Some version of half of the songs on YNW Melly’s *Just a Matter of Slime* was available to stream before the album’s actual release, a strategy clearly in service of keeping the incarcerated star’s name in the streets. Despite the very heinous accusations of orchestrating the 2018 murders of friends and crew members YNW Juvy and YNW Sakchaser, Melly remains as popular as ever, especially within industry circles, this particular project boasting collaborations with Lil Uzi Vert (“Mind of Melvin”), Lil Baby and Lil Durk (“Take Kare”), and Kodak Black (“Thugged Out”), among others. These collabs, likely ideated while Melly was free and reportedly finished with the MC’s input via jail phone call, sound nothing if not organic, Melly’s froggy warble serving as a remarkably dependable bridge between voices both hard (Kevin Gates, Hotboii) and soft (Queen Naija, Lil Tjay). Melly, here, is as much “the menace” as he’s ever claimed to be, something that can strike a nerve in a particularly unsettling manner when you hear him say things like “I’m a real n\*\*\*a, I can kill who I want to” on “Loving My Life.”
Rod Wave knows exactly who he is. “I got skills in other things, but rich off rapping pain,” he admits in the title track from his third album, *SoulFly*. That title contains multitudes in that Wave’s music obviously comes from his soul, and he is objectively fly, and then there is the fact that he’s continuously singing about the time after his eventual passing when his soul can *actually* fly free. In fact, Wave is remarkably productive for someone who’d have you believe he’s constantly in the throes of anguish. (The singer has released at least one project a year since 2016’s *Hunger Games*, amassing a fanbase whose penchant for making jokes about the glumness of his music is dwarfed only by their dedication to streaming it.) “If you can’t feel my pain, this ain’t for you anyways,” Wave sings on “Don’t Forget.” You’d think that the hard times he saw as a child, the constant betrayals he’d know as an adult, or the pressure he’s under as his family’s breadwinner might actually come close to breaking him, but Wave sounds like he is in a better space than he’s been in a long time. “I just be telling ’bout my pain,” he says on “Calling.” “I just be thinking, reminiscing ’bout that shit/I numb the pain with the money/I don’t feel pain, too much money.”
*This album includes content in Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos.* Before they dropped *Culture III*, Atlanta’s Migos declared it the final entry in the franchise. They’d long established themselves as hip-hop trendsetters and needed only to complete the trilogy before moving on to the next phase of their near decade-long chart domination. And with this last installment, Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff made sure fans understood that they’re fully in tune with everything that’s happening in rap. *Culture III* is 19 songs of the world they oversee, packed with the most beloved voices in contemporary rap—besides their own, of course. The’ve amassed features from Drake, Cardi B, Future, Justin Bieber (less of a surprise than it once was), and two of hip-hop’s most revered fallen stars, Pop Smoke and Juice WRLD. If you’re surprised that a group of three would create space for that many guests on a project where their own voices get near equal run time, you’re clearly unfamiliar with how self-assured the group is. “Last time I checked we were running the globe,” Quavo raps on “Modern Day.” If the excitement drummed up by lead single “Straightenin” was any indication, this is unlikely to change before the next time he checks. *All Apple Music subscribers using the latest version of Apple Music on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV can listen to thousands of Dolby Atmos Music tracks using any headphones. When listening with compatible\* Apple or Beats headphones, Dolby Atmos Music will play back automatically when available for a song. For other headphones, go to Settings > Music > Audio and set the Dolby Atmos switch to “Always On.” You can also hear Dolby Atmos Music using the built-in speakers on compatible\*\* iPhones, iPads, and MacBook Pros, or by connecting your Apple TV 4K to a compatible TV or AV receiver. Android is coming soon. \*AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, BeatsX, Beats Solo3, Beats Studio3, Powerbeats3, Beats Flex, Powerbeats Pro, and Beats Solo Pro \*\*Works with iPhone 7 or later with the latest version of iOS; 12.9-inch iPad Pro (3rd generation or later), 11-inch iPad Pro, iPad (6th generation or later), iPad Air (3rd generation), and iPad mini (5th generation) with the latest version of iPadOS; and MacBook (2018 model and later).*
In late December 2020, Pennsylvania MC Lil Skies was fed up. He posted a note to an Instagram story to clarify something for his followers: “Y’all gotta stop wishing i was the same person & made the same music,” it read. “I can’t be that same person i was three years ago. my life on a whole other type of time now, this be my last time addressing this.” That last part wasn’t entirely true, though, because roughly a month later, Skies would double down on just how far he’s come as a person and an artist with *Unbothered*. To Skies’ credit, the album is a purposeful step away from the somber crooning of early hits like “Red Roses” and “Nowadays.” He hasn’t abandoned the energy of those songs altogether (see “Red Wine & Jodeci” or “Sky High”), but *Unbothered* in particular is built mostly on two defining principles: stunting on doubters (“Take 5,” “Dead Broke,” “Trust Nobody”) and enjoying the life Skies has made for himself (“Havin My Way,” “Ok,” “On Sight”). In all, it’s a project that won’t surprise fans of more recent releases like “Lightbeam” or “Bad Girls,” but one we’ll surely be able to use in the future to chart the MC’s evolution.
Tkay Maidza described the first EP in her Last Year Was Weird trilogy as “daytime,” with the darker and heavier and more introspective *Vol. 2* as “nighttime.” *Vol. 3*, the final chapter, then, could be considered the following day. A year later, this final chapter sees her finding resolve and acceptance, and the confidence to move on. “I believe that by the end of the trilogy, I should understand what I want to do,” she says. “The music I’m making now is more like what I listen to. I wanted my perception and the way I feel to match up.” Musically, *Vol. 3* draws on the strongest moments from each—opener “Eden” is warm and dreamy, while “So Cold” is bright and bouncy, addressed to a former lover who she describes as “a waste of time.” “High Beams,” on the other hand, takes aim at haters and everyone who tried bringing her down, while “Syrup” is gritty and hard-hitting, all pride and bravado: “I just wanna be rich, thick, sweet, sick, syrup,” she raps over a deep, low beat. Final track “Breathe” ends the trilogy with fittingly confident reflection: “They didn’t think that I could see, they underestimated me,” she sings over sparse production, later yearning for her friends and family, and a time when she wasn’t so busy. “Can we just stay here?” she sings over dreamy synths. “I don’t mind at all, I just need you.”
In Bryson Tiller\'s hands, Christmas music gets a sexy and soulful twist, nostalgic but decidedly modern. Perhaps that\'s why his holiday offering is titled *A Different Christmas*—there are few standards and no bells or holly, but the singer nevertheless captures the spirit. Songs like “be mine this christmas” and “presents,” which features Kiana Ledé, check off all the lyrical staples of the season while also doubling as the kind of R&B songs that have replay value long after the tree is taken down. Elsewhere, his take on “i\'ll be home for christmas,” a dulcet a cappella ballad, and “winter wonderland,” a wholesome duet with his daughter Halo, maintain their familiarity without sacrificing personal touch. There are few clichés here despite the conspicuousness of the theme, and true to memorable holiday albums of the past, Tiller\'s take ultimately feels true to the artist who made it.
The title of Headie One’s fourth solo mixtape, *Too Loyal for My Own Good*, first arose in conversation between the Tottenham MC and his sister—keeping up the family theme after he dedicated his 2020 debut album, *EDNA*, to the memory of his late mother. In truth, no definitive answer is found to his sibling’s observations across the tracks they inspired. Instead, Headie One considers the implications and underlying factors of this—asking not for sympathy, but permission to dismiss the pack mentality of his past. “I put my life on the line for the mandem/I went to jail and felt like I was abandoned,” he reveals on the JAE5-produced “Finer Things.” Though a firm collaborative streak runs through Headie One’s rise, including a chart-storming meet with Drake on his debut and the joint project *GANG* with Fred again.. in 2020, and a trio of tapes with OFB partner RV, it’s all in the past for Headie. Here, on such a soul-searching project, he can only go it alone. *Too Loyal for My Own Good* trades in painful memories and laments on the misfortunes of those around him to better grasp his own nature. Guided by truthful self-dialogue and immersed in familiar production sounds (Quincytellem, M1onthebeat, The Elements), Headie One obsesses on settling old scores (“2 Chains”) and the need to outgrow the much-publicized issues of his past (“PTSD”) while also rejecting the trappings of his rising fame (“Nothing to Me”). Credited with widening the framework of the drill sound, Headie One racks newly polished drill anthems around unmistakable sample flips of ’90s Busta Rhymes hits (“Cry”) and a PARTYNEXTDOOR mixtape cut (“Long Knight in Knightsbridge”). The closing track—an alluring confessional of thumping bass notes and somber thoughts—draws shut this self-examination with the conviction that changing your ways is necessary and essential for survival.
A Boogie wit da Hoodie fans have come to distinguish between his A Boogie and Artist musical personalities as equally essential sides of the Bronx-hailing MC: A Boogie is the worry-free rock star, while Artist (Boogie’s government name) is the eternally heartbroken R&B singer. Before we get what he’s billed as a showdown of these voices (the tentatively named *A Boogie vs Artist* project), A Boogie delivers a seven-song appetizer in *B4 AVA* to give fans a taste of what they can expect. He’s tapped a few dependable hitmakers for production (Smash David, OG Parker, Murda Beatz) and includes a single guest verse from Lil Durk (bonus cut “24 Hours”), but whether it’s A Boogie or Artist, *B4 AVA* is one of NYC’s most beloved MCs putting it down exactly the way he wants to.
“*Back of My Mind* is accepting the vulnerability—being able to quiet the noise around me and listen to my own voice,” H.E.R. shares in the short film that accompanies her debut album. “It\'s the many layers that make me, me. It\'s all of the things that we\'re kind of afraid to share, afraid to say, afraid to do.” Within the opening minutes, on “We Made It,” that sentiment is clear, as the multi-hyphenate singer-songwriter drinks in the moment and the success that\'s taken her from nights she was uncertain to the Grammy stage and beyond. The percussion is crisp, and her guitar wails through a solo, and right away, we\'re engrossed in the lush, technical precision that has made H.E.R. one of the most gifted musicians of her generation. Over the course of the album\'s 21 songs, she offers the many modes which make up H.E.R. Sultry slow jams run up against funky grooves while stripped-back ballads exist alongside trap beats—together, they span the modern history of R&B and position H.E.R. as both a student of the genre and a bellwether in her own right. “There were a lot of records on this album that I realized were like elevated versions of songs on my first projects, *Vol. 1* and *Vol. 2*, where sonically, it\'s vibey. It\'s like that alternative, kind of new R&B sound,” she says in the film. “But with live instrumentation, it just took it to another level. It\'s a celebration of all things that make R&B—the different aspects, the different sounds of R&B. R&B is the foundation of all music.” Over the years, H.E.R.\'s work within the genre has only grown more expansive. Where once she was an artist defined by her anonymity, she\'s now unafraid of her own light, a full-fledged star whose versatility is matched only by her musicality. *Back of My Mind* effectively captures her at, arguably, the most brilliant, confident, and freewheeling she\'s ever been. In an often overprogrammed world, it\'s the instrumentation that takes the project to another level—the space where she\'s finally able to fully express herself. “This album is representing this freedom of creativity that people are now accepting of me,” she says. “Music is my playground, and I can do whatever I want.”
Longtime fans of Drakeo the Ruler know that the Los Angeles MC doesn’t need much to create an album. He made his breakthrough project, 2017’s *Cold Devil*, over the course of 10 days following an 11-month jail stint stemming from a gun charge. The acclaimed *Thank You for Using GTL* mixtape was recorded entirely over the phone—by way of the tape’s namesake collect-call service—while Drakeo was held at LA’s Men’s Central Jail. Just a month after being released from that same jail sentence, Drakeo delivered *We Know the Truth*. The synergy of *The Truth Hurts*, which arrived some two months after *We Know the Truth*, should come as little surprise to those who know how the MC works. The unflinching menace of Drakeo projects past is fully intact across *The Truth Hurts*, the Ruler confessing that he’s in “war mode” as soon as “Intro,” threatening—among more conventional methods of attack—to pull his enemies’ teeth out with pliers. On “10” he tells us, “I grab Jenny from the block, we finna slow dance/This nina kiss a n\*\*\*a when it’s time to romance.” Drakeo’s unique sense of humor is ever-present and immediately recognizable here in the form of song titles like “It’s Sum Shit on Me,” “Engineer Scared” (as in “we got the engineer scared”), and “Pow Right in the Kisser,” where every bar is punctuated by that refrain. For beats, he’s tapped the handful of producers defining the sound of contemporary Los Angeles street rap (RonRonTheProducer, Thank You Fizzle, LowTheGreat), along with names like Wheezy, Bankroll Got It, and Duse Beatz. By the time Drake pops up for “Talk to Me,” the voice we’ve heard the most outside of Drakeo’s is that of fallen comrade Ketchy the Great, showing us that as his star rises ever higher, his priority remains the brothers who didn’t make it far enough to experience the acclaim.
Duality is the spice of life, and Alicia Keys’ eighth studio album, a double release, is all about leaning into her own. For an artist with over two decades’ worth of work under her belt, that means considerations of both time and style. In one breath, she wanted to pay homage, as she explains to Apple Music\'s Ebro: “The goal was to own my greatness, to own the shoulders that I stand on, to recognize the classic, iconic artists that I couldn\'t even breathe without.” And in another, she wanted to honor the love and lineage she shares with hip-hop by sampling herself to reveal those songs anew. Thus, she divides *KEYS* between a first half she calls “Originals” and a second half titled “Unlocked.” “Originals” is largely a showcase of the singer-songwriter\'s essence that leans heavily towards jazz. In her own words, it was “born off the simplicity of a piano, of a pen, and of a voice,” and songs like “Love When You Call My Name,” “Daffodils,” and “Like Water” reflect this spirit with artful elegance. The first half functions as a throwback to her classic sounds—all raw emotion, grit, and soul. The “Unlocked” section takes bits and pieces of the first and reconfigures them, often into slightly bigger sounds with the help of producer Mike WiLL Made-It. Analog melodies and understated arrangements are met with programmed bass or lines of synth; the magnificent speakeasy texture of “Old Memories” morphs into an \'80s dance club, while the gorgeous and solemn blues of “Is It Insane” (a song written during Keys\' *Diary* era) becomes something more sultry. Through it all, the qualities that made Keys a showstopper remain. Whether acoustic and raw or highly produced and polished, she performs in service of a vision that is now, as it was then, transcendent and uniquely her own—two sides of the same invaluable coin.
D Smoke knows that not everyone understands who he is yet. There’s a brief interlude tacked on to the end of “Road Rage,” from the Inglewood MC’s sophomore album *War & Wonders*, where a purported music fan states as much in a frustrated tone: “First he talking Spanish, then he tryna lead the masses, next thing you know he with the gangstas. Like, what is he really on?” The short answer: all of those things, and then some. As a former high school Spanish instructor, he can, indeed, rap in Spanish, the way he did on his way to winning the Netflix reality show *Rhythm + Flow* and also here on “Dirty Mercedes.” Additionally, he’d love to be able to “lead the masses” to individuality and intellectual freedom, the way he attempts to on songs like “Shame on You,” “Find My Way,” and “Crossover.” He surely understands the gangsta mentality, the way he addresses its trappings on the title track and also “Why Run,” but to really understand who D Smoke is, at least in the way he’d like you to, the listener has to ingest the whole of these perspectives the way they are presented across *War & Wonders*. Because it is here that D Smoke gives us everything he’s got.
When it’s all said and done, there’s no telling how COVID-19 will have affected the artistry of some of our favorite music-makers—except in the case of Moneybagg Yo, who tells Apple Music very plainly that it made him a more focused MC. “I just feel like a lot of my old music the fans didn\'t accept how I wanted them to accept it,” he says. “I just was in a different stage of my life and I was moving around a lot. The COVID situation had to happen, and by that happening, I sat down and thought about everything and I made the biggest songs of my career—of my life—in the pandemic.” Here, Yo might be referring to the lead single from his fourth album *A Gangsta’s Pain*, the Future collaboration and instantaneous smash hit “Hard for the Next.” Or maybe he’s referring to an altogether trippy exploration of relationships through the eyes of a lean addict called “Wockesha.” Maybe he’s just that proud of the hard-charging “Shottas,” where he debuts a completely new flow. But regardless of which songs he’s referring to, the M-town representer claims that the break in action the world was forced to observe showed him exactly who he is. “I feel like by me sitting down and just figuring it out, I\'m going to go back to the roots,” he says. “I\'m giving them everything they love about Moneybagg Yo.” Below, the Memphis MC breaks down how we got the best of him on his favorite tracks from *A Gangsta’s Pain*. **“Hard for the Next”** “Me and Future, every time we get in the kitchen, the chemistry is always there, so I feel like this kind of happened naturally. When he gets you in there, he\'s going to lock you in and play all of what he\'s been working on. So, he played me everything and he kept skipping by stuff. I’m like, \'Bruh, go back! Go back to that. You\'re trying to hide this joint from me.\' He was like, \'Nah, bruh, you can have whatever you want.\' So my engineer got the session, I went back and recorded it, sent it to him, and the rest was history.” **“GO!” feat. BIG30** “I felt like I got to do one of them songs on here to where like I\'m just giving it to them. I\'m just on it. I ain\'t let up off the beat, just tempo. I got to lace BIG30 up on it because that\'s my artist, I want to see him win.” **“Projects”** “I was going through like, ‘What am I missing?’ And then I get the call that Pharrell wants to lock in for two days straight, so I was a little— you know how it be. Then, I came to the studio and I just laced it.” **“Certified Neptunes” feat. Pharrell Williams** “Pharrell had the chorus already laced up when I walked in. And then he was like, ‘Look, this is how I do it. My stuff, when I cook up, it be like a skit, so this is where I want to go with it. Just go in and then we\'re going to draw around it.’ It\'s like the trap energy, gutter-type Pharrell on that one.” **“Change Da Subject”** “This the type of song, you go in the booth and you just close your eyes, and you think about everything. You think about everything like how it started, where you\'re trying to go, who you do it for; all your accomplishments. You probably heard me saying something like, \'No more pain and suffering.\' It\'s a good feeling to be there.” **“Wockesha”** “‘Wockesha’ was just was like one of them songs like, you rap about your habits, you rap about what you got going on in your personal life. Because you know, sometimes when you\'re in a relationship with a girl and you got stuff going on, it\'s like you be back and forth: You can say, ‘It\'s not gon\' be this,’ and it ends up being that again. It\'s like relapsing. And that\'s the same thing people do with drugs and other stuff. They\'ll say, \'I\'m through doing this, I\'m through doing that,\' but then they\'ll get back on it. So, I just went off the concept of that. I\'m just painting pictures.” **“One of Dem Nights”** “Jhené \[Aiko\] is one of my favorites. And then I was in the studio, the first beat that YC played, it was on point. I told him where I wanted to go, who I wanted to put on it. As soon as he went that way, it was crazy. I just started mumbling the words and I went in there and did it. I sent it to her, they sent it back. Real classic.” **“Shottas (Lala)”** “I was in the studio just joking around. It was me and the guys, we was just in there just kicking it and YC just comes in there playing beats. I was like, ‘Man, what the hell is this?’ This is one of them type of vibes you just—it don\'t matter what you say, just go in that joint and just say whatever comes to mind.”
The rapper appeared seemingly out of nowhere in early 2021 and quickly established himself as a rising star in the Jacksonville scene; his debut album, *Who Is Nardo Wick?*, pares down the gritty drill music of his hometown to its most menacing, minimalist essence, with hooks so bite-sized and mantralike they could be the work of a haiku poet who chose violence. Nardo raps the blustery hook of his breakout hit, “Who Want Smoke??,” as if through perpetually gritted teeth, his icy tone reminiscent of a Floridian 21 Savage. Features from Future, Lil Baby, and Lil Durk lend the newcomer some star power, but he holds down the album’s highlight himself—“Wicked Freestyle,” with its eerie sample of a children’s chorus: “They hate how we walk, how we talk, how we move/Said we’re lost and frustrated/But believe it or not, we’re the next up on top/We’re the youth of the nation.” (Oh, and the majority of the project was recorded and engineered at home by Nardo’s dad.)
Dreamy synths and complex harmony vocals abound on the third studio album from singer-songwriter Kacy Hill. Building on the electronic-tinged indie pop of its predecessor (2020’s wonderfully titled *Is It Selfish If We Talk About Me Again*), the LP is more expansive sonically (aided by coproducers Jim-E Stack, John Carroll Kirby, and Ariel Rechtshaid) and lyrically, with Hill digging into particularly vulnerable subjects on songs like “Another You” and the title track. “In so many ways, I just make music for myself, and it’s music that I want to hear,” Hill tells Apple Music. “In reflecting afterwards, I guess the biggest thing I hope for is that it connects with someone, and that someone else feels heard and understood. I think that the most rewarding thing for me is just being like, ‘Oh yeah, other people feel this way, and I’m not the only person, like, stuck in my head.’” Below, Hill digs into several key tracks on *Simple, Sweet, and Smiling*. **“I Couldn’t Wait”** “That was the first one that I started for this album. I’d been in a funk for a good few months at the beginning of quarantine, I think, partially because I was still in the process of putting out another album. I got back into a flow and Eli Teplin sent me this little piano idea, which are the keys that are in the song still. Then I wrote the song over that piano idea, and then just looped it, and that was the song. I wrote this whole album, that song included, just in my room. It was a lot of virtual writing, sending stuff back and forth. That was just the start of a new creative process for me.” **“Seasons Bloom”** “I started that one with John Carroll Kirby and Jim-E Stack. We got together and put together this really rough idea. Then I took it home and just deconstructed it, made it something different, and in this really, really rough demo vocal take, I said the words ‘seasons bloom’ and John was like, ‘Oh, that’s a cool thing.’ I like the idea of feeling like there’s this moment of refuge or calm in the storm, and in whatever I’m feeling. Just in being with someone that I love and feeling like that makes it all worth it, you know?” **“Simple, Sweet, and Smiling”** “For the longest time, it was called ‘10/10,’ because we made it on October 10 and that was just the file name. But I decided to call the album *Simple, Sweet, and Smiling* because there’s a line in the first chorus that says, ‘I would like to be simple, sweet, and smiling.’ It felt really representative of the mood of making the album, or really just how I felt over the past year, because it felt like, COVID aside, there was just a lot of heaviness in me. My dad had gotten sick, so it was dealing with that and the idea of facing his mortality, which is something I never really thought of before and didn’t feel like I had to face until I was much older. I just felt like I wasn’t the best partner or friend in a lot of ways, because I had all this heaviness, and I think it was just this aspirational idea to want to be simple, sweet, and smiling—to just want to be easy and simple and light.” **“Easy Going”** “That one was actually the only one that I made in person, in a session, and I made it with Ethan Gruska and Jim-E Stack. We were just jamming and came up with this little idea, and then I put vocals down and that ended up being the melody. Lyrically, it’s about, obviously, going through anxiety, but I think I’ve had multiple moments of frustration where I’m like, ‘Why don’t I feel better?’ I’m doing all the things I’m supposed to be doing. I exercise. I drink water. I eat healthy. I’m on medication. I’m journaling. When is it supposed to kick in?” **“The Right Time”** “It was one of those songs that I went back and forth on the lyrics a million times. But it finally settled in, this feeling of almost like, ‘right person, wrong time,’ where you feel like you’re always missing each other. Even in a relationship, one person always wants the other person more, at different times. It’s just back and forth, of not wanting to be too needy, but at the same time being like, ‘But I do need you to at least tell me that you love me and miss me.’” **“Another You”** “That one was the last one added. It was called ‘Snatch,’ because I do weightlifting, and \[my demos\] all have the dumbest names. It sounded really different, but I liked the melody on it a lot. So, we just took everything away, took all the music away, and John really masterminded the production on that because I was just like, ‘I don’t quite know what to do with this.’ Honestly, the lyrics are almost too vulnerable for me. It feels like I’m naked, standing, I don’t know, at the school talent show or something.”
The increasing success of drill music in the UK has raised some questions for Unknown T, an early adopter of the sound imported from Chicago’s South Side. “At the start it was like Bitcoin,” he tells Apple Music. “But around the time it started to explode, from 2016 to ’18, everyone was jumping on it. And me? A person that loves music, but also thinks like a businessman, I’m thinking to myself, ‘How can I adapt my product?’” On *Adolescence*, features including M1llionz, Potter Payper, and M Huncho ensure a rhyme-heavy affair, but carefully selected moments allow the Hackney MC to explore growth. “GLEE” serves a warm, oxymoronic jam; “Tugman Vacation” employs a sweet sample-flip of Tyrese’s 1998 R&B hit “Sweet Lady”; and “Sweet Lies” offers a soulful guitar ballad. “As a child, I grew with positivity and light, and built up a passion for music,” he says. “But then you go through real shit. And faced with many different emotions as I was growing up, I just wanted to rap it out. It’s still the same, but I’m going back to the origin.” Here, Unknown T guides you across his second mixtape track by track. **“22 double 0”** “This one is a reminder of my flows, style, and technique. Something to get the blood pumping for the fans that have been with me from the beginning—and haven\'t heard this sound in a little while.” **“Driller sh!t”** “Recording this track with \[UK producer\] AXL Beats was probably the most interesting session I had. When I was in jail, I missed out on the main part of Pop Smoke’s career; from ‘Welcome to the Party’ to his death—that year was my jail time. Everyone compared me to him, with my voice and style, but the only person that really knew him over here was AXL. So that whole day was dedicated to Pop. We spoke about his legacy, but also how we can continue to revolutionize drill in the UK and the US. So you’ll notice my flow here reflects \[Chicago rapper\] G Herbo’s, but I’m representing in my way.” **“Trenches” (feat. Potter Payper)** “This is the UK streets, the trenches, you know? This is that sound we’ve been missing for a while, that authentic rap sound.” **“WW2”** “My fans on Twitter were screaming at the fact that I wasn’t nominated for some awards in 2020. It left me feeling like I had something to prove, but I kept quiet for the rest of the year—and when I came back with this \[in January 2021\], it left everyone gobsmacked. The flows, bars, and just the overall conviction—I put every element of me as an artist into this.” **“EAST”** “This one is for my side of London. In this game, everyone represents where they’re from, and I wanted to bring attention back to the East, and keep the energy up.” **“VIN DIESEL” (feat. M1llionz)** “I wanna big up \[UK producer\] Ghosty for this. We were discussing how to introduce new sounds to drill, and he pitched Turkish vocals. And we listened to some together; they’re really good singers. The sample through the beat is from one of those Turkish songs. I like to paint pictures, so with the energy of the beat, it gave me the feeling of the \[movie franchise\] *Fast & Furious*.” **“Sweet Lies”** “I would always say how it’s too early in the journey to show this side of me as an artist. But my guys would ask, ‘When is too early, or too late?’ They helped me realize that the only time you have is what you make of it.” **“Tugman Vacation”** “This life is a journey, and the way it’s panned out with my music, it’s a story that I reflect back on it like, ‘Wow.’ Somehow it all ended up making sense.” **“Goodums”** “This track was inspired by 2pac’s \[1996 song\] ‘Me and My Girlfriend.’ All the imagery and lyrics about his girl were a metaphor, and I’ve put my spin on that here.” **“Grandma Prayer”** “I thought it would be nice to have my grandma say the Holy Commandment, to better understand my growth spiritually, and also lead into the next song.” **“Bible Love”** “As a Christian, I’ve never really spoken about my faith, but now I’m growing as an artist and a man, I wanna try and touch on some real shit.” **“No Forgiveness” (feat. Nafe Smallz)** “This is the perfect drill-meets-rap wave; it gives a UK version to that Gunna and Lil Baby vibe. Nafe and I have our elements on lock, so when we get together it’s smooth like a relay.” **“Wonderland” (feat. M Huncho)** “My first track with M Huncho was ‘Addicts’ on \[2020 mixtape\] *Rise Above Hate*, a much darker track. So I have to give him the credit here, he suggested a more uplifting, triumphant vibe—or we’d just be doing ‘Addicts’ again. He was right.” **“Louis Bloom”** “Louis Bloom is the head of Island Records. I met him when I came home \[from prison in February 2020\] and he listened to my vision. This is a way for me to talk shit; I’m making noise on the man’s label, so why not?” **“GLEE” (feat. Digga D)** “On this track we wanted to make something for everyone—men, women, kids, parents—but still make it certy. With the structure and melodies, it’s just perfect. It was leaked onto TikTok a few weeks ago and the reaction was crazy. I know how much they’re waiting for this.”
“*El Dorado* is an album about love—and loss, too—because one cannot exist without the other,” 24kGoldn tells Apple Music of his debut. “There\'s no light without darkness. There\'s no yin without yang.” That kind of duality also extends to its creation, most of which took place when life was largely put on pause by the COVID-19 pandemic, as the San Francisco rapper sought to create an alternate world that could offer respite from the bleak reality. “I wanted it to be something that people could escape to, or that people can listen to the music and watch the videos and forget about whatever problems they were dealing with in their life,” he says. The album, titled after the mythical golden city as well as a reference to his hometown and his nickname, easily traverses the lands between pop and rap. Blissful melodies and longing guitar lines are in abundance, providing a backdrop for 24kGoldn’s musings on love, lust, heartbreak, and whatever obstacles arise in between. It isn’t self-serious, though. The 20-year-old, after all, has much to celebrate coming off the success of his smash hit “Mood,” and the songs—some of which he explains below—reflect accordingly. Not even the complexities of romance can bring down this gilded empire. **The Top** “I wanted a song that felt welcoming. I feel like when you hear that melody of the beat and that piano, it\'s like some big gates are opening up and it feels very triumphant and very like you already won. And I wanted to start the album off like that because, in a sense, I already did win. I was 19 with the number one song in the world—I got that championship ring rookie year. Right now, I\'m just playing for extra credit, and for legacy, basically.” **Company** “I\'ve been listening to Future since I was like 11 years old, so it was big for me to get him on his track. And to me, this is probably one of the best Future features in the past couple of years because he went so crazy on it. I know that if middle-school or high-school me—shit, me last month—found out you\'re going to have Future on your album, I would have spazzed out because that man\'s a legend.” **Love or Lust** “I think this song really came together because of the great conjunction. It was a couple of months back, and it was like Saturn was aligning with Jupiter so you could see both of them at the same time. Apparently it only happens once every 20 years, but it\'s supposed to bring good energy. Oftentimes, some of my best songs, I\'ll come into the studio with the melody beforehand or an idea of what we\'re going to make before, but this one I came in with no expectations. The melody just popped in my brain, and all the writing and everything just came together so easily. With my generation, Gen Z, it\'s a constant struggle between love and lust. Everyone needs real love. Everyone\'s looking for real love, but there\'s so many artificial substitutes—Instagram likes, Tinder swipes and stuff like that. My generation longs for that real love, but it\'s hard to find out here.” **Outta Pocket** “So this is actually one of the oldest songs on the album. I made this summer 2019, and we always thought it was an incredible song. And I\'m so glad that we saved it, because, out of all the songs we made, for something that\'s from two years ago to be on there, I really believe in that song. It\'s just honest, that\'s my favorite thing about it. Because we all got them days. I can admit my flaws—I be out of pocket, I be a little rude sometimes. My thing is just having the self-awareness to know it and growing from there. But I think this song adds context to me as a human being, and it\'s something that people can relate to and make them check themselves too.” **Yellow Lights** “I\'m just proud of the fact that I don\'t think any other rapper has used the word \'dissonance\' before. I remember being in this Airbnb that I got with \[guitarist and producer\] Omer \[Fedi\] mid-quarantine, and we would just make songs all day and just hang out. And it was like two in the morning, and I was about to go to bed, and that cadence and that melody popped in my head. I was just singing it, and Omer from the other room was like, \'Voice memo that, that\'s fire!\' It\'s a very inquisitive song—I\'m just trying to make this clear, how do you feel? What do you want? And I think clarity is something we\'re all searching for, whether it\'s in life or relationships.” **Empty** “In the past, I haven\'t made many sadder-toned or emo kind of songs before, but I felt like for the album, it was important to have those, because everybody has those days. Everybody can have a shitty day or feel like they\'re losing somebody special to them. I think that\'s an emotion we\'ve all felt, and music helps people process it, music helps people get through it. And \[Swae Lee\] be killing the melodies. He just wants to have a good time and make good music, which I feel that a lot.” **Don’t Sleep** “I think there\'s strength in vulnerability, and I\'m learning that as a human being. You don\'t gotta be perfect all the time. You don\'t gotta be pristine, like exactly portraying yourself as an image of perfection, because it\'s not human. We all got problems, and a song like \'Don\'t Sleep\' is probably my most vulnerable song, just talking about how I feel and in the most honest and simple way possible. You listen to this song, you shed a couple tears, you go to sleep, you going to wake up feeling a lot better.” **Mood** “That\'s the song that transformed my life. It was like hitting the fucking fast-forward button because everything just happened so fast. But man, that song came together by accident. Me and iann \[dior\] were just chilling, playing Call of Duty at his crib. And Omer picks up one of his guitars, starts strumming. And I just started singing that hook, it just popped in my head. I never would have expected it to be as big as it is, but I think that\'s just the universe. All I can control is the music, and the universe, and the DSP providers, they kind of helped everything else. I don\'t know, man, that\'s just one of them ones, and it feels great to be in the history books now.”
“I think the idea of sexiness or being calm and collected is a pretty stifling thing as a musician,” Dijon explains to Apple Music. “I\'ve wrestled with why you\'re supposed to make music if you\'re going to do it, and I think just the longer I\'ve been trying, I\'ve gotten pretty disenchanted with sort of the casualness and the informality.” This is the existential question at the heart of *Absolutely*, his debut album. If the prior EPs—2019\'s *Sci Fi 1* and 2020\'s *How Do You Feel About Getting Married?*—were for figuring out who he was as an artist through collages of ideas, then this is about figuring out who he can be, with regard to the expectations leveled at him from outsiders and those he has for himself. Of course, to hear him tell it, the process of creating this music wasn\'t nearly as deep. At the beginning of the pandemic, he visited a friend in Wyoming, where he began tinkering with bits and pieces of demos. He returned to Los Angeles, his home since he relocated from Maryland in 2016, and wrote one song, “Scratching,” and didn’t make anything else for months. That is, until he met fellow singer-songwriter Mk.gee (Michael Gordon) at a studio session. “He and I developed a bizarre language together that sort of spilled into the rest of the record,” he says. “With the pandemic, I just wasn\'t sure if I was going to make a record, how long it would take, or if it was even useful to make music. The records that we made together just sprang out of boredom and out of this kind of conversation—it was just a conversational way to exist.” *Absolutely* is Dijon’s most collaborative release to date, an exercise in surrendering to his own creative impulses as he also makes room for others’. Out of that comes an album that highlights the intimacy of candor, of offering oneself without dressing the parts up. In many of the songs, there’s ambient room noise—people laughing, talking, and reacting to the music—that positions the listener as a kind of fly on the wall for a private jam session. It’s raw and untouched in a way that runs counter to conventional ideas of what a debut album often is or should be. Life that feels as though it\'s coming apart requires music that is the same—the process of deconstruction and rebuilding animated through sound. Which brings us back to his original question. Over the better part of a decade, he\'s earned fans and a profile, and just as that means other people are asking things of him, he\'s asking new things of himself. *Absolutely* is some version of an answer that reimagines his artistry at a time that required he reimagine his life. “It just seems strange that the moment you get a little platform, people start to tidy up a little bit and they start to perfect their lane,” he says. “I just kind of wanted to destroy it and build a new one.” Below, he explains how each of the songs came to be. **“Big Mike’s”** “‘Big Mike\'s’ is the first song that Mk.gee and I made together. He came to the house, I had a drum loop playing, I had a couple of friends milling about. We\'d met a few times but we didn\'t really talk, and he picked up a guitar and he played a little, and it was so natural for us to build the track together. It was a complete freestyle, lyrically and melodically, and we sort of wrapped everything harmonically around it. I played some bass way after that I\'m pretty sure it\'s not the same key as what Mike was playing. And we just listened back, and we just felt like if this is on an album, I\'d want to hear this first because I can decide if I want to be here or not. We wanted it to be hypnotic, and I wanted to be as confrontational as possible.” **“Scratching”** “‘Scratching’ was the first song I actually ever made for the record, and it was a product of me trying to learn piano. I just played a couple of things and wrote a song around a midi piano part that I was just working on. It was super simple. I thought that there was this Springsteen-y thing to it that was an accident, so I was just like, well, how do I kind of pay homage in that way? Everything to me is post-realization—I never really know what I\'m doing when I\'m doing it.” **“Many Times”** “‘Many Times’ was the first time I\'d ever not controlled or been engineering my own session. I went with a very good friend, somebody I respect a lot named Andrew Sarlo—he works with some people I really love. Andrew has a patented recording technique or an exercise that I won\'t reveal, but we were just trying to get over a hump and trying to be productive. A lot of my records are nocturnal, and this was a bright coffee thing. We just wanted to make something that we thought was quite fun—everything is sort of operating with a little bit of humor, and Mike\'s solo exists relative to the intensity and the mania of the song as potentially a little hat tip.” **“Annie”** “I left to go upstate \[New York\] and brought a few friends, and a person I\'ve collaborated with a lot, Jack Karaszewski, ended up being there. We tried for a few nights just to hang out and make music around this table, and ‘Annie’ ended up being this pretty manic campfire thing. I picked up an acoustic guitar, and it was tuned in some really crazy way. I was just kind of sitting at the table and started mumbling and humming a little thing. Then Mike slotted in, picked up a bass, and we just made the song. The Band was always in the back of everybody\'s head. I had never really heard of them until I went to upstate New York and got extremely obsessed. I was trying to make some sort of demented version of a The Band song or something, and it happened really quickly.” **“Noah’s Highlight Reel”** “This is my favorite song on the record. We were sitting at this long dining room table, and our buddy Noah who\'s from Wyoming was there with us. He\'s played slide and occasional guitar on a couple of the songs and he\'s helped with the general vibe and thrown a couple lyrics in on this record. But Mike and I were cranking through super fast, a bunch of ideas per day, when we were in upstate New York. Things calmed down, we had a few beers, and I believe it was Mike\'s idea—he said, ‘Noah, you should write a song.’ I started playing a guitar part, some chords, and Mike slotted in with some bass and some other things, and my buddy Noah actually wrote a song and we asked him to sing it. We sang backup for him. I also lost the file, so that\'s the only version of the song that exists.” **“The Dress”** “I borrowed a drum machine and just laid down this thing, and a friend of mine named John Keek played some chords. He has a very sort of gospelly touch, and it started off as kind of a little gag, but obviously the chords he played were quite inspiring. I was experimenting a lot with noise on this album, and ‘The Dress’ was a way for me to kind of internally be like, can you actually just write a song? Because I didn\'t know if I could. And yeah, there\'s a little bit of an homage to Bonnie Raitt, but it was really an exercise in me trying to push myself out of a comfort zone. You can get really comfortable around like a wall of sonic trickery and fuzz.” **“God in Wilson”** “‘God in Wilson’ is a tough one, because that was a pretty early one. When I was in Wyoming—it\'s referencing Wilson, Wyoming—there was this attempt to kind of explore guilt and shame, and it was an interesting idea that I had. It was a pretty early demo idea that I never really fleshed out and just thought it could provide some sort of contrast on the record, I guess. I was really fascinated with priests and kind of thought about, I don\'t know, a little priest guy. But yeah, it\'s just an exploration, lyrically, of guilt and shame, and I kept it on there just because I thought it sounded pretty.” **“Did You See It?”** “It\'s a modular, like, Eurorack experiment that I was doing, and I wanted to see if I could write a song around it. It\'s about aliens.” **“Talk Down”** “On hip-hop records, you can kind of quote—like JAY-Z quotes Biggie all the time and stuff like that. I never really understood how to do that in more of a singer-songwriter thing, but ‘Talk Down’ was part two of ‘Annie.’ Same day, same table, same people. I was listening to a lot of Gillian Welch—I think I said her name wrong on the record—but a lot of the imagery that floated around the record was really based on the three-day drive from LA to New York. There\'s tension, there\'s excitement, there\'s anger. There\'s also monotony, it\'s a lot of boredom. I heard a chord that my friend John played. And I started freestyling this thing, and I just kept quoting ‘Look at Miss Ohio,’ and that became the basis of the song. It was me listing off songs I was listening to while driving and trying to contrast a little bit. I wanted to do a little homage to Baltimore club. I tried to do a few Baltimore club songs that failed, and this is the closest that we got.” **“Rodeo Clown”** “I was just kind of playing some chords and we were a little burned out after making ‘Big Mike\'s,’ just me, Mike, and Noah. But in effort of stretching what the performer is supposed to sound like, I just wanted to explore R&B melodic stuff. It\'s part of my DNA, but I just wanted to present it in a way that isn\'t clean. I get very frustrated by how cool everybody is, and I wanted to just see what happens if you try to make a song that\'s very earnest. I sort of blacked out a little bit and let it go and then listened back to it the next day, and I was like, \'Yeah, that sounds pretty good.\' I feel like it\'s very boring to think that just because you have a guitar, that you can\'t try to reinterpret how you\'re supposed to perform. I don\'t know if it was a successful experiment, but yeah.” **“End of Record”** “In an effort of making a debut record, you toss and turn a lot of ideas of how you\'re supposed to make it perfect, and ‘End of Record’ was a personal message to myself. It was done in upstate New York, around the table with a lot of people. I think it was on Halloween of \[2020\]. That song specifically—it\'s for me and the people on the record, like a little postcard from a time and all the emotion that was around that house at the time.” **“Credits!”** “I think that I have the tendency to sort of give off this impression that I\'m hyper-serious all the time and the music is emotionally weighty to people, but there\'s a lot of jokes that I think I\'ve been trying to get a little bit more effective at displaying on my music. And ‘Credits!’ is also just kind of another thing for me on there. I thought it was kind of fun. After you hear a lot of these ups and downs on this record, I couldn\'t think of a funnier and I think more obnoxious way to kind of put a bow on all of this weight. There were a lot of different variations of that energy, and ‘Credits!’ just sounded silly enough to be the one.”
