XXL's Best Hip Hop Projects of 2020

“I like to describe *So Help Me God!* as a light during a dark time,” 2 Chainz tells Apple Music. “It\'s a time capsule of what we\'ve been experiencing during this pandemic, during this year. But it\'s the light side. It\'s the other side of the pillow.” Before COVID-19 changed the direction of 2020 for the world, 2 Chainz had already delivered *No Face No Case*, a project serving mostly to showcase his T.R.U. clique. The pandemic would void any plans of in-person promotion, so in addition to the extra time he’d get with family, Chainz did what he’s always done, retreating to the studio to accumulate music for what would eventually become *So Help Me God!* Feeling the weight of the era like everyone else, he focused his creative energy on delivering a proper distraction, a body of work that features a diversity of production (Mike WiLL Made-It, Cool & Dre, David Banner, Chief Keef), guest vocals (Kanye West, Mulatto, Kevin Gates, Brent Faiyaz), and novel concepts, all which speak to the MC’s impeccable taste and uncanny ability to wring humor from the street life he knows so well. (See “Vampire” for a hilariously pointed quip about how he distinguishes hustlers who’ve always had money from those who are new to it.) “When people hear this album, they can\'t tell me they knew I was coming like this,” 2 Chainz says. “Ain’t no way. I switch my pitch every time. So, that\'s what this is. We\'re switching up the pitch.” Read on as 2 Chainz breaks down *So Help Me God!* track by track and explains what makes it the next best installment in his catalog. **Lambo Wrist** “Most of the time I like to warm people up—I might give them their soup and their salad before I give them their meal. But this time was a little bit different: I was trying to go entrée first and just recognize what I do, who I am, and what I bring to the game. Sometimes confidence and cockiness can get misconstrued, but I do feel like I\'m one of the best to do this, so I didn\'t want to play with them this time.” **Grey Area** “I went to the ’yo and I was rocking with my man Dallas Martin and he had a young producer over there, Jay the Great. When producers play beats, they \[get\] three to five. I don\'t like to listen to beats all day. I don\'t want to hear your \'experimental folder.\' So I told them three to five beats, and this was the third beat and I just went straight in, and that’s what was on my mind, I guess.” **Save Me (feat. YoungBoy Never Broke Again)** “I be doing a little light production around here. People don’t be knowing, but \[the bounce\] element is what I added to the record because, one, it has my man on there, NBA YoungBoy, and he\'s from Baton Rouge and that\'s just an element that they have in some of their music. I didn\'t want it to be overbearing, but I’m like, we coming with this nostalgic R&B with this bounce, this is a wave, this is a vibe. I could see me doing three or four more joints like this.” **Money Maker (feat. Lil Wayne)** “\[Me and Wayne\] are actually working on *ColleGrove* 2, so while we were doing that, I sent him this from my album. I needed him on this. One reason is because I got the sample from Southern \[Louisiana’s Southern University\] but I just be trying to make everything make sense, sonically and conceptually. \[‘Money Maker’\] is an articulation of the Black experience, the HBCU experience, band culture, halftime, all of those things rolled into one. And then ‘Piece of My Love’ is top of the food chain.” **Can’t Go for That (feat. Ty Dolla $ign & Lil Duval)** “Using Ty Dolla $ign and Lil Duval, that idea came from when JAY-Z did ‘Girls, Girls, Girls,’ when there were different people doing different hooks, from Biz Markie to maybe Beanie Sigel? It was different voices. So for \[Lil Duval and Ty Dolla $ign\], I had originally called on them to do the hooks differently, but I put them all together and it leads up to the point at the end where you just hear Ty going crazy. It rises with each hook, but people don\'t really notice it, and then at the end it\'s a jam session.” **Feel a Way (feat. Kanye West and Brent Faiyaz)** “The thing with me is I’m able to do a lot of different things. I\'m also someone that may be a little too in-tune or be a little too smart when it comes to the process, because I\'m data-driven as well and I understand what the majority of the fans like to hear from 2 Chainz. But I got other bags. I have a whole folder full of this vibe if you need that.” **Quarantine Thick (feat. Mulatto)** “Mulatto is from the South side. She from Clayco: Clayton County is where I\'m from. I thought, who\'s new or fresh who I can support and it\'d be organic—she pulled up on me at the studio and we knocked that shit out. So I fuck with her for that.” **Ziploc (feat. Kevin Gates)** “Kevin Gates pulled up on me at my crib in LA, and we went in. In this time of pandemics and internet, a lot of features are done through email—you send them and send them back—but when he came through, we vibed, we chilled, we chopped it up for an hour or so. Then we pulled up some beats and we did that one on the spot. It was one of my most memorable recording sessions because of just how we were getting to it on that thing, for real. Steel sharpens steel.” **Free Lighter (feat. Lil Uzi Vert & Chief Keef)** “People don\'t know, man, I\'ve rocked with Sosa, I be hollering at Sosa, I like what he do, I like how he bring his individuality to the game. Chief Keef is one of them people that we have to give him his roses too and he hard on the beats, too. So I talked to him and I said, \'Send me some beats.\' Then I did it and I sent it back and he thought it was so hard, he jumped on it. I think then Uzi may have heard it, and it just came together super organically. It\'s one of them records that I\'ve been sitting on. I\'ve been ready to get that boy out of here.” **Toni** “Toni talks in third person a lot. So, it\'s conceptual. \'Toni\' derives from the neighborhood I’m from, Old National: Everybody who sold powder or anything like that, their name was Tony. You would get called Tony: Black Tony, White Tony, Big Tony, Lil Tony—all the different likenesses. I\'m just Big Toni at this particular point in my career. The biggest Toni.” **Southside Hov** “I got a lot of admiration for the big homie, he been around for a few decades. He\'s been relevant and successful, in our eyes. He’s a businessman, philanthropist, he be helping the hood; married with the kids. He\'s not a bad person to look at when you want some advice or trying to figure a couple of things out. So I just really talk about my business savvy on there, mixed with my hustling savvy, which is kind of where he came from, the same thing. From hustling to the Fortune 500 type of flow.” **Vampire** “So I got the track from Dallas \[Martin\] and I do the track and I loved the track. And then I sent it back to Cool & Dre and they give it back to me *all* different—with heavy 808s…like some Florida shit. Maybe the beat was unfinished when I got it, but they don\'t know I fell in love with it like that. So I had to take things back off or whatever, but I\'ve *been* fans of those boys. I\'ve been fucking with those boys forever. It was just time to do it, and it was time to do something different.” **YRB (feat. Rick Ross & Skooly)** “So we needed a little spoken word on here, and my boy MIKE DEAN had made this, like, four-bar pass, with just the vibes. Then my boy KY, who mixes all my stuff, he was like, ‘You gotta put Big Rube on here to give them folks some game.’ \[We placed it\] right before Ross come on and it just fit like a glove.” **Wait for You to Die** “I had a little partner pass away, he was only 17 years old. And he passed away from something unfortunate, but I saw somebody else say, ‘I never looked up to nobody younger than me before.’ So it was about how he didn\'t even know. No one knew that. As soon as you die, somebody want your girl, the label make money off of you—like all this stuff is going to happen as soon as you pass away. So, it\'s just like a reality check. David Banner did the beat, too.” **55 Times** “I’ve talked about this before, but I have a couple of friends whose sons have passed away. My homie Crazy called me one time and told me that Big’s son just got killed and I didn\'t believe it. So Big called me a lot of times before I answered the phone. I don’t know if it was 55 times, but it was a lot of times before I found out the horrible news. And then when Johnny passed, I was asleep, out of town, and my wife was calling. I don\'t know what happened, either, my phone was dead or—by the time I got to the phone, I had so many missed calls and it was bad news. So basically with this song I talk about how God keeps blessing me for some reason. I was in a storytelling format where I talk about some of the dark times, but how God continues to bless me throughout.”

The impending arrival of 21 Savage’s *SAVAGE MODE II* was announced with a trailer directed by Gibson Hazard and narrated by Morgan Freeman. The takeaway, aside from the fact that Savage and collaborator Metro Boomin were emerging together from separate and presumably unrelated periods of inactivity, is that the project was much more than just two pals hanging out. With *SAVAGE MODE II*, the pair have effectively reached back to the era when 21 Savage wanted nothing more than to let rap fans know he was a “Real Ni\*\*a” with “No Heart.” *SAVAGE MODE II* follows 2017’s *Without Warning*—also featuring Offset—as the third collaboration between the pair, the first being 2016’s *Savage Mode*. Savage and Metro would go on to become exponentially more successful in the years following, but *SAVAGE MODE II* songs like “Glock in My Lap,” “Brand New Draco,” and “No Opp Left Behind” effectively recreate the us-against-the-world energy of the original. Elsewhere on the project, Savage is every bit the rap superstar we know in collaboration with Drake and Young Thug on “Mr. Right Now” and “Rich N\*\*\*a Shit,” respectively. But whether he’s talking about “Snitches & Rats” (with Young Nudy) or opening up about a relationship gone sour on “RIP Luv,” 21 Savage sounds like he\'s at the top of his game while he’s back in the saddle with Metro. Or as Morgan Freeman puts it in the trailer, “When someone is in Savage Mode, they’re not to be fucked with.”

According to A Boogie wit da Hoodie, 2018’s *Hoodie SZN* album—which broke the naming convention of 2016’s *Artist*, 2017’s *The Bigger Artist*, and 2018’s *International Artist*—was him leaning into a harder sound, MCing a little more in line with what you might expect to come out of the Highbridge section of the Bronx. “It’s straight street,” A Boogie told Apple Music at the time. With *Artist 2.0*, however, the hoodie has come down, the MC returning to Artist mode, once again baring his soul through R&B melodies. He indulges this in many ways across *Artist 2.0*, interpolating lyrics from Fantasia’s “When I See U” for a few bars during “Cinderella Story,” singing a verse in Bronx-friendly Spanglish on the same song, or wailing on “Thug Love,” “I just wanna be a rock star like The Beatles.” *Artist 2.0* is also rich with guest spots (Young Thug, Lil Uzi Vert, Gunna), but mostly they are vocalists of the same ilk: modern MCs gleefully toeing the line between rapper and singer. He makes room for two of them on “Anti-Social Gangsta (Numbers)” (Gunna, Roddy Ricch), but sounds equally comfortable next to proper R&B stars Summer Walker (“Calm Down \[Bittersweet\]”) and Khalid (“Another Day Gone”). It’s this kind of versatility that has given A Boogie his staying power, allowing him to outlast the many buzzing NYC artists that have popped up during his reign.

“This is some shit you go and pick your homie up from jail with,” Aminé announces to open *Limbo*, his second studio album. What follows reflects a wide-ranging version of the Portland rapper—at once introspective and lighthearted, weighty confessionals alongside freewheeling levity. It effectively captures the state suggested by its title, the messy, complicated, and triumphant glory of a quarter-life crisis. Of course romance is the primary recurring theme, because what is the heart if not life\'s greatest limbo. “Can\'t Decide” captures the indecision of situationships and those in-between states of maybe friends, maybe more, while “Riri” is a wounded survey of lost loves that manages to not sound wounded at all (and brims with pop culture references to boot). The silken “Easy” is a duet with Summer Walker about making it work even and especially when times are difficult. Elsewhere, he offers a show of maternal gratitude on “Mama” (“You\'re the only woman in my life who makes me smile,” he croons in falsetto), and conversely, “Fetus” wrestles with the prospect of parenthood and all that comes with it. Album closer “My Reality” pauses to breathe in all that life has brought to the rapper and exhales as a resounding thank-you. One of Aminé‘s greatest strengths is his versatility; he can effortlessly switch up his flows or a song\'s mood, going from a frenzied cadence to honeyed singing in a flash. He uses his voice as well as his production choices to build in contrast—nothing is ever too serious or flippant—and it makes for an intriguing listen that constantly pulls at the ear. At its core, *Limbo* is a searching album that often poses more questions than it answers, but Aminé makes the journey itself its own kind of pleasure.

Coming at the tail end of a steady wave of solid 2020 Griselda Records projects, the Buffalo, New York-based imprint may very well have saved the best for last. While his core labelmates Westside Gunn and Conway the Machine may have had more prolific release years, Benny the Butcher’s first project since the 2019 trio effort *WWCD* for Eminem’s Shady Records presents him in a singular context. Part of what makes *Burden of Proof* such a standout stems from the beat selection, all of which comes via Hit-Boy. Fresh off of a career highlight with Nas’ *King’s Disease*, the producer meshes exceptionally well with Benny’s street-informed verses on cuts like “Famous” and the animated boom-bap “Trade It All.” And as if his vibrant and boisterous bars weren’t enough, esteemed guests like Freddie Gibbs and Rick Ross sound energized by the upstate lyricist’s dynamic flows here.

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

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

The Mobile, Alabama, newcomer gets a new hater every single day (or so she raps on “Pockets Bigger”), and guess what? She’s loving it. With her brash, bratty delivery and supersized confidence, Flo Milli comes off like the cool girl at school—complete with a mouthful of braces—on her debut mixtape. A 12-track blast through swaggering boasts and bubblegum trap beats, Flo’s got punchlines for days on breakthrough hit “Beef FloMix,” hands for anyone who wants ’em on “Send the Addy,” and no time for thirsty dudes on the SWV flip “Weak.” Short and not-so-sweet, *Ho, why is you here ?* feels like the 20-year-old rapper’s official arrival.

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

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

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

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

It\'s not easy to listen to *Legends Never Die*. From the album\'s opening moments, which feature clips of the late Juice WRLD\'s voice in interviews and closing out a show, we\'re reminded that he wasn\'t the sum of the demons he exorcised in his songs; he wanted to be a positive force in a world that so often feels negative. “I love myself so much as far as the way I make music, the way God made me, the way God wired me to do the things that I do and to change the world the way that I can,” he says. At the time of his death, in December 2019 at the age of 21, the Chicago rapper had cemented himself as a bona fide star whose vulnerability on wax was transcendent. Here, on the first posthumous album since, he gains immortality. The unblinking candor that made Juice WRLD such a force comes full circle throughout the course of the project. Every revelation lands like a prophecy and every rare buoyant moment a light at the end of an endless tunnel. On wrenching songs like “Righteous” and “Fighting Demons,” when he explicitly battles with addiction as a means of coping and the ways in which material success is rarely ever salvation, the heart shatters all over again. But then there\'s others, like “Screw Juice” or “Man of the Year,” which find him urging listeners to use his battle as motivation: “Let\'s raise our hands, let\'s sing and dance,” he declares on the latter. “I know my lyrics saved you.” Elsewhere, the single “Life\'s a Mess”—which best captures his ability to connect with audiences far beyond the emo rap genre while remaining true to its essence—manages to sound triumphant in spite of itself, like a reason to fight on. As posthumous albums go, this one scans as true to the creative vision Juice WRLD cultivated for himself. His diaristic laments aren\'t sanitized or watered down in an attempt to mute the pain of his reality, and thus, under the circumstances, these songs feel especially brutal and honest. It\'s an effective eulogy that captures the charismatic artist as his fans had come to know him—complicated but hopeful. Despite the turmoil that plagues these lyrics being no different than those he released in his lifetime, one thing remains clear: Juice WRLD wanted to live. And with every elegiac confession, even from beyond the grave, he implores his fans to find ways to do the same.

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

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

The scrappy Atlanta rapper started spitting at the tender age of 10, spent her teenage years drag racing, and took home the victory on the inaugural season of Jermaine Dupri’s *The Rap Game* by the time she was 16. Which isn’t to say that her debut album is remotely PG—now 21, Miss Mulatto’s a “real-ass, rich-ass bitch from the South,” as she proudly proclaims on her breakthrough hit “B\*tch From Da Souf.” A raunchy, swaggering sampler of strip-club bangers that properly rep her hometown, *Queen of Da Souf* also boasts an impressive roster of fellow baddies, from City Girls to Trina. Bow down.

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

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

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

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

A few months before the release of *Lil Boat 3*, Lil Yachty made the decision to stop dyeing his hair the vibrant red that once helped him to stand out in an emergent class of MCs that included 21 Savage, Kodak Black, and Lil Uzi Vert. Some four years after that rookie campaign, now on the third edition of his namesake franchise, Lil Boat is established enough as a voice and personality that he no longer needs the “I know that guy” it factor those bright red braids once gave him. (And the dye was destroying his hair.) But outside of his mop’s color—and the zeros in his bank account, presumably—very little has changed for the 22-year-old MC as he delivers the follow-up to 2018’s *Nuthin’ 2 Prove*. The Yachty of *Lil Boat 3* is very much the sweet, spacey, and lyrically ambitious MC fans fell for over the course of the five full-length projects he’s released. This latest edition, whose production comes courtesy of some of Southern rap’s most consistently in-demand producers (Earl on the Beat, jetsonmade, and Pi’erre Bourne, among others), is built on hefty 808 gong, the gaps in between making up a perfect backdrop for Yachty’s Auto-Tuned toasting. Topically, *Lil Boat 3* is mostly about the freewheeling lifestyle Yachty enjoys, a perk of which would seem to be the endless amount of time the MC can spend turning up with his loved ones. This is a privilege that manifests itself on the record by way of several blockbuster collaborations, including “Oprah’s Bank Account” (Drake and DaBaby), “T.D” (Tyler, The Creator, A$AP Rocky, and Tierra Whack), and “Till The Morning,” which features Young Thug and Lil Durk.

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

Looking for a respite from the gloomy cycle that has been 2020? Then Megan Thee Stallion\'s got you covered. “I feel like I had to name my album *Good News* because we\'ve been hearing so much bad news,” she tells Apple Music. “It\'s like, \'Okay, look, Megan Thee Stallion finally coming with the good news.\'” The Houston rapper\'s long-awaited (and, yes, aptly titled) debut album is a distillation of her best qualities punched up for maximum impact. It\'s skillful and clever, but not at the expense of style and levity. Hope you\'ve done your stretches. To start, she wastes no time addressing the controversy that had been trailing her, using the album\'s opening moments to put to rest any discussion about the shooting incident that left her wounded. It\'s brief, fiery, and filled with haymakers, as Megan takes aim at her perpetrator (who remains nameless on wax—“I know you want the clout so I ain\'t saying y\'all name,” she declares) and any naysayers. Never one to wallow, she spends the next 16 songs showcasing exactly why she\'s earned the respect and adoration of peers and fans alike. Songs like “Do It on the Tip” (featuring City Girls) and “Freaky Girls” (featuring SZA) are flirty, twerkable, and emblematic of the \'girls just wanna have fun\' mantra that seems to rule her world, while others like “Movie” and “What\'s New” are all attitude and take-no-prisoners displays of the lyrical dexterity that makes her freestyles so charming. Elsewhere, “Intercourse,” which features Jamaican artist Popcaan, and “Don\'t Rock Me to Sleep” find her outside of her comfort zone, the former a dancehall-inflected romp and the latter a singsongy pop record. And for Meg, that kind of ambition felt right for the current moment. “When I started recording the songs for this album, I knew it sounded like album songs,” she says. “And I\'m like, \'This is it. This is the time. Quarantine is happening, everybody\'s basically in the house. I have everybody\'s attention. Everybody wants new music and you can sit down and actually absorb it.\" By the time the album wraps up with a run of previously released singles (including, of course, her “Savage Remix” with Beyoncé), it feels like we’ve glimpsed past, present, and future. The fan-favorite styles of old are now well-developed and existing alongside the possibilities of what may come next. *Good News* lives up to its name with ease—a tenacious effort that makes room for pleasure, dance, and feeling good (and oneself) despite contrary circumstances. And, really, who among us couldn\'t use just a little more of that?

Traditionally, the “king’s disease” refers to gout, a form of inflammatory arthritis commonly associated with excessive consumption of rich foods and alcohol. For Nas, an MC whose catalog would lead us to believe he\'s been eating and drinking well for decades, *King’s Disease* the album is a chance for him to relive that sort of voracious glory verse by verse, if not bar by bar. The follow-up to 2018’s seven-song Kanye West collaboration *NASIR*—again helmed by a single producer, Fontana, California’s own Hit-Boy—finds the MC wistfully recounting the days when he and his associates were the gold standard of ill, detailing the ways they’d receive preferential treatment at legendary NYC nightspot the Tunnel (“Blue Benz”), the specific and calculated ways he would hustle (“Car #85”), and the surplus of fly women who yearned to spend time with him (“All Bad”). Touchtones of the era will strike a chord with those who lived or even admired it—(“Since Guess was spotted on my denim pockets/And my wave grease would amaze geeks and freeze fly chicks”)—while a reunion of ’90s supergroup The Firm (minus beloved Queensbridge spitter Nature, who replaced a reportedly incarcerated Cormega at the time of *The Album*’s release in 1997) speaks directly to the school of thought that real MCing is truely timeless. To that very point, Nasty (as he was once known) allows newcomers like Don Toliver (“Replace Me”) and Fivio Foreign (“Spicy”), among others, to bask in the deftness of a voice their own parents likely idolized. He plays educator on songs like “Til the War Is Won” and “The Definition,” but ultimately leaves his legacy in the hands of the people—as any great king should—asking humbly on “10 Points”: “Is there love for a Queens dude in Supreme shoes?”

NLE’s *Top Shotta* album contains the third, fourth, and fifth iterations of his popular “Shotta Flow” song series, but if you let him tell it, these are the last of them. “I don\'t plan on making no more after the fifth one,” the Memphis-born MC tells Apple Music. “I\'m really trying to get away from them, \'cause there\'s way more to my music than that shit.” Doing his absolute best to prove this claim, he delivers *Top Shotta* at a strapping 20 songs. Outside of the “Shotta Flow” selections, where Choppa unfurls inspired non sequitur over charging low-end-driven production, there aren’t too many outright bar exhibitions, the MC instead choosing to focus on diversifying his catalog. Over production from hitmakers like CashMoneyAp, TNT, and Quay Global, Choppa aims to give fans what they’ve been missing in the eight months since 2019’s *Cottonwood* project, and then some. “I was recording different types of songs on different types of beats every night,” he says of the months leading up to *Top Shotta*\'s release. “I might make some shit about murder one night, come back in the studio and make a song about how I feel or who done did me wrong or how I feel left out—I might make some pain shit and then make some love shit. But it will be a rotation to where you never have the same type of song. It\'s like flavors of Starbursts or some shit. You got yellow, red, orange... You don\'t want to just open up a pack full of yellows or your ass gon\' be mad.” Below, NLE Choppa breaks down a few of the flavors he’s included in *Top Shotta*. **Daydream** “It’s not daydreaming anymore, it\'s more manifesting \[for me\] now, claiming what\'s already yours. It’s like something you already got, you just got to work towards it and get it. So I really call daydreaming \'manifesting\' now.” **Gamble With My Heart** “I was in my feelings, and that\'s pretty much just me letting it out on a beat. I freestyle all my music, so whatever comes out comes straight from right when I\'m there, all in the moment. \'Gamble With My Heart\' is one of my favorites ’cause it just feels like I slowed down the perspective and I address a lot of stuff in it.” **Who TF Up in My Trap** “When I came across it, the beat didn\'t even sound as good as it sounds now. It\'s a sample that was turned down at first, but when we got to mix it, we turned the volume up and it brought out the whole song. The song was good, but we could tell it was missing certain things. I knew the mix was going to be the most important part about everything. And that is one of the best mixes. That one surprised the shit out of me.” **Make Em Say (feat. Mulatto)** “Somebody from the label played \[Mulatto’s\] verse for me. And I was just like, man, I fuck with it. They was telling me, ‘Man, you got to come different, you know this ain’t what you always recording on.’ And so the whole time, I was just focused on tryna make one of those ratchet bangers for the summer—in case things would\'ve gotten back to normal by then. It ain\'t get back to normal, but it still had to go on my album because it can still slide to the end of the summer.” **Walk Em Down (feat. Roddy Ricch)** “I ain\'t gon\' lie, Roddy Ricch’s *Feed Tha Streets II* album, the one that *blew him up* blew him up, I related to that whole album before I blew up. He had hits on that bitch. I was like one of the first n\*\*\*as in my city that was bumping him. For \'Walk Em Down,\' I just DM\'d him and he pulled up to the studio the same night.” **Shotta Flow 4 (feat. Chief Keef)** “All of \[Chief Keef’s\] drill songs I used to fuck with: ‘Love Sosa,’ ‘I Don\'t Like’—I used to fuck with all them bitches. I felt like I had to do a song with Keef ’cause he was a part of my childhood. I know once people hear that, they\'re going to love that one, because they\'ve been waiting on Chief to get back on that drill type of music.” **Paranoid** “I walked in the studio and I said, ‘I just want to make something out of my element.’ I also wanted to make it so it could be suitable towards women. I fuck with that song because it shows a lot of versatility and I know like a few months ago I wouldn\'t have been able to go get on that beat. I don’t think that I would’ve had it in me. So I feel like I really been growing.”

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

If the uproar over the original cover of *Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon*—designed, per Pop Smoke’s wishes, by Virgil Abloh—tells us anything, it’s that hip-hop fans cared deeply for the slain Brooklyn rapper. As Smoke’s official debut and the project following up the well-received *Meet the Woo* mixtape series—not to mention the first one Pop wouldn’t be around to deliver—*Shoot for the Stars* meant enough to fans that they’d object in droves to what they believed was an unfit representation of their hero. What they’d find once they got past the artwork, though, is that Smoke had quite a bit of music diverging from the quintessential Brooklyn drill he was best known for. *Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon* was executive produced by 50 Cent, the veteran MC having formed a mentor-like relationship with Smoke sometime during Smoke’s meteoric rise. “When me and Pop went to go see 50 originally, he told 50, ‘Yo, I\'m working on this album,\' and he was sending 50 songs,” Pop Smoke’s friend and manager Steven Victor tells Apple Music. “\'Yo, get Chris Brown on this song for me. I’m thinking about putting this song on my album. What do you think about it?\' They were already in conversation about his album.” Following Smoke’s untimely passing in February 2020, 50 would take the reins as a means of honoring his friend’s vision. “I recorded three records and then I was like, \'Don\'t let me overkill or *over-50* on Pop\'s s\*\*t,\'” 50 Cent tells Apple Music. “There\'s certain joints there that Steven will tell you—because of my process, I understood what he was doing.” 50 Cent appears on a single song on *Shoot for the Stars* (“The Woo”), which doesn’t make it any easier to determine where Smoke’s aspirations of diversifying his sound ended and 50’s curation began. Smoke flows gruffly over R&B samples on “Yea Yea” and “Diana,” and then chooses to explore the whole of his vocal range on the CashMoneyAp-produced “For the Night.” Attempting to channel a regional vibe, he’s not-so-inconspicuously titled his Tyga collab “West Coast S\*\*t.” UK-based producer and longtime collaborator 808 Melo is all over the album, along with guest appearances from homegrown NYC MCs Rowdy Rebel and Lil Tjay. There are also three separate songs featuring Quavo, as well as appearances from a handful of first-time collaborators who also happen to be some of rap’s most dependable hitmakers (Future, DaBaby, Roddy Ricch). Then there is “Enjoy Yourself,” a feel-good pop-rap collaboration that features Colombian vocalist KAROL G rapping in Spanish. But it is the uniquely charming NYC-bred aggression and sex appeal of Smoke himself that tie together the disparate features of *Shoot for the Stars*. And to let Victor tell it, the project is the realization of where he and Smoke knew the MC was destined to be. “It’s crazy because everything was coming together the way we spoke about it,” Victor says. “The whole idea was we were going to put out a series of mixtapes: *Meet the Woo* 1, *Meet the Woo 2*, *Meet the Woo 3*—however long it took to make his name a staple. Then from there, we would go to the album. After the second mixtape, he was \[already\] making a name for himself.”

“This album for me was one of those experiences that helped shape me as a person,” Rico Nasty tells Apple Music of the creation of her debut album, *Nightmare Vacation*. “I feel like I haven\'t gone through something like this since my son.” All the best qualities of the DMV-born and -bred rapper are perfected and blown out to make for some of her most punk yet polished work—a fully formed vision that took a bit of self-reflection and self-assurance to create. “I feel like when you\'re working on music and makeup and merch and all these other different avenues, you get swamped; I think that\'s the reason why I chose to name it *Nightmare Vacation*, too,” she says. “I was overwhelmed and I caught myself several times letting other people set goals for me and tell me where I should be going instead of just following the path that I was already on.” Songs like “Candy” and “No Debate” reflect a more assured Rico, confident of her abilities and her place as one of rap\'s most unique talents. Her willingness to experiment across *Nightmare Vacation*, and how, each time, she emerges with a result that fits her well, is further proof of the magic of gift meeting grit. “I didn\'t rush myself to complete a song or to catch a certain wave of music. I didn\'t try to blend into whatever was out,” she shares. “Being your own person can be scary sometimes because you don\'t know if people are going to love it or hate it, but I feel the way I dress prepared me for this as well. I don\'t care about the naysayers.” **Candy** “I feel like a lot of times when I rap, it\'s over crazy beats. Even though this is also a super sick beat, it\'s usually either a rock beat or some type of super hard bass-swamping shit. A lot of times I\'m just vibing, trying to be as humble as I can, but I feel I\'ve been humble for too long. This is my shit, and I just wanted to own it.” **Don’t Like Me** “That collab flew out of the sky, but I feel like that\'s how a lot of great songs happen, and I\'m very happy to have \[Don Toliver and Gucci Mane\] on the song. They\'re both very talented, legendary people. But yeah, these bitches don\'t fucking like me. They really don\'t. That\'s what\'s crazy. I don\'t know if I scare them or what, but they\'re not fucking with me.” **Check Me Out** “‘Check Me Out’ is for the bitches who get double takes everywhere we go, like you break necks everywhere you go, people asking you where you got that. It\'s all about feeling yourself. For this song in particular, I don\'t want people to think about Rico Nasty—when you sing along to it, it\'s more so for you. You could have been in the bed all day, but you hear this song and you want to get up, you want to do something, you want to feel like a bad bitch, aggressively.” **IPHONE** “The mindset was the future, which oddly enough came true. It was a little bit of the future and the past, because I have Myspace references, but I talk about smoking so much gas, I forgot to put my mask on. I wrote that in 2019 and everybody in 2020 had to wear a mask, and I just find that super creepy, but we\'re just going to rock with that.” **STFU** “I just want people to shut the fuck up, honestly. I feel like, due to the internet, people give their opinion where it\'s really not needed, wanted, asked for, and it gets a little uncomfortable sometimes as an artist. Obviously, you can\'t respond back to everybody individually and tell them \'shut the fuck up,\' so I tried to make my haters feel special and I gave them their own personal song.” **Back & Forth** “Yo, every time I fucking think about this song, I just think about Aminé doing his verse and my verse not having anything to do with what he\'s talking about. It was just very hilarious. I love Aminé. He helped me come out of my box a little bit, because I was never comfortable talking about shit like that. He helped pick the beat, and that night, we was with CashMoneyAp and stuff. He\'s fucking fire. I love Aminé. That\'s one of my top three favorite rappers of this generation.” **Girl Scouts** “The inspiration behind that was I was sitting back, going through my DMs, going through my mentions, and in my text photos, there\'s always girls dressing up like me, recreating my makeup looks and just going full-out Rico Nasty. I will call them Sugar Soldiers and the Nasty Mob—I think of them like Girl Scouts now, because there was a point in time where I was doing things and when I would see people do them, I would get offended or I\'d be super territorial. I remember somebody got the same exact tattoo as me, and I was just pissed off. I feel that\'s another thing that comes with growing up and this being a really big turning point in my life because I learned how to take my power back. We are an army. We are Girl Scouts. We at your fucking door. You come for one, you gotta deal with all of us. I love them so much.” **Let It Out** “It kinda tells the story of just my whole career. I love this verse because I just feel like I was having the most fun with that. It be the craziest beats that I just get on it and I feel the most lit for some reason. On the melodic ones, I\'d be a little bit scared, but on this one—I think I made this song super fast, and I didn\'t really like it at first. And everybody on my team and my manager leaked it on Twitter to see if they would like it, and they were like, \'Please drop this,\' and I was like, \'Damn, they fuck with it.\' That was one of the fun ones.” **Loser** “I wouldn\'t call myself the queen of surprises, but I never like to give people what they expect. Trippie \[Redd\]\'s amazing. Hopefully we get to work again. He was really fast giving me my song back, and he even came to the studio when I did his song—he\'s really awesome. I\'m looking forward to that punk shit, that crazy rock-screaming shit. We both have haters. We both have people who, I guess, call us weird or say we dress weird, and then we have the other half who dress like us. I just thought about this like *Mean Girls*. \'Everybody\'s going to want to be like us, but they can\'t sit with us\' type vibe. We\'re going to call Trippie \'Trippie Lohan.\' He\'s got the red hair like Lindsay Lohan, so it\'s really funny. It\'s hella flowy, hella melodic but also heavy-hitting.” **No Debate** “I talk about giving energy and power back to my fans with this album, and I just want to give them shit that puts them in a good mood and just makes them feel real bouncy. This song, I will say, was definitely inspired by the *Nasty* era. When I made this song, I was listening to a lot of my *Nasty* mixtape, and I feel this is a flavor from that era that was missed on the album.” **Pussy Poppin** “People don\'t really know, but I\'m very shy about talking about stuff like that. Whenever I make a song about that type of shit prior to this, I\'m like, \'Get out of the studio. Please leave.\' I\'m nervous as fuck, palms sweating, trying to rap about sex. And this night, bro, I don\'t know what had got into me. I wanted to have some fun. Obviously we talk about how these n\*\*\*as ain\'t shit, but I feel some of the best songs are the ones where it\'s like we\'re celebrating how our n\*\*\*a actually is fire. I feel we don\'t have that many songs like that, and I just wanted to make that song for all the girls with boyfriends out there who don\'t really talk about that shit but want to.” **OHFR?** “It was just one of those days where I remember it was hella gloomy and the song was made very fast. Dylan \[Brady\] was there, and the exhausting part with this song was the fucking beat. When we had tried to set it up, there was something wrong with the BPM. It was weird, like people were like, \'I don\'t know if you can even get on it because of the way that the beat is set up\' or whatever. But I still got on it. We still went crazy. \'OHFR?\' is definitely an anthem for people to put they middle fingers up, and it\'s just in your face.” **T0Fo** “It\'s like I\'m talking to myself on that song. I feel like that\'s the devil on your shoulder doing reckless-ass shit. Obviously, I\'m not trying to make people go out and fuck shit up, but when I wrote the song, it was definitely in a time where I was angry, and I wanted to get my power back so I just talked my shit. I was a little bit hesitant about really releasing the song, because I don\'t ever want nobody to do no wild-ass shit listening to me. But this one of the ones—it just made me feel like breaking shit, going out, whoever did me wrong, fucking they shit up. I don\'t care. It\'s the soundtrack to beating a n\*\*\*a\'s ass. We were smacking bitches before, but I feel like this song in particular is definitely about getting back at a guy.” **Own It** “I feel like with ‘Own It,’ I was trying to hone that vacation vibe but still Rico Nasty type of vacation—very glamorous, spooky, weird, still out there in its own way. I feel ‘Own It’ is also about owning your shit, owning my island. And it\'s also for bitches to be feeling they need to own it and that they\'re that bitch, because we need one big room full of bad bitches. Shout-out Kreayshawn.” **Smack a Bitch (Remix)** “Well, I felt like all of the girls that I put on this song are very avid people that are great contenders for smacking bitches. Sukihana will smack a bitch in an instant, ppcocaine will smack a bitch in an instant, and I definitely feel like Rubi Rose would smack a bitch or a n\*\*\*a in an instant. I also put them on the song because I feel one way or another, they\'ve inspired me to go hard just by the shit they go through on a daily basis. Suki\'s a mom. ppcocaine is a rising TikTok star and shit, and it\'s hectic on TikTok because they be hella rude on there. And then Rubi Rose is somebody who has been a beautiful girl that was well-known, and so many people try to underplay her as a rapper, and I fucking hate when people do that. I feel like the female rap scene right now is hella punk. We don\'t give a fuck. We showing ass, showing titties. We talk about what we want. Obviously, this has always been hip-hop, but in my head, we just look like a bunch of rock stars.” **Smack a Bitch (Bonus)** “I don\'t know what it is about that song. Obviously, I would like to think just because of the circumstance and how it came out, that\'s why people gravitate to it. It probably makes people feel like fighting and all that really goofy-ass shit. But I feel over time, it\'s just become one of those songs. It\'s a fun song. It\'s fun to put on. It\'s probably the fastest song I ever made, the most fun I had in the studio. I\'m very thankful for everybody that was a part of it, because I feel like it pushed me to do my own thing even more.”

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

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

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

In times of turmoil, some retreat inward, some draw closer to their fellow humans, and others lean into spirituality. The multifaceted collective Spillage Village does a little bit of all three. As pandemic and social upheaval gripped the country, the artists—duo EARTHGANG, rappers JID and Jurdan Bryant, singers 6LACK and Mereba, and producers Hollywood JB and Benji—holed up in an Atlanta rental and came back with *Spilligion*. Built around religious signifiers and iconography, the album teases out the theme to create something that is ambitious in its scope and lush in its musicality. “Baptize” playfully incorporates the language of the sacred in a display of nimble lyricism; elsewhere, \"Judas\" deals with betrayal and loss, while “Oshun,” named for the Yoruba goddess of sensuality, and “Cupid,” named for the Roman god of desire, juxtapose experiences of romance. Throughout, hope, love, and camaraderie take center stage amid a backdrop of injustice and doom. “End of Daze” is an apocalypse (“God packed his bags and said bye-bye,” Mereba sings on the hook) set to candied neo-soul, while “Hapi” is a prayer for survival that resembles a sermon. The songs are collagic and, like church services, offer themselves up to be mined for whatever it is you need to heal or get free. Despite the cerebral nature of what brought Spillage Village to this album in the first place, *Spilligion* feels fun and carefree, intentional but not self-serious and brimming with a soulful Southern hospitality that goes down easy.

Diversity has long been the strength of Canton, Ohio, MC Trippie Redd’s catalog, and that doesn’t stop with his third studio album *Pegasus*. “It’s kind of like *A Love Letter to You 4*,” he tells Apple Music. “It takes you from place to place, as far as genre goes. The beginning is going to be love, and then the next half is like, ‘OK, we’re picking up the pace,’ we’re speeding up. And then by the end of it, you’re being brought back down because we turnt you to the max for like five songs.” *Pegasus* plays out almost exactly the way Trippie describes, its early tracks utilizing well-established lotharios like PARTYNEXTDOOR (“Excitement”) and Chris Brown (“Mood”) to sing about mind-blowing sex and relationship problems, respectively. Trippie is vulnerable across the early portion, assuring a lover, “I just wanna be with you,” on “Moonlight,” and then promising, “Me and you can do anything,” on “So Stressed.” Things turn up slowly but surely, and roughly halfway through the album, we are treated to guest spots from some of Atlanta’s most in-demand feature MCs, including Young Thug (“Spaceships”), Future (“Never Change”), and Quavo (“No Honorable Mention”). Their features here aren’t exactly club bangers, but those looking for the turn-up are rewarded a little deeper into the project with “Red Beam,” “Sleepy Hollow,” and “Kid That Didd,” which features a second appearance from Future alongside his Freebandz label signee Doe Boy. The come-down arrives in the form of songs like “Don,” where he sings about what he\'s still willing to do to an opp; “Hell Rain,” where he describes how different he is from pretty much everyone else on earth; and then “Sun God,” where we’re assured how capable of a lover Trippie is.

A Ty Dolla $ign verse or hook is like an adventurous spice—a recipe can be fine without, but the addition really elevates it. The singer and rapper has spent the past decade being that little extra something in every corner of music, from R&B and pop to electronic and hip-hop, and his third album, *Featuring Ty Dolla $ign*, is a celebration of that collaborative spirit. Over the course of an hour, it highlights both the contours of his silky smooth delivery and the agile manner in which he slots in alongside his peers. Whether in crooning or in rhyming, he shows up to each track prepared to inject it with whatever energy it needs. Despite the star-studded guest list, his voice, which is far too frequently heard as complement to someone else\'s, takes center stage here. On songs like “Real Life” (which features Roddy Ricch and DJ Mustard), “Lift Me Up” (which includes Young Thug and Future), and “Your Turn” (which welcomes Musiq Soulchild, Tish Hyman, and 6LACK), he shines through his guests, taking the qualities they bring and transforming them into his own. On solo tracks—“Nothing Like Your Exes,” “Time Will Tell,” and “Slow It Down” the standouts among them—he commands the space as if to remind us that he\'s still a force unto himself. This may be *Featuring Ty Dolla $ign*, but there\'s no mistaking who is, in fact, the main attraction.

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

The title of Young Dolph\'s *Rich Slave* instantly sets up a kind of duality that directly confronts the legacy of racism and capitalism central to America. Dolph\'s catalog is filled with songs that hinge on self-made narratives about how he got to the money by any means necessary, and this album is no exception. But under the provocation of its name, such themes feel more contradictory than ever. Tracks like “I See $\'s” and “Death Row” contrast wealth with misery or at least an ongoing ambivalence about the true costs of financial success. Even when the lyrics are at their most triumphant (“Used to sign for the packs, now I sign T-shirts and posters/Drop 500 racks to drop the top on that new roadster” as on “Hold Up Hold Up Hold Up”), the rapper\'s matter-of-fact cadence sounds as if he\'s unfazed. That tension comes to a head on “The Land,” which makes explicit the wages of being Black in America, wealthy or not, and on the title track: “All them diamond chains, he look like a rich slave.” Still, even with all of this unease lingering, the album isn\'t nearly as weighty as it might suggest. Dolph has always had a sardonic sense of humor that sets up one-liners as quotable as they are comedic and offsets his darker musings (“Lately I\'ve been hearing a lot of voices in my head/It woke me straight up out my sleep and said go buy a Lam”). “CrayCray” is standard shit-talk, while “RNB,” which features a spirited verse from Megan Thee Stallion, brims with flirty bravado. These flashes of levity hearken back to earlier Dolph tracks, but *Rich Slave* stands as his most explicitly introspective work. The pair of skits early in the album may offer the most illuminating glimpse into his mindset, as both trace the rapper\'s attempts to reconnect with the past—his own and that of his hometown, Memphis. The conversations between a family friend and Dolph are candid and humorous, with the elder sharing memories of Dolph\'s father; taken in context, they ground the album and suggest a quest for something deeper than just menace and boasts.