Words by Brian James
Brian James is a former co-host of the Best Song Ever podcast and contributor to Off Shelf along with other music publications. As a lifelong enthusiast, he has been a fan of hip-hop and r&b since middle school and now enjoys keeping up with mainstream and underground releases, and diving deep on the sampled and influencing sub-genres.
May is truly the most special month of the year. Temperatures are finally starting to keep warm on a consistent basis, pools begin to open toward the end of the month, and a certain Feats. writer (me) has a birthday. Pure magic. This May saw the release of several incredibly solid rap/R&B releases, which I’ll cover below and dig into how I discovered each one…
But first, as I mentioned above, my birthday is in May and each year I like to pretend that any album released the Friday after my birthday (or on my birthday) are birthday presents just for me! This year, as I looked forward to releases that fell on that date, I saw no releases that piqued my interest. Honestly, not one. Thus, I entered into my birthday week a morose soon to be middle aged man expecting absolutely nothing. On Monday morning, I opened up Stereogum to see if any good sounding songs had come out yet and…
SURPRISE!
Stereogum
Vince Staples, my favorite current rapper, had released a new song and that felt like birthday present enough. However, I read on and what to my wandering eyes should appear, but a new album (Def Jam) announcement for this very year! Nay, this very month. Wait, this very week? That’s right, Vince had pulled off a special birthday surprise just for me and released an album as my most prized present in recent memory. All that to say, Vince Staples continues his winning streak of introspective chilled out west coast rap and delivered what is potentially my favorite rap album of the year so far. Cheers, Vince!
Now that we have that foolishness out of the way, what else went down this month? And how did I find out about these releases? Well, I’ll tell ya.
Brooklyn Vegan
Each Friday Brooklyn Vegan has a “Notable Releases of the Week” post, which I look forward to more than any other such post. They do an amazing job at scattershot coverage of all types of genres from death metal to mainstream pop to rap and everything in between. One of these posts alerted me to two new albums from two rap stalwarts.
Rapsody has been releasing music since around 2010 and took the rap world by storm with her 2017 release Laila’s Wisdom, which has topped many publication’s best albums of the 2010s lists. After Laila’s Wisdom came 2019’s Eve and then nothing until now. Please Don’t Cry (Roc Nation) is over an hour long, tells a captivating story of a true artist, and is full of awesome rap music. Definitely worth your time.
Mach-Hommy is notoriously mysterious. Most images of him have his face covered and he generally doesn’t do much promoting of his music. He’s sold small batch albums only available in physical formats for a lot of money and generally feels like an artist very connected to his art. Any sort of Mach-Hommy release is met with excitement and #RICHAXXHAITIAN is no exception. This is a dense collection of tracks and maybe the best that Mach-Hommy has put out to date.
Pitchfork
As a general rule I like to check out pretty much any new album that gets Pitchfork’s “Best New Music” stamp of approval. Sometimes it’s to say “can you believe this got Best New Music’d?” but more often than that it leads me to discovering some really great music. I was thrilled to see Yaya Bey’s album Ten Fold (Big Dada) receive this stamp and even more happy when I listened to the album and found Yaya Bey had refined her sound, creating an album on non-stop bops. Definitely one of my favorite albums of the year so far.
Another way I like to engage with Pitchfork is by checking out their “Albums to Listen to This Week” posts on Fridays. These lists cast a pretty wide net and have a different focus than Brooklyn Vegan’s do, so looking at both should give you a great finger on the pulse of new album releases. In the middle of one of these posts in May I saw an artist I had never heard of, that being Jawnino. There aren’t too many details in the write ups about these albums but I saw that MIKE, one of the most respected names in underground rap right now, was featured on Jawnino’s album 40 (True Panther) (also ugh, why’d you have to remind me that I literally just turned 40?!). I would’ve totally missed this album if it were not for this post and seeing MIKE’s name and boy am I glad I checked it out. 40 is an album full of chilled out rap that is often gorgeous and hard hitting; another one that will appear somewhere on my year end list no doubt.
In Search of Media
I’m not 100% sure where I first saw that Jadasea had released a new album (10k Global). It could’ve been from a source listed above, or a text from a friend, could have even been from an alert on my phone. In times like this, where there’s an album I really like that’s also kind of a niche release, I like to Google for reviews of said album and see if there could be new sources of information I haven’t been aware of yet. This is how I discovered In Search of Media just about a half hour ago. It’s a good review of a great album and after checking out their Best Albums of 2023 list I am confident to add them as a trusted source moving forward.
Bandcamp
Of course I can’t do one of these posts without mentioning Bandcamp! Their Bandcamp Daily landing page is a pure hit of serotonin and full of awesome features, including their pick for “Album of the Day.” Yes, every day of the week, they pick a release to check out. One of these posts had an album that I had definitely heard of but was going to skip as it’s not my “thing” at all… or so I thought. When I saw Shaboozey, the North Carolinian who fuses rap and country, featured here it was a true head-scratch moment. It seemed out of place to me given my perception of what I thought the album would be and the fact that he’s a pretty big artist, definitely bigger than most artists featured here. All of this dissonace inspired me to press play, mostly to confirm my previous decision of avoidance. I’m not too proud to admit when I’m wrong, and boy was I wrong here. This album (EMPIRE) somehow wonderfully threads the needle and is really, really great. I encourage you to do the same.
Birthday Count:
In this entire post I have said the word birthday (including this one) 10 times. You’re welcome!