Stereogum's 10 Best Rap Albums of 2022

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.”

It can be unwise to play favorites in the music biz, but maybe nobody told that to The Alchemist. “I really made an album with my favorite rapper and it drops tonight at midnight,” the producer tweeted ahead of the release of his and Roc Marciano’s *The Elephant Man’s Bones*. “I’m tripping.” Hempstead, Long Island-originating Marciano is no stranger to peer adulation, however. His time as a recording artist dates at least as far back as a stint with Busta Rhymes’ late-’90s Flipmode Squad collective, but the name he has today was made from the string of gritty and impressive solo projects he released across the 2010s. You do need a specific kind of ear to fully appreciate the MC. Roc Marciano raps in the kind of street code that reveals itself to be genius to those who can grasp its nuances. Take this couplet from *The Elephant Man’s Bones*’ “Daddy Kane”: “I been getting off that soft white long before shorties was rocking Off-White/Water-colored ice, I call it Walter White/Walk with me like a dog might, I got 44 bulldogs, you ain’t got a dog in the fight.” The bars themselves are less complex than they are both slimy and razor-sharp. These are raps to be heeded and, maybe more importantly, enjoyed at a safe distance. Unless, of course, you’re The Alchemist—or album guests Action Bronson, Boldy James, Ice-T, or Knowledge the Pirate—in which case you can’t wait to add some of your own ingredients to Marciano’s cauldron.

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.

Babyface Ray’s January 2022 LP *FACE*, an album built on exotic boasts unfurled through the MC’s supremely unbothered delivery, brought Ray a level of visibility he hadn’t known prior. *MOB*, which comes to listeners less than a year later and functions as a natural counterpart (Face Mob, after all, is one of Ray’s aliases), is a continuance of the MC’s mission to establish himself a cut above the rest of Detroit’s obscenely rich rap talent pool. And he needn’t do much to do so. Tapping frequent collaborators Pooh Beatz and Space for the lion’s share of the album’s production, Ray delivers lyrical exercises (“Waves on Every Chain,” “Crazy World,” “Corner Suite”), collaborations with rap heroes of the day (“Wonderful Wayne & Jackie Boy” featuring Lil Durk), affirmations of his proudly independent rise (“Rap Politics,” “Masterpiece”), a love song (“Spend It”), and, in the greatest abundance, the uniquely Motor City flexing we’ve come to know and love him for (“Nice Guy,” “Brand New Benz,” “Spend It,” “Hallelujah”). In fact, if there’s anything Ray doesn’t give us on *MOB*, it’s an indication that he’s anywhere close to slowing down.

Much has been made of Alabama-hailing MC NoCap’s ability to weave between traditional rapping and the pain-influenced harmonizing that dominates many contemporary hip-hop playlists. Much less attention, however, has been paid to what the MC has been trying to tell us. On breakout single “Ghetto Angels,” it was how much he missed the friends he’d lost to the streets. On his debut album, *Mr. Crawford*, it’s who he is as a man and an artist. “They telling me to make some club music/Nah, bitch, I’m a pop-star drug user,” NoCap sings on “I’ll Be Here.” Not unlike admitted influence Lil Wayne, the MC is partial to near-endless non sequitur, but buried within these brain dumps are declarations of identity: “My scars are amazing, I lost homie after homie,” he raps on the Kodak Black collaboration “Save the Day.” “I’m a real n\*\*\*a, ain’t gotta record every time I hand out book bags,” he wants us to know on the album’s title track. “I was really in the streets before my YouTube,” he confesses on “GoRealer.” There’s likewise plenty here about the life he’s led since becoming maybe the most buzzed-about Alabama MC to date, but he’s just as quick to remind listeners—as he does on “Forever Loading”—that he\'s coming for everything he’s owed: “Lord forgive me for my sins, but I’m living off revenge.”

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.