didn’t want to scrap the other intro that I already had.” **“Wheelie” (feat. 21 Savage)** “\[21 Savage and I\] already had a relationship because of my previous album. We had a song called ‘Pull Up.’ When I heard ‘Wheelie,’ after I did the first verse, I’m like, ‘I don’t even want to do the second verse,’ so I’m thinking of people that would be perfect for that sound. It reminded me of ‘Pull Up,’ as far as that sticky, choppy, catchy flow. He put the second verse on there, sent it right back. That’s Atlanta culture, strip-club culture—that’s the ratchet song, the turn-up song on the album.“ **“Big Energy”** “I did this one in LA. When I walked in the session, my A&R were talking about this beat that they wanted to play for me. It felt nostalgic, it felt big and super mainstream, commercial for me. I wanted to really just challenge myself. I was trying to catch the flow and figure out my tone on the beat for a week straight until I got it. And by the time I got it, I was like, ‘I think this is special.’” **“Sunshine” (feat. Lil Wayne and Childish Gambino)** “I still can’t even believe that I got them both on the song. I had originally recorded it as a solo song, but I felt like it was bigger than me. I wanted a feature on it. So, I’m thinking out loud. I’m thinking of very ‘artistic’ artists. I want somebody who has a universal sound and someone who can go more in-depth and play on the word ‘sunshine.’ Who is the clever rapper? I’m thinking of these names and I’m shooting for the stars. And to my surprise, both of them did the song request, which is like huge, huge, huge. I’m still a new artist. I’m from Atlanta, so Childish is extra special, and I just grew up on Wayne.” **“Like a Thug” (feat. Lil Durk)** “‘Like a Thug’ was one of the ones that I had been sleeping on it. I have had it in the vault since 2020. I just never gave up on the song. That’s a different sound for me, but I knew it had some special components to it, too. Come around to this year, and I rerecord it, fix it up, change a bar here and there. It’s so pretty, super radio, and I wanted it to still have edginess—that raw, uncut feel. Lil Durk, in my opinion, kills all the slow songs; he features on these slow R&B songs, girl songs. He eats them up. To my surprise, he did it, no questions asked.\" **“It’s Givin”** “In my opinion, it’s the sassy, girl-power song on the album. It’s so fun. That’s a girl anthem. When you making your videos on Instagram, walking in your heels, and you ready to go to the club—makeup done, hair done, nails done—this is the song. This is the song you going to be playing, adding behind your videos and stuff. It’s just boss bitch, bad bitch energy.” **“Stepper” (feat. Nardo Wick)** “‘Stepper’ was another one of those that I had originally in mind as a solo song. I actually freestyled this song—I was in the booth, just going part to part, punching in; it was just getting more aggressive. I was like, ‘You know what? I feel like I need a male to offset my energy. I feel like I hear Nardo Wick on this.’ I’m a fan of his music. Then I found out we was labelmates, so I’m like, ‘Oh, y’all got to make this happen.’ Nardo jumped on there and when I heard his verse, I fell in love. This song, from jump, I never second-guessed it.” **“Trust No Bitch”** “‘Trust No Bitch’ is my personal favorite. Sitting in the studio one day, it’s close to album wrap-up time. I’m just seeing what else I have left in me. It’s just me and the engineer. I’m going through beats and I’m not finding anything that’s jumping out at me. Soon as I played this beat, I sent it to the engineer, like, ‘Pull it up right now. I’m going in the booth.’ The aggression literally was just flowing out of my mouth. And it’s a buildup of all my experiences—I’m growing up as a woman and an artist at the same time. So, I think it’s just a buildup of all the relationships and friendships that I’ve been through that make people skate on thin ice around me. Everybody can’t be trusted.“ **“Bussdown” (feat. Kodak Black)** “I recorded that song in Miami. One of my A&Rs, they had a relationship with \[Kodak’s\] engineer. I wasn’t mad at the idea at all. So, I gave them the green light to send it over to him, and he sent the verse back the next day. He was super excited to do it. I fell in love with the verse.\" **“Soufside”** “‘Soufside’ came about because I never wanted to go too mainstream or commercial with my music. I never wanted to get away from my roots and the sound that made me who I am. So, after I dropped ‘Big Energy,’ I was very adamant about dropping another song that offset it a little bit, just so people know that I’m not forgetting where I came from. ‘Soufside’ is like, ‘OK, I got all these new eyes on me. “Big Energy” is bubbling and it’s reeling in a new fanbase, so let me tell these people who I am, where I’m from, and how I get down.’” **“Sleep Sleep”** “On the verse, I did a flow that I had never done before. For that one, I just set the lights in the studio to a moody light. There wasn’t any yellow or white lights in the studio or the booth. I’m literally just feeling things about what goes down in the bedroom.” **“Real One”** “Pharrell produced ‘Real One.’ I could not believe that he even wanted to work with me. I pulled up on him for a week straight and we cut five, six songs. This was my favorite out of the songs that we did. I definitely couldn’t *not* put a Pharrell-produced song on my album. I think it’s just one of those songs that girls can relate to. Men make mistakes, and sometimes they don’t really realize what they lost or realize what they had.”

“I like to prepare myself and prepare the surroundings to work my music,” Bad Bunny tells Apple Music about his process. “But when I get a good idea that I want to work on in the future, I hold it until that moment.” After he blessed his fans with three projects in 2020, including the forward-thinking fusion effort *EL ÚLTIMO TOUR DEL MUNDO*, one could forgive the Latin superstar for taking some time to plan his next moves, musically or otherwise. Somewhere between living out his kayfabe dreams in the WWE and launching his acting career opposite the likes of Brad Pitt, El Conejo Malo found himself on the beach, sipping Moscow Mules and working on his most diverse full-length yet. And though its title and the cover’s emoting heart mascot might suggest a shift into sad-boy mode, *Un Verano Sin Ti* instead reveals a different conceptual aim as his ultimate summer playlist. “It\'s a good vibe,” he says. “I think it\'s the happiest album of my career.” Recorded in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, the album features several cuts in the same elevated reggaetón mode that largely defined *YHLQMDLG*. “Efecto” and “Un Ratito” present ideal perreo opportunities, as does the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Rauw Alejandro team-up “Party.” Yet, true to its sunny origins, *Un Verano Sin Ti* departs from this style for unexpected diversions into other Latin sounds, including the bossa nova blend “Yo No Soy Celoso” and the dembow hybrid “Tití Me Preguntó.” He embraces his Santo Domingo surroundings with “Después De La Playa,” an energizing mambo surprise. “We had a whole band of amazing musicians,” he says about making the track with performers who\'d typically play on the streets. “It\'s part of my culture. It\'s part of the Caribbean culture.” With further collaborations from familiars Chencho Corleone and Jhayco, as well as unanticipated picks Bomba Estéreo and The Marías, *Un Verano Sin Ti* embodies a wide range of Latin American talent, with Bad Bunny as its charismatic center.

Midway through 2020, Alex O’Connor felt like he had to get out. The artist trading as Rex Orange County was done with the claustrophobia and frustrations of lockdown. So, once restrictions allowed, he got in the car with a friend and left the UK for Amsterdam, intending to spend a couple of days smoking and hanging out with Dutch singer-songwriter Benny Sings. As they had done on Rex’s breakthrough track “Loving Is Easy” in 2017, the pair ended up making music together, crafting the warm pop of “KEEP IT UP.” “It’s probably very inspired by feeling like I *didn’t* want to keep it up and didn’t feel very good,” O’Connor tells Apple Music. “So I wanted something motivational, some kind of an affirmation.” It was such a rejuvenating experience that he returned later in the year, spending another 10 days shaping the rest of his fourth album with Benny Sings as co-producer. “He’s an incredibly productive force,” says O’Connor. “Every day, it’s like four or five ideas. His choice of chords, his instrumentation, the sense, his vocals, his melodies, everything—I love his music. We’re cut from the same cloth.” Their union forged a set of songs that amp up the orchestral flourishes in Rex’s music (he was listening to a lot of Romantic-era classical while making the record), and just as wanderlust had taken him to Amsterdam in the first place, there’s a restlessness discernible throughout. “THE SHADE” finesses his blend of confessional bedroom soul and melodic soft rock, but “IF YOU WANT IT” drags that formula to the club on a bed of bone-rattling synths. “WORTH IT,” meanwhile, suggests Bond-theme aspirations with its grand strings and crisp beats. Rex is equally unseated in his heart and head. Love is a source of both celebration (“AMAZING”) and anxious uncertainty (“THE SHADE”). And if the frustrating inertia of the pandemic era hangs heavy on the Tyler, The Creator collaboration “OPEN A WINDOW,” a moment of life-affirming clarity pokes through the title track. It’s just the ups and downs of existence—a duality reflected in an album title that can be read as a blithe brush-off or a sincere plea. “That’s precisely the point,” he says. “It’s both, and I seem to swing between both. I’m always two sides of everything. There’s been many, many times where I’ve thought I don’t care—when I’m feeling positive and when I’m feeling negative. But there were way more times where I’ve been thinking, ‘Who really cares? I wanna know who cares.’ I do care about what people think. I care about what I do. I’m doing it for a reason.” Ultimately, *WHO CARES?* is the sound of creative doors opening, an overture to further musical adventures. “My favorite albums are when artists really change it up,” O’Connor says. “This feels like one side, but I’d want people to know that beyond *WHO CARES?*, there’s a whole other side that I’m working on that’s very, very exciting.”

In the five years between Syd’s solo debut, *Fin*, and its follow-up, the singer-songwriter experienced her first major heartbreak. It upended her world right as our social lives were already contracting under the weight of the pandemic, giving her plenty of time to mourn and then heal. Most of the songs on *Broken Hearts Club*, despite its name, were written before that, when she was still swaddled in the bliss of deep, reciprocal love. What results is a conceptual evolution of romance and its subsequent unraveling, traced over the course of the album. “CYBAH” (as in “could you break a heart”—one of the few songs written after the fact) captures the ambivalence of catching feelings, as fear begins to give way to surrender. Warm fuzzy feelings abound. They\'re in the ecstasy of “Fast Car,” an ode to not-so-secret rendezvous and stolen kisses, and the sentimental delight of “Sweet” and “Control,” both emblems of infatuation transforming into safety and comfort. Around “Out Loud”—a gorgeous plea to be desired and adored without shame which becomes especially cogent through the voices of Syd and Kehlani, both of whom are gay—cracks begin to emerge, before the all-out shattering of “Goodbye My Love.” Love is a risk and deserves music that reflects as much, and likewise, within the space of *Broken Hearts Club*, Syd shows up more vulnerable than ever. The lilt of her voice shifts forward, front and center to sing the kind of lyrics that could only come from real-life inspiration. There\'s no hiding here. It may be her most personal album to date, but it resonates far beyond.

Silky-smooth vocals and alt-R&B jams ignite an assured debut LP.

Ella Mai knows her way around a love song. We\'ve known that for years—certainly since her 2017 single “Boo\'d Up” proved a breakout sensation—but her second album cements her as one of R&B\'s preeminent heart healers. *Heart on My Sleeve* is filled with the kind of desperate pleas and resolute statements of adoration that could soften even the hardest of hearts. With a voice made of satin and honey, she sings of love in the way so many wish to feel it—vulnerable and terrified yet thoroughly convinced it\'s worth it. The lead singles, “DFMU” (which stands for “don\'t fuck me up”) and “Leave You Alone” (“I can\'t leave you alone,” goes the staccato and Auto-Tune hook), were the perfect appetizers for what proves to be a buffet of tender devotion intertwined with blind infatuation. On the gorgeous “Break My Heart,” Mai welcomes the heartache if it means feeling the rush for even a second: “Face my fears, ’cause if I had to choose who could break my heart, baby, it would be you,” she confesses on the hook. “Fallen Angel” literally invokes the heavens with a cameo from a Kirk Franklin-led choir that slides seamlessly into the lament of “How,” which, despite its grievances, still manages an optimistic bent. Elsewhere, tracks like “Pieces” and “A Mess” are about leaning into a person and the feelings they stir up, even when it doesn\'t necessarily make sense. The songs here aren\'t naive to the problems or immune to the pain, but instead reflect someone choosing love again and again. It\'s far too easy to keep our walls up—and in a voice note at the end of “Sink or Swim,” Mary J. Blige in fact implores us to “guard that heart” from those who don\'t deserve us—but *Heart on My Sleeve* also reminds us of the potential rewards that await on the other side.

Michigan street rap has been experiencing a renaissance in recent years; on the Detroit native’s most ambitious album yet, Babyface Ray hopes to parlay a decade of regional success into national stardom. As an MC, he’s equal parts hustler and Zen master: “Nah, I ain’t trap, I’m just moving off survival/Tryna figure out how to sell the church Bibles,” he murmurs on “Me, Wife & Kids” in his mellow, understated way. On *FACE*, he splits the difference between the funky, rough-edged gangster tales his hometown is known for (“Sincerely Face,” “Richard Flair”) and big-name collabs that aim to infiltrate the mainstream (“Dancing With the Devil” and “Kush & Codeine,” which feature, respectively, Pusha T and Wiz Khalifa). But the highlights are somewhere in between, like “Overtime,” an unlikely meetup with Swedish sadboi Yung Lean that submerges rubbery Detroit basslines in spacey atmospherics so weird it works.

During his time in the public eye, Japanese fashion icon Nigo has been a man of few words and famously great taste. Both traits are intact across 2022’s *I Know NIGO!*, a compilation album where the BAPE founder taps a small handful of his favorite hip-hop artists, all of whom have been spotted in the designer’s fashions over the years. The verses, however, are hardly drip-dependent. *I Know NIGO!* features multiple appearances from coke-rap devotee Pusha T, Nigo’s BBC and Ice Cream labels business partner Pharrell, and Tyler, The Creator and A$AP Rocky, who, outside of their respective solo outings, deliver a rap-off on “Lost and Found Freestyle 2019” in the tradition of the pair’s 2018 track “Potato Salad.” Elsewhere, there are mosh-pit-ready big-room anthems from Lil Uzi Vert and A$AP Ferg (“Heavy,” “Paper Plates”), one of the most well-enunciated verses of ATL spitter Gunna’s entire career (“Functional Addict”), a little hip-house from Nigo’s own group Teriyaki Boyz (“Morë Tonight”), and a rock-solid reminder of why Pop Smoke remains the face of Brooklyn drill rap a full two years after his death (“Remember”). There’s a lot to digest within the album’s 11 tracks, but Nigo was on the same mission here as he was when creating the BAPE pieces that superfans still scour the internet for: He was making something intended to outlast any single season.

Before becoming a progenitor in the microgenre chillwave—defined by a 2000s indie rock culture obsessed with 1980s electro-synth sounds and nostalgic, dreamy bedroom pop—Toro y Moi (Chazwick Bradley “Chaz Bear” Bundick) was known for his experimental production, leading to a long run of widely lauded albums. *MAHAL* is his seventh, its title taken from the Tagalog word for “expensive.” It\'s also a good time in 13 songs, from the Parliament funk of “Postman” and the psychedelic percussion of “Clarity” to the garage-psych of “The Medium” featuring New Zealand band Unknown Mortal Orchestra and the smoky “Mississippi.” If chillwave was a flash-in-the-pan moment, Toro Y Moi has long since survived it.

The 13-track project marks the seventh studio album from Bear under the Toro y Moi moniker. To celebrate the announcement, Toro y Moi shares two singles from the forthcoming record "Postman" b/w "Magazine." Each of the new singles arrives with accompanying visuals. "Postman," directed by Kid. Studio, sees Toro and friends riding around the colorful San Francisco landscape in his Filipino jeepney, seen on the cover of MAHAL. "Magazine," directed by Arlington Lowell, sees Toro and Salami Rose Joe Louis, who supplies vocals on the track, dressed vibrantly in a photo studio spliced with various colorful graphics and playful edits. MAHAL's announcement and singles arrive on the heels of Toro's highly celebrated 2019 album Outer Peace, which Pitchfork described as "one of his best albums in years" along with his Grammy-nominated 2020 collaboration with Flume, "The Difference," which was also featured in a global campaign for Apple's Airpods. Today's releases mark the first from Toro y Moi since signing to Secretly Group label Dead Oceans. Dead Oceans is an independent record label established in 2007 featuring luminaries like Japanese Breakfast, Khruangbin, Phoebe Bridgers, Bright Eyes, Mitski, Slowdive and more. Toro y Moi is the 12+ year project of South Carolina-reared, Bay Area-based Chaz Bear. In the wake 2008’s global economic collapse, Toro y Moi emerged as a figurehead of the beloved sub-genre widely known as chillwave, the sparkling fumes of which still heavily influence musicians all over today. Over the subsequent decade, his music and graphic design has far, far surpassed that particular designation. Across 9 albums (6 studio as Toro y Moi along with a live album, compilation and mixtape) with the great Carpark label, he has explored psych-rock, deep house, UK hip-hop; R&B and well-beyond without losing that rather iconic, bright and shimmering Toro y Moi fingerprint. As a graphic designer, Bear has collaborated with brands like Nike, Dublab and Van’s. And as a songwriter and producer, he’s collaborated with other artists like Tyler, The Creator, Flume, Travis Scott, HAIM, and Caroline Polachek.

There was a time, not long ago, when a DJ Drama-helmed *Gangsta Grillz* mixtape was maybe the most official declaration of a hip-hop artist’s arrival. Though Drama would exit the mixtape game to develop stars like Lil Uzi Vert and Jack Harlow—the *Gangsta Grillz* brand fully intact—contemporary rap has yet to find a replacement for “Mr. Thanksgiving” popping his shit at the beginning (and end) of the whole of a mixtape’s tracks. Someone with the star power of Dreamville label head J. Cole needn’t have called on Drama—in this day and age or any other—to affirm his standing in hip-hop, but their collaborative *D-Day: A Gangsta Grillz Mixtape* is a victory for fans of either era. To be clear, Cole’s Dreamville team knows how to put a mixtape together. Look no further than 2019’s *Revenge of the Dreamers III*, a project whose recording process became the talk of the industry before it’d even come out. But with *D-Day*, the crew pays tribute to an institution while realizing the mission of every hip-hop mixtape ever released: reaffirming that the MCs therein are skilled enough to hold your attention even when outside of “album mode.” *D-Day* is an undiluted showcase for Dreamville’s very dynamic roster, providing plenty of space for under-heralded MCs like Bas, Lute, Cozz, Omen, and EARTHGANG to bar up, making time for Ari Lennox to cosplay as young Mary J. Blige (“Coming Down”), and then allowing the big boss man J. Cole to go straight savage on the gleefully nihilistic “Freedom of Speech.” The guest verses here are just as rewarding as they are surprising, and include sets from A$AP Ferg, 2 Chainz, Young Nudy, and long under-regarded LA gangsta rap traditionalist G Perico. If this differs from previous *Gangsta Grillz* tapes, it’s because the agenda here is not to anoint the collective as a force to be reckoned with. The reality is that they’ve been a force, and also that they’ve already managed to leap the contemporary version of that marker, in having their very own Dreamville music festival.

Veteran New Orleans rapper Curren$y brags different. It’s maybe the singular thing that protects him from an inadvertently dismissive label like “everyman MC.” When he talks about about how well he’s doing—as he does early and often across *Continuance*, his collaborative album with producer The Alchemist—he does so in a way that bypasses leaving a listener feeling inadequate. Curren$y’s raps are a celebration of taste—in automobiles, clothing, jewelry, weed, women—and you can hear, in that signature laidback flow set to expertly chopped jazz loops, an implied invitation for you to join him. The guests here don’t necessarily have the same reputation for affability (Boldy James, Havoc, Styles P, Babyface Ray, to name a few), but they sound just as happy as Curren$y to be rapping over The Alchemist’s production.

When Jack Harlow settled in to record “Movie Star,” something had been weighing on his heart: “I’m done faking humble, actin’ like I ain’t conceited/’Cause, bitch, I am conceited, you know you can’t defeat it,” he rapped. It’s a wonder he held out as long as he did. By the time of *Come Home the Kids Miss You*’s release, he’d been a performing guest on *SNL*, been called “Top 5 out right now” by one Kanye West, and released his Fergie-sampling, TikTok-conquering “First Class.” But as he remarks on that very song, life has been moving maybe quicker than he can comprehend. “They say, \'You a superstar now,\' damn, I guess I am,” he raps. “You might be the man, well, that\'s unless I am/Okay, I\'ll confess I am.” *Come Home the Kids Miss You* is Harlow coming to terms with his still-ascending star, reflections on his position sandwiched between meticulous wordplay and appeals for affection (“I’d Do Anything to Make You Smile,” “Side Piece,” “Lil Secret,” “Like a Blade of Grass”). It’s a series of diary entries authored by the coolest kid in school, and, as such, is not without moments of self-doubt. “Am I fancy enough?/Am I dancing enough?/Am I handsome enough?/Tell me right now so I can be enough,” he raps on “Young Harleezy.” But don’t think for a minute that Harlow isn’t also having heaps of fun. He’s called on people he likely once considered musical heroes for guest slots (Pharrell, Drake, Justin Timberlake, Lil Wayne), and if album closer “State Fair” is to be believed, Harlow’s been working so hard for so long that he’s finally ready to celebrate.