Recently, in casual conversations, I’ve been asked for my opinion about the October report that “No Rap Songs Are in the Billboard Hot 100’s Top 40 for the First Time Since 1990” more so than my thoughts on any particular rap album or song from this year. I never gave anyone the “Yeah, this rap shit is dead” answer they seemed to be looking for, but the question did make me have to think about what gets me excited about rap these days.
Immediately, I thought about regional scenes, but I realized it wasn’t just that—it was the marginal and almost undetectable ways these scenes have changed over time. How did Philly street rap get to the point where the underwater raps of HappyDranker make sense? Why do all the DMV beats sound like a cargo train running over rusty tracks? Catching these little tweaks and advancements is what makes me lose my shit.
I admit that is pretty unglamorous and dorky. It’s probably way cooler and more social to be like, I like the Clipse album because the brothers helped shape my childhood, dress fly in middle age, and I can rap along to “So Be It” with my friends. But I do seek out that feeling, too; a lot of my favorite albums from this year were elevated in my mind by some sort of live performance or from the thrill of shootin’ the shit about them in a park, at a bar, or over the phone.
I remember when it clicked for me how much I love the No. 1 album on this list. One day, I played it for my friend as we drove around Brooklyn, trying to sell him on the creativity of the project with the intensity of one of the brokers in Boiler Room for no real reason. When he hit me with a song link and the “Nah, he’s going crazy” text a week later, the blast of endorphins I got made me understand the communal connection so many rap fans are desperately looking for.
Below is a list of my favorite rap albums of the year—from Chicago revisionist drill to Mexican plugg, from new age L.A. g-funk to ATL Christian trap—almost all of which make me want to talk my friend’s ear off about them.
M Row: M Row / Mari B: Every Opp
If M Row was born in the Upper West Side 100 years ago, he’d be writing crime novels instead of New York drill. The story on the intro of his self-titled mixtape could be ripped from one of Chester Himes’ seedy Harlem noirs: He pulls up to the club and one of the dancers happens to be a girl he hasn’t seen since high school, she puts him onto a scheme about robbing the safe of a big time gangster she’s messing with, but, of course, none of that goes as planned. It’s a playful narrative energy he sustains throughout the project, adding some fantasy to a drill scene that is often too based in realism. On the other side of the coin is Mari B, who brought the subgenre back to its stripped-down, lurking in the shadows roots. As belts whip and turbulent Jersey club drums roar, Every Opp sounds like the last few seconds before Godzilla tears up the city.
Listen/Buy (M Row): Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Listen/Buy (Every Opp): Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Baby Mel: El Chito
Part of the fun of listening to Alabama oddball Baby Mel is getting into arguments about Baby Mel. Here’s a text exchange between me and YouTube critic EricTheYoungGawd about “Aint My Fault” off Mel’s unhinged tape El Chito full of screech-rap vocals in desperate need of WD-40.
Eric: One of the worst vocal performances I’ve ever heard.
Alphonse: Hating.
Eric: The beat is one of the coolest of the year, but what the fuck is he even saying. You a New York nigga so I know you can’t understand him if I can’t.
Alphonse: I like how he pushes that early Boosie nails-on-a-chalkboard voice to the extreme, but all for the funny ass purpose of being incredibly horny, like c’mon, he said, “Damn bae you thicker than a bitch/Where your friend?”
Eric: Your freaky ass just likes horny music.
Alphonse: How are you from Florida and don’t like horny music? That’s basically the birthplace of ultra horny rap.
Eric: Man imagine Los and Nutty had this beat instead.
Alphonse: It’s perfect right where it’s at.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Thirteendegrees °: Clique City Vol. 2
Dust off the shutter shades. Order the studded leather jacket Tyga wore in the “Rack City” video. Track down Lil Chuckee’s white fedora from “Girl I Got You” (we will keep Lil Twist’s Party Down-style bowtie-vest combo on ice). Now, you’re ready to enter the world of Clique City Vol. 2. In Thirteen’s hands, hip-hop trends of the late 2000s and early 2010s are new again, linking together the digital player aesthetic of peak Young Money and the zany Auto-Tune flows of Atlanta’s futuristic era. Moving the tape beyond pastiche, though, is the way he uses the bright triumphance of Chicago bop as his foundation, lifting shameless nostalgia into a love letter to his hometown.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
ShadStackzz: Up My Standards
Technically, Up My Standards is a mixtape, but it sounds more like one long radio freestyle. The only moments where Philly’s Shadstackzz isn’t rapping at full force are when the beats switch from one to the next or one of his boys—named nonsense like firbucketss and Broadday—tag in. He would’ve ripped an episode of Sway’s 5 Fingers of Death.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
luisentme: selfmade music vol. 1
Luisentme punches up the melancholy of the UK rap scene—the Skins vibes of What The Feng; the Black British coming of age story of Jim Legxacy’s tape—with a handful of truly bugged-out self-produced beats: The 808s of “release” have the drunken bounce of StepTeam drums, the digital silliness of “on edge” reminds me of Certified Trapper’s green screen era. The result is a tape that has the heart of the UK’s underground rap boom, but that is also on some other shit.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Monaleo: Who Did the Body
If our rap songs list had included four or five joints off Monaleo’s Who Did The Body I wouldn’t have complained. I’d put “Putting Ya Dine,” up against any Houston club rap jam since the heyday of BeatKing, as well as the Black empowerment anthem “Sexy Soulaan.” The vintage Eazy-E homage of “Spare Change” is a swing that connects, and so does “We On Dat,” which makes me want to smash a bottle over some dude’s head like Cam in Killa Season. These songs are so good that we will all agree to pretend that the competition show balladry of “Dignified” and the Lizzo duet don’t exist.
Read: Family Dinner At Monaleo’s
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Che: Rest in Bass
With the critical attention-to-detail and electronic impulses of the best of digicore, Che impossibly finds a new angle into rage rap by making Whole Lotta Red for nerds.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Paul Wall / DJ.Fresh: The Tonite Show
The fatal flaw of Mass Appeal’s Legend Has It… series—well, besides the fact that most of the albums (besides Slick Rick and De La Soul) stunk—is that the New York-centric lineup built around legacy sequels and posthumous records felt more like narrow-minded financial endeavor than a true celebration of the forty- and fifty-something rappers still out here doing their thing. If I was them, I would’ve hit up the longtime Intercontinental champ of Swishahouse, Paul Wall, who, on The Tonite Show, settles into middle-aged bliss with odes to candy-painted American muscle cars and meditations on all the grinding that got him to this point.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Yeyo: latinpapichuggstar
La Obsesión, an omnivorous collective out of Mexico, love tradition and love upending that tradition. The clique might have the only mixtape on Earth that is equally inspired by reggaeton icons Plan B as TrapMoneyBiggie free car beats, that will flip MF Doom while keeping their roots tied to decade-old Mexican drill. That’s also the case with latinpapichuggstar by Yeyo, one of the stars of the crew, who puts a twist on first-generation plugg beats by laying down lovesick melodies on them like he’s the fucked-up son of Jory Boy and Summrs.
Listen: SoundCloud
Kelly Moonstone: New Moon
One of my favorite TV episodes of the 2020s is Insecure’s “Lowkey Happy,” Issa and Lawrence’s Before Sunset-style walk-and-talk. There’s no big, theatrical falling out or a loud happy ending; instead, the will-they-won’t-they exes break the tension with jokes and slip into long spells of silence that say more than their words do. I thought about that episode the first time I listened to New Moon, Kelly Moonstone’s gentle, intimate, and kinda funny collection of relationship stories. Toggling between feathery R&B croons and nimble rap flows that seem descended from the early 2010s generation of Chicago hip-hop scribes nurtured in after-school programs and generations of hard-nosed rhymes from her native Queens, Kelly gives us a glimpse at what her inner monologue might sound like when she catches feelings.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Preservation / Gabe ’Nandez: Sortilège
For about as long as I’ve been a hip-hop writer, I’ve been following Gabe ’Nandez’s trek from underground journeyman attempting to condense all the life he’s lived into one cohesive sound to Backwoodz standout actually pulling that off. With his sandpapered voice and philosophical and political ideologies tied into his day-in-the-life raps, Gabe levels up, with a little help from Preservation’s beats, perfect for soundtracking the final knife fight in a Kinji Fukasaku yakuza flick.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Mel V: Chaponomical
Overloaded on gunshots, shattered glass, demonic DJ tags, and foaming-at-the-mouth raps, Chaponomical brings rage rap back to its roots. By that I mean, Mel V doesn’t seem to give a shit about the runway-ready aesthetic pushed by the Opium braintrust, and instead reworks the sound rooted in plugg, Chief Keef, and all of the Atlanta trap music in between TM:101 and Ds2. As she hurls threats and disses like Stone Cold did beer cans, the tape is as much a recontextualization of the subgenre as it is one for the headbanging sickos.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
G Herbo: Lil Herb
From where I’m sitting, G Herbo seems to have plenty of money, a healthy relationship with his fiancée, and the respect of his peers who pretty much all agree he is the Jadakiss of his generation. And yet, he’s still rapping with the life-or-death hunger of Vlad Jr. sliding into home. On Lil Herb, he motivates himself by returning to his stomping grounds in Chicago and looking back on the original era of drill. The result is the rare revisionist drill album that takes a critical magnifying glass to the complicated, fucked-up, and historical genre, all while rapping his ass off.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
AriiArii: Ho Ho Summer
My weakness is insane, bass-boosted Milwaukee twerk music that sounds like it was improvised at X-rated house parties.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Papo2oo4 / Subjxct 5: Papaholic, Vol.1
There’d be those nights during my freshman year of college where I’d sit around the dorm with my roommates getting wistful about athletes, wrestlers, and rappers from our childhood. Back then, those conversations and conspiracies about Rickie Weeks and J.R. Writer seemed random, but really, it was how we got to know how each other sees the world. On Papoholic Vol. 1, nearly all of Papo2oo4’s memories come with a reference to former Dodgers outfielder Matt Kemp or a David Spade movie or purple Dinosaur Jr. Nikes. Over hard as pernil skin Subjxct 5 beats that weave pieces of production from across eras and regions into their retro-future Jersey lifestyle rap, Papo’s audio pop culture almanac is the entryway into his world.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
HappyDranker: Clean Up on Isle 29
When HappyDranker isn’t busy raiding the shelves of Spirit Halloween for new masks to rock, he’s one of the most stylish rappers out of Philly. Upping the supernatural Hammer horror effect of Skrilla’s Zombie Love Kensington Paradise, Happy randomly flaps his lips, shifts his pitch and the tempo of his flow, and sounds like a disembodied voice rapping from inside of a suffocating fog.
Listen: SoundCloud
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BunnaB: Bunna Summa (Ice Cream Summer Deluxe)
If a couple of the teasing hooks off the deluxe edition of Bunna Summa haven’t already been turned into double-dutch rhymes, somebody should get on that. Combining bouncy flows ripped off vintage Gucci tapes with the attitude of the flyest girl on the block, Bunna’s new-age futuristic Atlanta rap has the feel-good spirit of skipping rope at your neighborhood park. Whether she’s hyping up her boyfriend (Mr. Baby Kia) or declaring her love for “studs,” that vibe never lets up.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Treety: Trick or Treat
In what was a banger year for New Orleans bounce projects—504icygrl’s Mardi Gras-ready Caked Up, OnlyHeaven’s cutesy KISS EP, and T99zy’s back-to-the-basics Nola to Global—the best rapping was on Treety’s Trick Or Treat. With samples of any and everything rotating in and out (Nickelodeon theme songs, 2000s R&B), she sons the men on her roster and rips a blend of herky-jerk, off-the-wall bounce beats (BlaqNMilD is still going crazy) and more standard popular fare with a calm, calculated aggression.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Luhh Dyl: Hear My Cry
It wasn’t an easy decision, but we at Condé Nast’s Pitchfork.com would like to announce the winner of the annual “Popular Loner” award presented by the Rod Wave Foundation is none other than Luhh Dyl. The Detroit rapper exemplified all of the qualities we look for in handing out this honor: Heavy-hearted storytelling over a bunch of guitar samples about hard-earned life lessons and the plight of being a good rapper. His certificate will be presented to him at halftime of the next Lions game by star defensive end Aidan Hutchinson.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Skino: Middle of Hell
The title of Middle of Hell is spot on. Skino’s blunt and direct references to violence make me squeamish in the way EBK Jaaybo’s Don’t Trust Me does, but the music is way more fantastical, all industrial free car madness and vengeance-seeking in the traditional rapid-fire DMV flow. Mostly, though, it’s a showcase for the production of the region, which pushes the critical intensity and drums that sound like they were made with a coal miner’s tools into the apocalyptic territory of Lil Dude, Goonew, and Cheecho’s Homicide Boyz.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
4TheWinn: Winnito
Winnito is no-frills Northern California get-money rap that finds a middle ground between the drill of the EBK guys and good ol’ fashioned Mac Dre vibes. Pumping out more unsolicited financial advice than a Forex trader, 4TheWinn makes motivation rap that you’ll want to hit a two-step to. This is a much-needed win for Sacramento, because you know Domantas Sabonis isn’t bringing them any.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Playboi Carti: MUSIC
OK, yes, MUSIC is a rushed, overthought, Kanye-brained mess. OK, yes, MUSIC might just exist because Carti needed an excuse to post IG pics and show off his new handshakes. But still, it’s the boldest, strangest, and riskiest mainstream rap album we’ve had in a minute. Taking advantage of an uncritical hip-hop ecosystem that hypes whatever is undeniably the shit, Carti uses his hotness to lean into all of his pushing-30 impulses: flipping a Rich Kidz classic, pulling a Castor Troy on Future, gathering the 2010s all-stars for one last hurrah. I can’t help but respect the shitshow, which, a little bit sadly, feels like a loose capstone on one of the great rap album runs of the 21st century.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Jeune Morty: Eponyme
Earlier this year, I was at a birthday party talking to some dude about French Malian supernova Aya Nakamura when he dropped a bar on me, “All the greatest music in the world right now is in French.” I kind of just nodded at him, but I’ve been thinking about that all year as I became obsessed with Theodora and Denden’s performances on Planete Rap and warmed up to the crank variants of 63OG. Best of them all, though, was Jeune Morty, who with Eponyme merges the mellow atmosphere of the Ivorian dance music he grew up on (such as Meiway and DJ Arafat) with the flows and melancholic wonder of SoundCloud touchstones like Uzi’s Luv Is Rage and Fauni’s The Ex Files. My man at the bar was onto something.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
KenTheMan: Kinda Famous
In a better world, KenTheMan would be one of the most popular rappers in the country. She’s feeling the same way on Kinda Famous, which has all the fixings of a really good mainstream rap album without trying too hard to actually be one. She’s got the catchy hooks, charisma, booming Houston jig beats, heart, and filthy-mouthed scenarios for days: “Single, you can’t tell me shit, just come over here/I want you to come and eat the pussy through my underwear.” I should call up my local radio station and put in a request like it’s 1998.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Lelo: New Detroit
Back in January, I remember driving a rental car through a Detroit ice storm all to get to a ghettotech show. The whole time I thought I was going to die, so to make myself feel better, I held onto the steering wheel with the iron-clad grip of a gymnast. That is, until Lelo’s ghettotech-infused, porn star-thirsting “Teanna Trump” came on and I risked my life to run it back. Similarly, I think a few of my most-played songs of the year are on his debut album New Detroit. Playfully updating the laid-back flows of the Detroit vets by brushing up against the city’s rich history of dance music, Lelo’s portrait of his city is so vivid, hammered home with barking dogs, police sirens, thunderous car engines, and party raps with a hyperlocal, critical, and autobiographical edge.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Lil Tony Official: Born Again
I had to double-check if Atlanta’s own Lil Tony was the only artist on this list to have also appeared on the podcast of Bryce Crawford, an Evangelical Christian influencer who looks like Gideon from The Righteous Gemstones and travels around the country selling I <3 Jesus t-shirts and blessing students, meme rappers, and athletes. I mention this because rap was more Christian than usual this year, and none more than the bible-thumping motivation trap of Born Again. These days, you almost have to view every pivot into Christianity skeptically, given the amount of religious grifting happening everywhere from politics to hip-hop, but Born Again isn’t so heavy-handed with it, more about the trauma and struggles that led him down a faith-based path. “Went through hell and fought with all my demons/Walk ’round dead, thought I was living,” he raps on the intro, falling somewhere in between the sin-shedding of Nino Paid’s Can’t Go Bacc and the flawed man character study of YoungBoy’s best stuff. “Whole time, lost touch with my spirit/This my testimony, I ain’t going nowhere until all you niggas hear it.” He’s going to be one hell of a youth football coach.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
WNC WhopBezzy / 70th Street Carlos: Out the Blue
WhopBezzy—a Baton Rouge shit-talker who loves ass-shaking—and 70th Street Carlos—a Baton Rouge loudmouth who loves ass-shaking even more—get together on some of the biggest, brassiest turn-up beats to hit the Bible Belt since the heyday of Trill Entertainment. Out The Blue pulls together strands of Dallas boogie, Mannie Fresh bounce, and the rags-to-riches motivation rap that has been holding down their hometown for decades, as the bash brothers go in for damn-near 40 minutes of SEC homecoming weekend blowout music. Shit, if you can’t get down to this, it might be time to hang up the jersey.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Ba Pace: Midnight Maroon
In August, Ba Pace and his Bronx-based Public Housing crew took over a small section of Tompkins Square Park. On the path in between the playground with kids playing tag and the makeshift skatepark where some dude got his head cracked with a board in a brawl, the group hooked up their own speakers and set up decks on top of the kind of foldable table normally used for cookouts. There, Ba Pace performed songs from his catalog, including some off Midnight Maroon, for anyone who walked by. I had heard the tape before, with its dusted Sniper Lew-produced jazz loops, lowkey sense of humor (“Sell a wave cap to a bald man”), and husky-voiced city dwelling (the sleepy subway romance of “Girls, Girls, Girls”; the “half of chicken with fried rice out on Broadway” on “Motion Sickness”), but it came alive for me right there as day turned to night, as the NYPD rolled by deciding whether to fuck the vibe up or not.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Earl Sweatshirt: Live Laugh Love
On his “I’m just a man” shit like Nate Dogg on “Scared of Love,” Earl keeps on puncturing the mythicized way he’s been spoken about since his Odd Future days by getting incredibly personal. Working through his anxieties about falling in love and fatherhood with understated jokes, hoops, hangouts with the bros, and rap, Live Laugh Love feels like you’re eavesdropping on his conversation from the next table over at a brunch spot playing their Lil Baby mix a little too loud (For the record: I am pro pancakes with a side of “We Paid”). That in-his-head feeling is pushed to the extreme by a woozy collection of beats courtesy of Theravada and team, and Earl’s dip into the lyrically absurd, where faded memories flow out of him like the water from a cracked fire hydrant in the summer.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
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Big Sad 1900: 1937 South Corning St (Deluxe)
The new generation player’s ball of the deluxe edition of this Big Sad 1900 tape has such a strong sense of place that I feel like I’m in L.A. without actually being in L.A. Imbued with ego inflamed shit talk, endearingly dated regional touches (R&B hooks, g-funk synths, an intro skit that put me onto The Relativez’s “Streets Won’t Let Me Chill”), and colorful mafioso fantasies (he goes on vacation to Hawaii to eat at shrimp trucks, get head, and ride around in four wheelers), Big Sad’s vivid portrait of his hometown is warm yet smeared with fatalism, down-to-Earth yet like a half-remembered dream.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
KP Skywalka: I Tried To Tell You
KP Skywalka rolls nearly every microgeneration of D.C. street rap into his regionally-specific, timeline-overlapping stories of hustling, surviving, and getting ass. With the laid-back mood of Smokey and Craig getting high and chatting shit about the neighborhood on the porch, I Tried To Tell You drops you into his world only with the context developed on previous tapes like the jumping-off-the-porch tales of Grandma House and the sexcapades of 4 Tha Freakas. Over an insane selection of beats that soften the industrial sound of modern DMV free car music with ’90s R&B samples, shades of g-funk and plugg, and a go-go bounce, KP gets words of advice from family, navigates local vendettas, and stays true to his loverboy antics: The one bougie girl he picks up from a night out at Rose Bar; the one who used to live near him in D.C. but moved to Largo, where he drives out to visit her anyway. It’s a tonally shifting hood comedy-drama that puts a personal and romantic twist on one of the great rap scenes of the last decade.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal