Ari Lennox is Dreamville’s resident singer-songwriter, rounding out the label\'s hip-hop-heavy lineup with rich, midtempo soul birthed from basslines, melody, wind instruments, and supreme heartbreak. “I never thought I\'d make money off of soul music,” the Washington, DC-based singer told Beats 1’s Ebro. “I always thought I\'d have to be this pop artist or make this super hit, but no.” Lennox was discovered after putting her music up online, signing with Dreamville in 2015. She\'s contributed “Shea Butter Baby” to the *Creed II* soundtrack and released the 2016 EP *Pho*. The positive response to tracks like “Backseat” showed that her retro R&B fits well in contemporary times. “There\'s so many opportunities that come to me,” she said. “And I\'m just like, ‘You guys like soul and R&B that much? That\'s awesome.’ I didn\'t know it could ever happen again, because I knew it was really booming in the ’90s and the early 2000s, and then it felt like people stopped caring.” On her debut full-length, her voice is strengthened and emboldened by both breakup and “u up?” texts. She celebrates independence (“New Apartment”) and processes pain (“Speak to Me,” “I Been,” “Pop”) with equal parts frankness and freedom. Cameos by JID (“Broke”) and J. Cole (“Shea Butter Baby”) and a classy Galt MacDermot “Space” sample on “BMO” give the album its pronounced bump. “It’s soul,” she told Ebro. “There’s no gimmicks. It’s feeling.”
Let’s just state the obvious: BENNY THE BUTCHER can *rap*. He’s from Buffalo, not NYC, but *The Plugs I Met* boasts the kind of grimy, word-obsessed, kick-in-the-door New York gutter raps that old heads think went extinct in ’98. Well, not if Benny has anything to say about it. Over dusty Alchemist drums and menacing keys on “Dirty Harry,” the rapper crafts dense, writerly bars about all varieties of cinema-caliber gangster shit: “I wash the blood off the money that my daughters inherit/And kept the barrel so hot that it fog up the mirrors.” Name another current rapper who could invite Pusha T, Jadakiss, and Black Thought on their EP—and outpace all three.
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On April 14, 2018, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter etched her name even deeper into the history books with a transcendent, career-spanning Coachella performance. The show was the first of two headlining sets—the second taking place the following weekend—with Bey making it a point to call out the fact that she was the festival\'s first-ever Black female headliner. The whole thing, in fact, was a year behind schedule: Beyoncé was originally slated to headline in 2017 in the wake of her ultra-personal *Lemonade*, but postponed after announcing she was pregnant. So in 2018, some 10 months after delivering Sir and Rumi, Beyoncé got up on one of the biggest stages in the world, in front of millions collectively freaking out during the livestream, and delivered one of the most memorable live performances in the history of that festival or any other. Her set—presented in full on *HOMECOMING: THE LIVE ALBUM*—which included highlights from the whole of her catalog dating back to her Destiny’s Child days, spoke directly to her moment as historymaker, synthesizing generations (and regions) of Black musicality through the filter of an HBCU-style marching band (members of DrumLine Live, performing here as Queen Bey’s “The Bzzzz”). In the American college tradition, she called the performance “Homecoming,” packing it over the course of nearly 40 songs with the sounds of brass-heavy New Orleans second-line bands (“Single Ladies \[Put a Ring on It\]”); reggaetón (“Mi Gente”); bounce music (“Formation”); Washington, DC’s go-go (“Love On Top”); her native Houston’s chopped and screwed music (“I Been On”); dancehall reggae (“Baby Boy”); and the Dirty South hip-hop she grew up on (“Crazy In Love,” “Diva”). For good measure, there\'s also a duet with her husband (“Deja Vu”), a Destiny\'s Child reunion (“Say My Name,” “Soldier”), and as an added bonus at the end of the album, a backyard-barbecue-ready studio rendition of Maze featuring Frankie Beverly’s “Before I Let Go” that also interpolates Cameo’s “Candy.” You can hear the voice of Malcolm X on “Don\'t Hurt Yourself,” and there\'s an a cappella version of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” known colloquially as the “Black National Anthem”—beyond blockbuster production values and expert musicianship, it remains an earnest tribute to her experience as a young Black woman working to contribute to the rich musical legacy that inspires her. And according to her mother, this was the plan from the beginning: In an Instagram post the week of the first Coachella performance, Tina Knowles wrote that her daughter told her, “I have worked very hard to get to the point where I have a true voice. And at this point in my life and my career I have a responsibility to do what\'s best for the world and not what is most popular.” But the two are far from mutually exclusive, and that performance—and this vital document of it—is proof.
In the lead-up to the release of *The Lion King: The Gift*, a collection of music inspired by the 2019 reboot of the classic Disney film, Beyoncé remarked that the project was meant to be “a love letter to Africa.” As executive producer, Bey made it a point to solicit contributions from artists spanning a number of the continent’s many culturally rich traditions and regions, including Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, and South Africa. The album, in fact, is a separate project from the film’s official soundtrack, but that doesn’t stop Beyoncé and a cohort of hand-selected talents from telling that timeless story of the Pride Lands through song. Not unlike the film, *The Gift* chronicles a saga of personal growth, filtered through some of the brightest stars in Afrobeats and Afrofusion. Artists like Mr Eazi, Yemi Alade, Burna Boy, Tiwa Savage, and Tekno sing in multiple languages about embracing blessings (“JA ARA E”), staying the path (“DON’T JEALOUS ME”), and rising into your own majesty (“KEYS TO THE KINGDOM”). Family is a constant theme, with Beyoncé singing to her children directly on “BIGGER” and then about her father on “FIND YOUR WAY BACK.\" She’s procured contributions from some of her favorite US-born MCs, like Kendrick Lamar, co-star Childish Gambino, Tierra Whack, and, of course, the man co-captaining her household, JAY-Z. *The Gift*, then, is a compilation of talents both African and Afro-diasporic strong enough to buttress the throne of the woman we’ve come to know as Queen Bey.
YBN Cordae may be riding high off his inclusion in *XXL* magazine’s esteemed Freshman Class, but it’s not like he doesn’t know what it’s like to be down and out. “*The Lost Boy* represents anyone who hasn’t found their path or their calling yet,” he tells Apple Music of his debut album. “That’s kind of where I was at a point in my life, just lost.” He could be talking about his time as a struggling college student (during which he also held a job at a fast-casual restaurant), but ever since he released “Old N\*ggas,” a seething open-letter response track to J. Cole’s “1985,” life for the Maryland-raised MC has meant an increasingly large crowd patiently awaiting his next verse. With *The Lost Boy*, YBN Cordae’s mission is twofold: to tell the story of his own rise to purpose, complete with details of familial hurdles (“Family Matters”), the pressures facing his generation specifically (“Thousand Words”), and the power of perseverance (“Way Back Home”)—and to do so as cleverly as possible. Guests include MCs with a similar appreciation for complex wordplay (Chance the Rapper, Meek Mill, Pusha T), and there’s even a track (“RNP”) produced by J. Cole himself, a onetime foil turned ally. If there’s anything lost in the vision of YBN Cordae’s first album, it’s just how far the MC will go.
In the video for “Walker Texas Ranger,” Charlotte, North Carolina, MC DaBaby sports a weathered leather jacket and a cowboy hat while he drives a pickup truck clear off a cliff. This, along with the clip for “Suge,” where he can be seen dancing in a mail carrier’s uniform (“Pack in the mail, it’s gone”) and donning fake bodybuilder muscles, has led rap fans of a certain age to liken him to animated superstars past like Ludacris and Busta Rhymes. But to let DaBaby tell it, this innate wackiness is as much a part of him as the tattoos and jewelry he sports. “I\'m not too serious for myself,” he told Apple Music’s Ebro ahead of the release of *KIRK*. This album comes seven months after *Baby on Baby*, the rapper’s breakout project and home to the aforementioned “Walker Texas Ranger” and “Suge.” “A lot of n\*ggas are too serious for themselves, and that\'s not even them behind closed doors or off camera. As consumed as your time is in a business like this, being yourself got to be the smartest thing a person could do.” *KIRK* might be more DaBaby than he’s ever been: On “INTRO,” he gets deep into his family history, speaking candidly about losing his father in the midst of his rise. It’s a theme he revisits on “GOSPEL,” a song featuring straight-faced verses from Chance the Rapper and Gucci Mane as well as some R&B support from Florida singer YK Osiris. As past hits would attest, DaBaby is well-equipped to carry a song by himself, but he sounds great in tandem with voices like Nicki Minaj on “iPHONE” (“DaBaby and Da Barbie,” she quips), Lil Baby and Moneybagg Yo on “TOES,” and Migos on “RAW S\*\*T.” DaBaby’s rap style in particular features the kind of endlessly amusing non sequitur most of these artists made their names on. Every verse is a chance to show off, and is usually rooted in some kind of nonlinear storytelling. The chorus of “VIBEZ” takes listeners on an abbreviated journey through a day in the life. “She wanna fuck with me but I don’t got the time/I just hopped off a private plane and went and hopped on 85/Go call my chauffeur, bitch, ’cause I don’t like to drive/We in Suburbans back to back and we gon’ fill em up with vibes.” An aim to come off well as a rapper is something the MC does not take lightly but is also, as DaBaby would claim, just another facet of who he is. “I let the music take me there, but at the end of the day, I\'m just not no dumb n\*gga,” he tells Ebro. “I can walk into a building and have a conversation with somebody that went to school for 10 years and not miss a beat. And have them on the same frequency I\'m on. And vice versa. Then, I go in the hood and talk to any n\*gga in the hood. I\'m just a versatile person. And I got the brains to be able to play around with words.”
After Daniel Caesar released his soul-baring debut album, *Freudian*, tracing his decision to leave home and the church at 17, he became one of R&B’s most promising poets, able to distill spiritual complexities into deceptively simple love songs. Then, he got lost in his own head. “I got pretty depressed,” he tells Apple Music, citing artistic pressure, social media, and the isolation of fame as factors. “For a while, I didn’t want to leave my house.” The thing that ultimately freed him from his creative rut was finding comfort in his own mortality. “Everything dies, everything changes—I had to embrace that,” he says. “To not be so scared of failure.” *CASE STUDY 01*, his existential follow-up, is denser, headier, and riskier, confronting ideas like good and evil, life and death, loneliness, and God. “I’m drawn to touchy subjects,” he says. “They’re my favorite.” He found he kept circling back to themes of death and spirituality. “I’d been reading a lot about Judaism and Kabbalah and meditation. And I was raised religious, so it’s like my operating system,” he says. “But I also needed to free myself from that—to live.” Once he’d regained some creative confidence, he drafted a fantasy lineup of artists to work with on the new music—Pharrell, Brandy, John Mayer. “These are my heroes,” he says. “People who I never thought I’d ever collaborate with, until the opportunity came up and it was like, ‘Is this really real?’” Even more surprising, perhaps, was the degree to which the studio sessions felt like true artistic exchanges. “There were obviously things I admired about these artists,” he says, “but I realized there were also things they admired about me.” Pharrell was drawn to Caesar’s palette of influences—a mix of gospel, R&B, rock, and soul—while Caesar hoped he’d absorb some of Pharrell’s signature playfulness. “I take myself very seriously,” he says, “and there’s something so childlike and fun about his music.” Similarly, Mayer, his all-time favorite artist, was interested in seeing how Caesar pieced lyrics together: “He liked what I say and how I say it.” “SUPERPOSITION” perfectly marries their mutual love of romantic, tuneful melodies and densely layered production. “I wanted a song that could’ve fit on \[Mayer\'s 2006 album\] *Continuum*,” Caesar says. “But, you know, right on the edge.”
If there is an overarching concept behind *uknowhatimsayin¿*, Danny Brown’s fifth full-length, it’s that it simply doesn’t have one. “Half the time, when black people say, ‘You know what I\'m sayin\',’ they’re never saying nothing,” Danny Brown tells Apple Music. “This is just songs. You don\'t have to listen to it backwards. You don\'t have to mix it a certain way. You like it, or you don’t.” Over the last decade, Brown has become one of rap’s most distinct voices—known as much for his hair and high register as for his taste for Adderall and idiosyncratic production. But with *uknowhatimsayin¿*, Brown wants the focus to lie solely on the quality of his music. For help, he reached out to Q-Tip—a personal hero and longtime supporter—to executive produce. “I used to hate it when people were like, ‘I love Danny Brown, but I can\'t understand what he\'s saying half the time,’” Brown says. “Do you know what I\'m saying now? I\'m talking to you. This isn\'t the Danny that parties and jumps around. No, this the one that\'s going to give you some game and teach you and train you. I\'ve been through it so you don\'t have to. I\'m Uncle Danny now.” Here, Uncle Danny tells you the story behind every song on the album. **Change Up** “‘Change Up’ was a song that I recorded while trying to learn how to record. I had just started to build the studio in my basement. I didn\'t know how to use Pro Tools or anything. It was really me just making a song to record. But I played it for Q-Tip and he lost his mind over it. Maybe he heard the potential in it, because now it\'s one of my favorite songs on the album as well. At first, I wasn\'t thinking too crazy about it, but to him, he was like, \'No, you have to jump the album off like this.\' It\'s hard not to trust him. He’s fuckin’ Q-Tip!” **Theme Song** “I made ‘Theme Song’ when I was touring for \[2016’s\] *Atrocity Exhibition*. My homeboy Curt, he’s a barber too, and I took him on tour with me to cut my hair, but he also makes beats. He brought his machine and he was just making beats on the bus. And then one day I just heard that beat and was like, ‘What you got going on?’ In our downtime, I was just writing lyrics to it. I played that for Q-Tip and he really liked that song, but he didn\'t like the hook, he didn\'t like the performance of the vocals. He couldn\'t really explain to me what he wanted. In the three years that we\'ve been working on this album, I think I recorded it over 300 times. I had A$AP Ferg on it from a time he was hanging out at my house when he was on tour. We did a song called \'Deadbeat\' but it wasn\'t too good. I just kept his ad libs and wrote a few lyrics, and then wrote a whole new song, actually.” **Dirty Laundry** “The original song was part of a Samiyam beat. He lives in LA, but every time he visits back home in Michigan he always stops over at my house and hangs out. And he was going through beats and he played me three seconds of that beat, and I guess it was the look on my face. He was like, \'You like that?\' and I was like, \'Yeah!\' I had to reform the way the song was written because the beats were so different from each other. Q-Tip guided me through the entire song: \'Say this line like this…\' or \'Pause right there...\' He pretty much just coached me through the whole thing. Couldn\'t ask for anybody better.” **3 Tearz (feat. Run the Jewels)** “I’m a huge fan of Peggy. We got each other\'s number and then we talked on the phone. I was like, \'Man, you should just come out to Detroit for like a week and let’s hang out and see what we do.\' He left a bunch of beats at my studio, and that was just one. I put a verse on, never even finished it. I was hanging out with EL-P and I was playing him stuff. I played that for him and he lost his mind. El got Mike on it and they laced it. Then Q-Tip heard it and he\'s like, \'Aww, man!\' He kind of resequenced the beat and added the organs. That was tight to see Tip back there jamming out to organs.” **Belly of the Beast (feat. Obongjayar)** “I probably had that beat since \[2011’s\] *XXX*. That actual rap I wrote for \[2013’s\] *Old*, but it was to a different beat. Maybe it was just one of those dry times. I set it to that beat kind of just playing around. Then Steven \[Umoh\] heard that—it was totally unfinished, but he was like, ‘Yo, just give it to me.’ He took it and then he went back to London and he got Obongjayar down there on it. The rest was history.” **Savage Nomad** “Actually, Q-Tip wanted the name of the album to be *Savage Nomad*. Sometimes you just make songs to try to keep your pen sharp, you know? I think I was just rapping for 50 bars straight on that beat, didn\'t have any direction. But Q-Tip resequenced it. I think Tip likes that type of stuff, when you\'re just barring out.” **Best Life** “That was when me and Q-Tip found our flip. We were making songs together, but nothing really stood out yet. I recorded the first verse but I didn\'t have anything else for it, and I sent Tip a video of me playing it and he called me back immediately like, \'What the fuck? You have to come out here this weekend.\' Once we got together, I would say he kind of helped me with writing a little bit, too. I ended up recording another version with him, but then he wanted to use the original version that I did. He said it sounded rawer to him.” **uknowhatimsayin¿ (feat. Obongjayar)** “A lot of time you put so much effort when you try too hard to say cool shit and to be extra lyrical. But that song just made itself one day. I really can\'t take no credit because I feel like it came from a higher power. Literally, I put the beat on and then next thing I know I probably had that song done at five minutes. I loved it so much I had to fight for it. I can\'t just be battle-rapping the entire album. You have to give the listeners a break, man.” **Negro Spiritual (feat. JPEGMAFIA)** “That was when Peggy was at my house in Detroit, that was one of the songs we had recorded together. I played it for Flying Lotus. He’s like, \'Man, you got to use this,\' and I was like, \'Hey, if you can get Q-Tip to like it, then I guess.\' At the end of the day, it\'s really not on me to say what I\'m going to use, what I\'m not going to use. I didn\'t even know it was going to be on the album. When we started mixing the album, and I looked, he had like a mood board with all the songs, and \'Negro Spiritual\' was up there. I was like, \'Are we using that?\'” **Shine (feat. Blood Orange)** “The most down-to-earth one. I made it and I didn\'t have the Blood Orange hook, though. Shout out to Steven again. He went and worked his magic. Again, I was like, \'Hey, you\'re going to have to convince Q-Tip about this song.\' Because before Blood Orange was on it, I don\'t think he was messing with it too much. But then once Blood Orange got on it, he was like, \'All right, I see the vision.\'” **Combat** “Literally my favorite song on the album, almost like an extra lap around a track kind of thing. Q-Tip told me this story of when he was back in the late ’80s: They\'d play this Stetsasonic song in the Latin Quarter and people would just go crazy and get to fighting. He said one time somebody starts cutting this guy, cutting his goose coat with a razor, and \[Tip\] was like, \'You could just see the feathers flying all over the air, people still dancing.\' So we always had this thing like, we have to make some shit that\'s going to make some goose feathers go up in the air. That was the one right there. That was our whole goal for that, and once we made it, we really danced around to that song. We just hyped up to that song for like three days. You couldn\'t stop playing it.”
As opening lines go, you can’t do much better than “Said play with my pussy, but don’t play with my emotions.” That’s how Doja Cat kicks off “Rules,” a semi-vulnerable highlight from a sophomore LP that’s forced to contend more with following last year’s “Mooo!” than her excellent debut from a few months earlier, *Amala*. “Mooo!” was an absurdist stunt (“Got the methane/I’m a farter/With my farmer/McDonald”) whose homespun video was designed to go viral—which it did, garnering cosigns from Chance the Rapper and Katy Perry along the way. While *Hot Pink* never shies away from a punchline—or much of anything, really—it also re-emphasizes the California native’s artistry, whether she’s paying tribute to Nicki Minaj (“Cyber Sex”) and posteriors (“Juicy”) or making easy work of a woozy blink-182 sample (“Bottom Bitch”) and weightless West African guitar (“Won’t Bite”).
If meme culture has contributed anything to the legacy of J. Cole, it helped establish him as a sort of popular rap antihero: “J. Cole went platinum with no features.” Casual fans could be forgiven for thinking this an indicator of Cole’s friend circle, but his label Dreamville’s *Revenge of the Dreamers III* compilation goes to great lengths to prove the opposite. The recording sessions, which took place over a 10-day period in January 2019, reportedly hosted over 100 artists and producers, all of whom were summoned via personal invitation. The songs (and contributors) that made the album, then, are the best of a creative community formed at the behest of “Mr. Nice Watch” himself. Present, of course, is the home team of Dreamville singer Ari Lennox, Queens-hailing everyman rapper Bas, ATL bar specialist J.I.D, songwriter/producer Omen, and Atlanta duo EARTHGANG, among others—along with names that were at one time unlikely to appear on the same playlist as Cole, let alone a compilation album flying his label’s banner. Each of the project’s 17 songs overflows with features, with notable contributions coming from young power players outside of the camp like Buddy, Young Nudy, KEY!, Maxo Kream, DaBaby, and Ski Mask the Slump God. The spirit of collaboration is audible throughout, as confirmed by Bas, who spoke with Apple Music just after the album’s recording. “It was so easy to create,” he says. “You have so many other creatives that you trust and respect, you don’t have to overdo it. You could do a 16-bar verse or hook or bridge and know that someone else is bringing something dynamic to the table.” The MC, who appears on four songs on *Revenge III*, clearly isn’t concerned about what working with a wealth of talent means for air space within the project. “I wish we could work like this all the time,” he says.
An eccentric like Madlib and a straightforward guy like Freddie Gibbs—how could it possibly work? If 2014’s *Piñata* proved that the pairing—offbeat producer, no-frills street rapper—sounded better and more natural than it looked on paper, *Bandana* proves *Piñata* wasn’t a fluke. The common ground is approachability: Even at their most cinematic (the noisy soul of “Flat Tummy Tea,” the horror-movie trap of “Half Manne Half Cocaine”), Madlib’s beats remain funny, strange, decidedly at human scale, while Gibbs prefers to keep things so real he barely uses metaphor. In other words, it’s remarkable music made by artists who never pretend to be anything other than ordinary. And even when the guest spots are good (Yasiin Bey and Black Thought on “Education” especially), the core of the album is the chemistry between Gibbs and Madlib: vivid, dreamy, serious, and just a little supernatural.
Ahead of the release of his official full-length debut album, DC rapper GoldLink launched his Beats 1 show IFFY FM, describing it as “a carefully curated journey through sound touching many corners of the world” and “home to the sound of the black diaspora.” The show exists as a companion piece to the album, shining a light on the MC’s many divergent inspirations, including artists from the UK, Canada, Colombia, Nigeria, and, of course, his native DMV area. The album is these same musical ideas realized, with GoldLink running his own unique brand of future bounce through the filters of Afrobeats, dancehall, street rap, and UK pop (among others), seasoning it all with the rumble of post-trap sonics. (There is also the curiously titled “Spanish Song,” where GoldLink has buried any semblance of ethnic identifiers deep into warm and cascading synth lines.) The list of collaborators on *Diaspora* is equally diverse, with features from LA antihero Tyler, The Creator, British-Nigerian producer Maleek Berry, American pop crooner Khalid, Afrobeats superstar Wizkid, and hip-hop bully Pusha T, to name a few. GoldLink has managed to make sense of plenty of voices here, and if *Diaspora*’s relationship to IFFY FM proves nothing else, it’s that he’s making the exact kind of music he wants to be listening to.
In 2018, Gunna was everywhere. Standout albums from Travis Scott, Lil Baby, 21 Savage, Torey Lanez, and even Mariah Carey, among others, featured verses from the Atlanta MC. Having spent the better part of a year rapping his way into the consciousness of his peers\' fans, Gunna has fashioned his *Drip or Drown 2* album—the sequel to his 2017 EP—as a coming-out party. “I feel like a lot of my new fans just know me from \[Travis Scott’s\] ‘Yosemite’ and *Drip Harder* and some of my recent activities,” the MC told Beats 1’s Zane Lowe. “But on this album, it\'s gonna put the icing on the cake and let them know what kind of artist I am.” Embracing a spotlight he once patiently stood just to the left of, *Drip or Drown 2* is a 16-track jaunt through Gunna’s world. As an orator, his voice is light—just a couple of registers above a whisper—and even when injected with melody, it can sound like he’s singing to himself. It makes you feel as if you’re privy to the MC’s innermost thoughts, which typically span a deep appreciation for luxury fashion and automobiles, how he would prefer women to act around him, and the things money has allowed him to do for his family. “Speed It Up,” one of the project’s standouts, is particularly interesting for the giant gaps of space he leaves between words. Frequent collaborators Wheezy and Turbo the Great (who both serve as executive producers) handle the bulk of the production. Despite his lengthy collaborative resume, Gunna saved the guest spots on *Drip or Drown 2* for hometown heroes Lil Baby, Young Thug, and Playboi Carti. His many industry relationships aside, the MC knows that he’s still on the come-up. “One thing I have learned from putting out music, and just growing, is to know even when you\'ve got good feedback and you\'re doing good, there\'s still another level to go to,” he told Zane Lowe. “It\'s never like, \'Oh, I\'m good, or I\'ll do what I need to do.\' There\'s still more to be done. I’m just getting started.”
There’s nothing all that subtle about Jamila Woods naming each of these all-caps tracks after a notable person of color. Still, that’s the point with *LEGACY! LEGACY!*—homage as overt as it is original. True to her own revolutionary spirit, the Chicago native takes this influential baker’s dozen of songs and masterfully transmutes their power for her purposes, delivering an engrossingly personal and deftly poetic follow-up to her formidable 2016 breakthrough *HEAVN*. She draws on African American icons like Miles Davis and Eartha Kitt as she coos and commands through each namesake cut, sparking flames for the bluesy rap groove of “MUDDY” and giving flowers to a legend on the electro-laced funk of “OCTAVIA.”
In the clip of an older Eartha Kitt that everyone kicks around the internet, her cheekbones are still as pronounced as many would remember them from her glory days on Broadway, and her eyes are still piercing and inviting. She sips from a metal cup. The wind blows the flowers behind her until those flowers crane their stems toward her face, and the petals tilt upward, forcing out a smile. A dog barks in the background. In the best part of the clip, Kitt throws her head back and feigns a large, sky-rattling laugh upon being asked by her interviewer whether or not she’d compromise parts of herself if a man came into her life. When the laugh dies down, Kitt insists on the same, rhetorical statement. “Compromise!?!?” she flings. “For what?” She repeats “For what?” until it grows more fierce, more unanswerable. Until it holds the very answer itself. On the hook to the song “Eartha,” Jamila Woods sings “I don’t want to compromise / can we make it through the night” and as an album, Legacy! Legacy! stakes itself on the uncompromising nature of its creator, and the histories honored within its many layers. There is a lot of talk about black people in America and lineage, and who will tell the stories of our ancestors and their ancestors and the ones before them. But there is significantly less talk about the actions taken to uphold that lineage in a country obsessed with forgetting. There are hands who built the corners of ourselves we love most, and it is good to shout something sweet at those hands from time to time. Woods, a Chicago-born poet, organizer, and consistent glory merchant, seeks to honor black people first, always. And so, Legacy! Legacy! A song for Zora! Zora, who gave so much to a culture before she died alone and longing. A song for Octavia and her huge and savage conscience! A song for Miles! One for Jean-Michel and one for my man Jimmy Baldwin! More than just giving the song titles the names of historical black and brown icons of literature, art, and music, Jamila Woods builds a sonic and lyrical monument to the various modes of how these icons tried to push beyond the margins a country had assigned to them. On “Sun Ra,” Woods sings “I just gotta get away from this earth, man / this marble was doomed from the start” and that type of dreaming and vision honors not only the legacy of Sun Ra, but the idea that there is a better future, and in it, there will still be black people. Jamila Woods has a voice and lyrical sensibility that transcends generations, and so it makes sense to have this lush and layered album that bounces seamlessly from one sonic aesthetic to another. This was the case on 2016’s HEAVN, which found Woods hopeful and exploratory, looking along the edges resilience and exhaustion for some measures of joy. Legacy! Legacy! is the logical conclusion to that looking. From the airy boom-bap of “Giovanni” to the psychedelic flourishes of “Sonia,” the instrument which ties the musical threads together is the ability of Woods to find her pockets in the waves of instrumentation, stretching syllables and vowels over the harmony of noise until each puzzle piece has a home. The whimsical and malleable nature of sonic delights also grants a path for collaborators to flourish: the sparkling flows of Nitty Scott on “Sonia” and Saba on “Basquiat,” or the bloom of Nico Segal’s horns on “Baldwin.” Soul music did not just appear in America, and soul does not just mean music. Rather, soul is what gold can be dug from the depths of ruin, and refashioned by those who have true vision. True soul lives in the pages of a worn novel that no one talks about anymore, or a painting that sits in a gallery for a while but then in an attic forever. Soul is all the things a country tries to force itself into forgetting. Soul is all of those things come back to claim what is theirs. Jamila Woods is a singular soul singer who, in voice, holds the rhetorical demand. The knowing that there is no compromise for someone with vision this endless. That the revolution must take many forms, and it sometimes starts with songs like these. Songs that feel like the sun on your face and the wind pushing flowers against your back while you kick your head to the heavens and laugh at how foolish the world seems.
Say what you will about Jim Jones, but he knows his ground and holds it hard. Following both 2018’s *Wasted Talent* (his first album in seven years) and a reunion with the Diplomats, *El Capo* is—in the mold of *Pray IV Reign* or *Hustler’s P.O.M.E.*—a gritty, flashy, satisfyingly dramatic shot of New York street rap, right down to the soul-inflected sound of longtime Dipset producers The Heatmakerz. “I think my critics need to hear this,” Jones raps at the outset of “State of the Union.” “Or anyone who doubts my political awareness/I’m what you call a democratic with an automatic.” Elsewhere, we get treated to features from a host of New York legends, from Fat Joe (“NYC”) and Fabolous (the simmering, disco-ish “Nothing Lasts”) to Jadakiss (“Don’t Know What They Took Him For”) and, of course, Cam’ron (“Pity in the Summer”).
Before he made music as Kemba, the Bronx MC born Matthew Jefferson cut his teeth in the New York City rap underground, releasing projects as YC the Cynic. The eventual name change was meant to reflect a creative freedom he’d been unable to embrace as a bar-focused young rapper, and with *Gilda*, his second project as Kemba, he seems fully comfortable in service of this new voice. The album is named for his mother, who he lost to a stroke in 2017, and is a diary of sorts, reflecting on who Kemba’s become in the absence of one of his biggest inspirations. “I am not a finished product/Only judge me when I’m done/Young and black and from the projects/Got a lot to overcome,” he says on “Work in Progress.” Though’s he’s clearly still ascending rap’s notoriety ladder, he’s forthright about what moves him, admitting on “Exhale,” “I feel more pressure from my moms than from the blogs/I feel more pressure from my n\*ggas than the critics.” When Kemba sings, as he does for those aforementioned bars, he does so gently, as if the words he delivers in melody need to be handled with extra care. The raps, though, are likewise sharp and affecting. “If your Corn Pops never had a roach in it, you probably won’t get it,” he starts in on “Captain Planet,” a song that attempts to rectify an undying self-doubt with dreams of overcoming the poverty he grew up in. On “What a Day,” he painstakingly details familial dysfunction, and then he faces down some voices of self-hatred on “Dysfunction” itself. There are brighter moments on *Gilda*—most notably “Alive,” where in remembrance of his mother Kemba makes a fairly compelling case for God as a black woman, but the scriptures here are rooted overwhelmingly in the harshness that has marked his path to date. It’s a rough trade-off, but it’s this very experience that has fostered art that will outlast any amount of rebrands.
Little Brother's first album in nine years, saw Phonte and Rapper Big Pooh reunite after a surprise reunion show in late 2018. Boasting production from frequent Little Brother collaborators such as Nottz, Khrysis, and Focus... as well as features from Carlitta Durand, Darien Brockington, and new comer Blakk Soul. Executive produced by Little Brother and released through their respective labels in conjunction with Empire, "May The Lord Watch" became Little Brother's first album to reach a number one by debuting at number one on Apple Music.
New Orleans’ Lucky Daye was brought up in a religious cult that forbade secular music; it wasn’t until later in life that he became enamored with classic R&B, from The Gap Band to Chaka Khan to Prince. (That “e” at the end of Daye is an homage to Marvin Gaye’s subtle name change.) You may have already been introduced to the bulk of the golden-voiced singer’s long-teased debut album, *Painted*: Daye released most of its tracks over the course of two previous EPs, both of which have since disappeared into the digital ether. But the songs are all the more striking presented in full, a lush, impeccably produced arc from feel-good funk (“Late Night”) to slinky Ginuwine interpolations (“Karma”) to ravaged ballads that compare turbulent relationships to natural disasters—no small statement from a guy who survived Hurricane Katrina. Very little on *Painted* sounds like the R&B you’ll hear on the radio, which is exactly why it’s one of 2019’s most interesting debuts.
Michael Kiwanuka never seemed the type to self-title an album. He certainly wasn’t expected to double down on such apparent self-assurance by commissioning a kingly portrait of himself as the cover art. After all, this is the singer-songwriter who was invited to join Kanye West’s *Yeezus* sessions but eventually snuck wordlessly out, suffering impostor syndrome. That sense of self-doubt shadowed him even before his 2012 debut *Home Again* collected a Mercury Prize nomination. “It’s an irrational thought, but I’ve always had it,” he tells Apple Music. “It keeps you on your toes, but it was also frustrating me. I was like, ‘I just want to be able to do this without worrying so much and just be confident in who I am as an artist.’” Notions of identity also got him thinking about how performers create personas—onstage or on social media—that obscure their true selves, inspiring him to call his third album *KIWANUKA* in an act of what he calls “anti-alter-ego.” “It’s almost a statement to myself,” he says. “I want to be able to say, ‘This is me, rain or shine.’ People might like it, people might not, it’s OK. At least people know who I am.” Kiwanuka was already known as a gifted singer and songwriter, but *KIWANUKA* reveals new standards of invention and ambition. With Danger Mouse and UK producer Inflo behind the boards—as they were on *Love & Hate* in 2016—these songs push his barrel-aged blend of soul and folk further into psychedelia, fuzz rock, and chamber pop. Here, he takes us through that journey song by song. **You Ain’t the Problem** “‘You Ain’t the Problem’ is a celebration, me loving humans. We forget how amazing we are. Social media’s part of this—all these filters hiding things that we think people won\'t like, things we think don\'t quite fit in. You start thinking this stuff about you is wrong and that you’ve got a problem being whatever you are and who you were born to be. I wanted to write a song saying, ‘You’re not the problem. You just have to continue being *you* more, go deeper within yourself.’ That’s where the magic comes—as opposed to cutting things away and trying to erode what really makes you.” **Rolling** “‘Rolling with the times, don’t be late.’ Everything’s about being an artist for me, I guess. I was trying to find my place still, but you can do things to make sure that you fit in or are keeping up with everything that’s happening—whether it’s posting stuff online or keeping up with the coolest records, knowing the right things. Or it could just be you’re in your mid-thirties, you haven’t got married or had kids yet, and people are like, ‘What?’ ‘Rolling with the times’ is like, go at your own pace. In my head, there was early Stooges records and French records like Serge Gainsbourg with the fuzz sounds. I wanted to make a song that sounded kind of crazy like that.” **I’ve Been Dazed** “Eddie Hazel from Funkadelic is my favorite guitar player. This has anthemic chords because he would always have really beautiful anthemic chords in the songs that he wrote. It just came out almost hymn-like. Lyrically, because it has this melancholy feel to it, I was singing about waking up from the nightmare of following someone else’s path or putting yourself down, low self-esteem—the things ‘You Ain\'t the Problem’ is defying. The feeling is, ‘Man, I\'ve been in this kind of nightmare, I just want to get out of it, I’m ready to go.’” **Piano Joint (This Kind of Love) \[Intro\]** “As a teenager, I’d just escape \[into some albums\], like I could teleport away from life and into that person’s world. I really wanted to have that feel with this record. It would be so vivid, there was no chance to get out of it, no gap in the songs—make it feel like one long piece. Some songs just flow into each other, but some needed interludes as passageways. This intro came when I was playing some bass and \[Inflo\] was playing some piano and I started singing my idea of a Marvin Gaye soul tune—a deep, dark, melancholic cut from one of his ’70s records. Then Danger Mouse had the idea, ‘Why don’t you pitch some of it down so it sounds different?’” **Piano Joint (This Kind of Love)** “I used to always love melancholy songs; the sadder it is, the happier I’d be afterwards. This was my moment to really exercise that part of me. Originally, it was going to be a piano ballad, and then I was like, ‘Why don’t we try playing some drums?’ Inflo’s a really good drummer, so I went in and played bass with him, and it sounded really good. I was thinking of that ’70s Gil Scott-Heron East Coast soul. Then we worked with this amazing string arranger, Rosie Danvers, who did almost all the strings on the last album. I said to her, ‘It’s my favorite song, just do something super beautiful.’ She just killed it.” **Another Human Being** “We were doing all the interludes and Danger Mouse had found loads of samples. This was a news report \[about the ’60s US civil rights sit-in protests\]. I remember thinking, ‘This sounds amazing, it goes into “Living in Denial” perfectly—it just changes that song.’ And, yeah, again, I’m ’70s-obsessed, but the ’60s and ’70s were so pivotal for young American black men and women, and it just gave a gravitas to the record. It goes to identity and something that resonates with me and my name and who I am. It gives me loads of confidence to continue to be myself.” **Living in Denial** “This is how me, Inflo, and Danger Mouse sound when we’re completely ourselves and properly linked together. No arguments, just let it happen, don’t think about it. I was trying to be a soul group—thinking of The Delfonics, The Isley Brothers, The Temptations, The Chambers Brothers. Again, the lyrics are that thing of seeking acceptance: You don’t need to seek it, just accept yourself and then whoever wants to hang with you will.” **Hero (Intro)** “‘Hero’ was the last song we completed. Once it started to sound good, I was sitting there with my acoustic, playing. We’d done the ‘Piano Joint’ intro and I was like, ‘Oh, we should pitch down this number as well and make it something that we really wouldn’t do with a straight rock ’n’ roll song.’” **Hero** “‘Hero’ was the hardest to come up with lyrics for. We had the music and melody for, like, two years. Any time I tried to touch it, I hated it—I couldn’t come up with anything. Then I was reading about Fred Hampton from the Black Panthers and I started thinking about all these people that get killed—or, like Hendrix, die an accidental death—who have so much to give or do so much in such a small time. I also love the thing where all these legends, Bowie and Bob Dylan, were creating larger-than-life personas that we were obsessed with. You didn’t really know who they were. That really made me sad, because I don’t disagree with it, but I know that’s not me. So, ‘Am I a hero?’ was also asking, ‘If I do that stuff, will I become this big artist that everyone respects?’—that ‘I’m not enough’ thing.” **Hard to Say Goodbye** “This is my love of Isaac Hayes and big orchestrations, lush strings, people like David Axelrod. Flo actually brought in this sample from a Nat King Cole song, just one chord, and we pitched it around, and then we replayed it with a 20-piece string orchestra packed into the studio. We had a double-bass cello, the whole works, and this really good piano player Kadeem \[Clarke\] who plays with Little Simz, and our friend Nathan \[Allen\] playing drums. That was pretty fun.” **Final Days** “At first, I didn’t know where this would fit on the record, like, ‘Man, this is cool, I just don’t *love*it.’ I wrote some lyrics and thought, ‘This is better, but it’s missing something.’ It always felt like space to me, so I said to Kennie \[Takahashi\], the engineer, ‘Are there any samples you can find of people in space?’ We found these astronauts about to crash, which is kind of dark, but it gave it this emotion it was missing. It gave me goosebumps. Later, we found out that it was a fake, some guys messing around in Italy in the ’60s for an art project or something.” **Interlude (Loving the People)** “‘Final Days’ was sounding amazing, but it needed to go somewhere else at the end. I had this melody on the Wurlitzer, and originally it was an instrumental bit that comes in for the end of ‘Final Days’ so that it ends somewhere completely different, like the spaceship’s landing at its destination. But I was like, ‘Let’s stretch it out. Let’s do more.’ Danger Mouse found this \[US congressman and civil rights leader\] John Lewis sample, and it sounded beautiful and moving over these chords, so we put it here.” **Solid Ground** “When everything gets stripped away—all the strings, all the sounds, all the interludes—I’m still just a dude that sits and plays a song on a guitar or piano. I felt like the album needed a glimpse of that. Rosie did a beautiful arrangement and then I finished it off—everyone was out somewhere, so I just played all the instruments, apart from drums and things like that. So, ‘Solid Ground’ is my little piece that I had from another place. Lyrically, it’s about finding the place where you feel comfortable.” **Light** “I just thought ‘Light’ was a nice dreamy piece to end the record with—a bit of light at the end of this massive journey. You end on this peaceful note, something positive. For me, light describes loads of things that are good—whether it’s obvious things like the light at the end of the tunnel or just a light feeling in my heart. The idea that the day’s coming—such a peaceful, exciting thing. We’re just always looking for it.” *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, MacBook Pros, and HomePods, 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).*
Producer, bassist, and Tony! Toni! Toné! cofounder Raphael Saadiq steps away from classic soul (2008’s *The Way I See It* and 2011’s *Stone Rollin’*) to tell a tragic personal story. *Jimmy Lee* refers to his older brother, who was addicted to heroin and died of an overdose in the ’90s. Saadiq draws on the struggles he witnessed and experienced to create the most personal album of his career. “It’s about my brother, it’s about me growing up to be a man versus a boy, and the vulnerabilities and frailties we have in life,” he tells Apple Music’s Ebro. Given the fragile subject matter, the songs on *Jimmy Lee* are dark, leaning on supple soul and gospel as both vessel and confessional. Perspectives move from an addict’s (“Sinners Prayer,” “So Ready,” “Kings Fall”) to those caught in the addict’s crossfire (“This World Is Drunk”). A burst of clarity emerges on “I’m Feeling Love” (“You are my rehab/The only needle that I have/Injections every day/Vein to vein, I’m here to stay”) before returning back to fatal urges. The aftermath begins with “Belongs to God,” a church spiritual that mysteriously ends and opens into the ominous self-examination “Glory to the Veins.” “Rikers Island” is split in two parts: one a gospel-delic protest against the physical and psychological incarceration of African Americans, the second a pleading spoken-word piece voiced by actor Daniel J. Watts. Then an uncredited Kendrick Lamar steps up for the chorus on the album closer, “Rearview” (“How can I lead the world when I’m scared to try/Why should I need the world, we all gon’ die,” he posits). *Jimmy Lee* is a chilling lamentation. Like Sly Stone and Marvin Gaye, Saadiq uses soul music as a transformative tool, embracing darkness in order to shed light.
Where do you go after you’re nominated for a Grammy for what is only your second proper album? If you’re celebrated North Carolina MC Rapsody, you go only wherever your heart desires—for her, that was down a path forged by historic black women before her. “When I think of why I am who I am, it\'s because I\'m inspired by so many dope women,” Rapsody tells Apple Music. “Dope men, too, but mostly dope women.” The MC’s third album *Eve* (named for that biblical mother of humanity) is a series of dedications to these women—some literal, others figurative, and still others simply named for individuals who embody ideals the artist felt compelled to extol. “It was easy once I had a concept,” she says. “All these women have different energies and they represent different things to me. And the bars just connected on their own, to be honest. Once you have the idea, the basis of what you want to write, everything else is just freedom and truth.” Lead single “Ibtihaj” (as in Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, the first Muslim American woman to wear a hijab while competing for the United States in the Olympics) features a sample of GZA’s “Liquid Swords” along with guest spots from D’Angelo and The Genius himself. Elsewhere, the voices of rising New York MC Leikeli47, Los Angeles singer K. Roosevelt, and the legendary Queen Latifah ring out to help Rapsody tell the tales of “Oprah,” “Maya,” and “Hatshepsut,” respectively. *Eve* also features fellow generational talent and early Rapsody supporter J. Cole, who, during the sessions for “Sojourner,” helped distill his and Rapsody’s shared purpose as educators. “That whole song came from a two-, three-hour conversation that myself, J. Cole, and Ninth Wonder had in the studio,” Rapsody explains. “We were talking about Ninth’s generation versus me and Cole\'s. Everything is on the internet; they don\'t have to go and talk to each other face to face. In school they don\'t learn about all our black heroes. Some of them don\'t even want to know who Malcolm X is, who Betty Shabazz is. So that turned into: What is our responsibility as artists? We teach through our music. We should have fun, we should vibe out, but we have a responsibility to be reporting and talk about what\'s going on.” What that means for *Eve* is that the MC gets to honor some of her biggest inspirations as she earns a place among them.
“*Port of Miami* was the foundation I built the empire on,” Rick Ross tells Apple Music. “We’ve accomplished so much since then, and sometimes you just gotta reflect on that.” Thirteen years, nine albums, and too many hits to count later, Ross returns to the first brand he ever built, delivering a sequel to that seminal debut. Within it there are luxury raps aplenty, along with references to streets of Miami outside of South Beach, the area Ross immortalized in the music video for “Hustlin’.” *Port of Miami 2* isn’t just a continuation of the original, though—it\'s a project that allows Ross to revel in his legacy while adhering to a blueprint the MC executed on the original and continued to build from throughout his career. “*Port of Miami* 1, you talkin’ ’bout young producers, a new sound, a different vibe,” Ross says. “And this album, on track one, ‘Act a Fool,’ I felt like it made sense to kick the door in with an MMG foundation: the producer Beat Billionaire. His sound, with our energy.” \"Act a Fool\" also features longtime MMG cohort Wale; he joins Gunplay (“Nobody’s Favorite”) and Meek Mill (“Bogus Charms”) to reaffirm that the home team is fully intact. The raps on *Port of Miami 2* reflect the clout Ross has managed to acquire over the years. Instead of “I’m Bad” on the original, the always proud villain has graduated to “Nobody’s Favorite.” His “Where My Money (I Need That)” has yielded a “Rich N\*\*\*a Lifestyle,” and where he’d once had to announce “It’s My Time,” *Port of Miami 2* looks into the not-so-distant future toward a “Vegas Residency.” Within the project, Ross has also tapped a bevy of his favorite voices, including Swizz Beatz, who guests on the Just Blaze production “BIG TYME,” R&B upstart Summer Walker (“Summer Reign”), onetime adversary Jeezy (“Born to Kill”), and the dearly departed Nipsey Hussle (“Rich N\*\*\*a Lifestyle”), among others. Together, the group celebrates Ross’ legacy by way of performances that serve to buttress his oversized personality. “At this stage in my career, and being where the game is, the goofy shit is the way a lot of people promote the music now,” Ross says. “And me being where I\'m at, I can\'t do that. I gotta remain creative and just dope. The production, the wordplay, the concepts, you know?” Basically, the things that have gotten him this far.
If trip-hop had been created in sunny Inglewood, California, instead of downcast Bristol, it might sound a lot like *Chasing Summer*. It’s mood-intensive and takes unexpected stylistic shifts, yet stays true to the block. SiR, an R&B prodigy and TDE signee, doesn’t bunker down behind muted, eclectic sound banks. His supple reading is front and center, reveling in tales of love and torment. Stars like labelmate Kendrick Lamar (“Hair Down”), Lil Wayne (“Lucy’s Love”), Jill Scott (“Still Blue”), and Sabrina Claudio (“That’s Why I Love You”) are drawn to his magnetic personality, respectfully vibing with SiR on his level. *Chasing Summer* passes the bump test, no matter what the season. Stay for the album’s closer “LA,” his potent love letter to the City of Angels.
Born to Iranian parents in Sweden and now based in LA, Snoh Aalegra represents the hopeful global face of R&B. Early cosigns from both Prince and Drake (who sampled her song “Time” for his *More Life* track “Do Not Disturb”) gave her 2017 debut album *Feels* extra eyes and ears. Her second album, humorously titled *- Ugh, Those Feels Again*, digs deeper into the groove she created. Her satin voice doesn’t need gimmicky production, so producers like NO I.D., D-Mile, and Doctor O create an open canvas for Aalegra to attack. And does she ever, rising above relationship woes with sculpted grace (“I Want You Around,” “Love Like That,” “Situationship”). She works abdominals with the body-roller “Toronto,” while “Nothing to Me” raises both heat and BPMs.
In the three years since her seminal album *A Seat at the Table*, Solange has broadened her artistic reach, expanding her work to museum installations, unconventional live performances, and striking videos. With her fourth album, *When I Get Home*, the singer continues to push her vision forward with an exploration of roots and their lifelong influence. In Solange\'s case, that’s the culturally rich Houston of her childhood. Some will know these references — candy paint, the late legend DJ Screw — via the city’s mid-aughts hip-hop explosion, but through Solange’s lens, these same touchstones are elevated to high art. A diverse group of musicians was tapped to contribute to *When I Get Home*, including Tyler, the Creator, Chassol, Playboi Carti, Standing on the Corner, Panda Bear, Devin the Dude, The-Dream, and more. There are samples from the works of under-heralded H-town legends: choreographer Debbie Allen, actress Phylicia Rashad, poet Pat Parker, even the rapper Scarface. The result is a picture of a particular Houston experience as only Solange could have painted it — the familiar reframed as fantastic.
Summer Walker doesn’t look the way she sounds. The Atlanta singer’s face tattoos are more in line with the aesthetic of her hometown’s many hip-hop superstars than that of ’90s golden-era R&B acts like Mary J. Blige, Xscape, and SWV, but the makeover feels right for the moment. On Walker’s heavily anticipated *Over It*, which follows her 2018 breakout mixtape *Last Day of Summer*—as well as the *CLEAR* EP—the singer recontextualizes some familiar-sounding frustrations and reckonings about hard-earned romantic truths by way of throwback sounds and contemporary real talk (all of which sounds even richer thanks to Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos). “Did I ever ask you to take me to go shopping in Paris?/Or go sailing overseas and just drape me in Gucci?” she asks on the Bryson Tiller duet “Playing Games.” “No, I never had an issue, go to the club with your boys, baby/I never wanted you to stay too long, just wanted you to show me off.” Later in the song she borrows a few bars from “Say My Name,” Destiny’s Child’s eternally catchy ballad of the underappreciated lover. *Over It* is indeed peppered with references to the R&B of Walker’s childhood: Producer London On Da Track utilizes a vintage 702 sample for “Body” and builds the beat for “Come Thru,” which features Usher, on the keyboard line of the ATL icon’s 1997 “You Make Me Wanna...” The album also boasts guest spots from Drake, 6LACK, A Boogie wit da Hoodie, and long-dormant moody-R&B hero PARTYNEXTDOOR. The vantage point of *Over It*, though, is wholly the singer’s own. The exchanges in Walker’s verses sound like they could have been grafted directly from text messages or pulled from a FaceTime conversation. “Am I really that much to handle?” she opines on the title track. “You wanna be a good friend to me/Why don’t you pour up that Hennessy/Light up a few blunts so we can get high,” she sings on “Tonight.” “Too much Patrón will have you calling his phone/Have you wanting some more,” she advises on “Drunk Dialing…LODT.” Walker’s words are so relatable they seem destined to become social media captions. *Over It*, then, is a project whose title betrays its maker’s constitution, one certain only to leave fans wanting more.
From the outset of his fame—or, in his earliest years as an artist, infamy—Tyler, The Creator made no secret of his idolization of Pharrell, citing the work the singer-rapper-producer did as a member of N.E.R.D as one of his biggest musical influences. The impression Skateboard P left on Tyler was palpable from the very beginning, but nowhere is it more prevalent than on his fifth official solo album, *IGOR*. Within it, Tyler is almost completely untethered from the rabble-rousing (and preternaturally gifted) MC he broke out as, instead pushing his singing voice further than ever to sound off on love as a life-altering experience over some synth-heavy backdrops. The revelations here are mostly literal. “I think I’m falling in love/This time I think it\'s for real,” goes the chorus of the pop-funk ditty “I THINK,” while Tyler can be found trying to \"make you love me” on the R&B-tinged “RUNNING OUT OF TIME.” The sludgy “NEW MAGIC WAND” has him begging, “Please don’t leave me now,” and the album’s final song asks, “ARE WE STILL FRIENDS?” but it’s hardly a completely mopey affair. “IGOR\'S THEME,” the aforementioned “I THINK,” and “WHAT\'S GOOD” are some of Tyler’s most danceable songs to date, featuring elements of jazz, funk, and even gospel. *IGOR*\'s guests include Playboi Carti, Charlie Wilson, and Kanye West, whose voices are all distorted ever so slightly to help them fit into Tyler\'s ever-experimental, N.E.R.D-honoring vision of love.
The title phrase of Wale’s sixth studio album, *Wow… That’s Crazy*, exists mostly in common parlance as conversational placeholder. We often hear it delivered by someone on the receiving end of an elaborate story, buying time to process what they’re hearing or to formulate a more insightful response. In the case of Wale’s *Wow… That’s Crazy*, the DC rapper is opening up about his worldview and some things in it that have been weighing on him, in a way likely to leave listeners in need of a second to process. The album opens with “Sue Me,” on which the rapper grapples with his presence in the entertainment matrix. “Sue me, I’m rooting for everybody that’s black,” he admits. There are a number of references to his vantage point here—as it refers to the black experience specifically, including odes to black women (“BGM,” “Black Bonnie”) as well as ruminations on his responsibility as a young leader. “We just want to be black and legendary/Be us and be proud by any means necessary,” he raps on “Love Me Nina / Semiautomatic.” On the 6LACK collaboration “Expectations,” he raps, “Black man in therapy/’Cause white terror don’t sleep/I got to roll up my leaf/Might stop the PTSD.” Another theme of *Wow… That’s Crazy* is the complexity of the modern relationship—one familiar to Wale fans. The Jeremih-assisted “On Chill” finds him begging for a reprieve from a relationship’s fighting, while “Set You Free” has the rapper taking responsibility for his missteps within a partnership. There’s also the Lil Durk collaboration “Break My Heart,” which gives us a rare glimpse into the guesting Chicago MC’s softer side. In addition to the aforementioned guests, *Wow… That’s Crazy* features Ari Lennox, Meek Mill, Jacquees, and Megan Thee Stallion (among others), who all do their part to help the MC tell a story that fans can take their time with.
There aren’t many rappers who can claim to have the stylistic influence that Young Thug has had—a fact that may or may not have slowed the once prolific artist’s rate of output. Never lacking in feature work, the majority of Thug’s career saw him release multiple projects annually before dropping the Future collaboration *SUPER SLIMEY* and the YSL Records showcase *Slime Language* in 2017 and 2018, respectively. A little more than halfway through 2019, Thugger awards his fans’ patience with *So Much Fun*, an album that not only reminds us what we’d been missing, but one whose title seems to speak directly to the experience of creating it. Thug sounds elated to be making music across *So Much Fun*, unloading quirky stream-of-consciousness bars like rounds from one of the many guns he so often cites. “I put on my brothers, I put on my bitch/Had to wear the dress, ’cause I had a stick,” he raps on “Just How It Is.” He gets explicit on “Lil Baby,” telling us, “She put my cum in her cup like it was shake/I’ll never fuck this bitch again, it was a mistake,” but also proclaims via “Ecstasy,” “I don’t wanna talk about no hoes with my dad.” Fair. The production on *So Much Fun*, along with the way Thug processes it, is based in trap but equally indebted to video game scoring and some unplaceable fantasy world. Frequent collaborators like Wheezy and Southside, as well as friend and former tourmate J. Cole, have pushed themselves to their weirdest in attempts to keep up with Thug’s vocal experiments. Here, they include playing with British slang (“Sup Mate”), aping Louis Armstrong’s singing voice (“Cartier Gucci Scarf”), and punctuating bars with Michael Jackson-reminiscent ad-libs (“Light It Up”). The MC is very clearly in his bag on *So Much Fun*, something that we might attribute to the peace he may have found as one of rap’s most revered innovators. He alludes to this himself on “Jumped Out the Window,” rapping, “I been in the top room at Tootsie’s, they ain’t stunt me/They know I got money, and I don’t want nothing.”