Author: Justin Boland

Hip Hop’s Extremely Official 50th Anniversary was a crude, awkward scene, yet it also brought us a ton of welcome comebacks. There has been a whole wildfire worth of old school legends re-appearing with some serious heat, far hungrier than they have to be. For my crisply folded money, Redman’s 2024 joint Muddy Waters Too…

Homeboy Sandman is one of one. That’s hella redundant because he already knows this, and has referenced it many hundreds of times throughout his sprawling, breezy and often genius-grade catalog. Like too many basic bitch hip hop heads online, I had doubts about this cat at first, back where the Blog Era overlapped with the…

Real Yeti Rap seldom covers the same artist twice, but Rome Streetz is an exceptional human. There has been a lot of Discourse™ in the past year questioning whether he’s somehow fallen off, or at least hit that awkward plateu where he’s out of shit to say but still has to keep cutting new verses.…

A lot of rappers these days are keen to clarify they’re actually curators. Very few of them are. Sideshow has been walking that walk in Los Angeles for a minute or three, a man with a million projects, perpetually. So saying that “ALOVENARCOTIC” is an excellent video for a nothingburger song is missing the point:…

Checking out the annual harvest of “Album of the Year” lists is always a valuable reminder that music criticism is polluted with hipster weirdos. Their primary purpose is co-signing effusive poptimism handjobs for the major label flagship products & festival PR projects that pay the bills. In exchange for that service, they’re allowed the self-indulgence…

I had never heard of namesbliss before, but I was pretty much sold thirty seconds into this video. Unlike most of my few remaining peers here at the heights of music journalism, I am acutely allergic to rap with British accents. I do make exceptions for exceptional voices like D Double E or Roots Manuva…

Larry June has been a reliable roadmap to quality product for a long time now, a co-sign worth exploring. That Good Job tag means something real at this point, especially after his trilogy of winners with Alchemist & Co. Foggieraw is a DMV artist making a big push for 2026 with Mercury Records behind him,…

TRAPMAT SAVIOR is fortunate indeed to keep such good company. As advantages go in this rap game, having both Nicholas Craven and Mike Shabb in your corner is far better than having rich parents, although Monsieur Savior seems to have that going for him, too. Live from Montreal’s ex-pat exodus melting pot, he reps Port-au-Prince…

Casual blasphemy: DJ Premier has always been better with his scratch hooks than his actual beats. He’s never had to be flashy because his sense of timing is so perfect, transforming short snippets of classic accapellas into earworms that stick like melodies. His production work is a mixed bag, but his hook game? An unbroken…

There are so many inferior knockoffs trying to replicate this formula in 2026, you could almost forget how electric it is when it actually works. Music journalists used to have nothing in their sorry toolkits but “abstract” to cover rap like this, but now we’ve got “left-field,” “mumble-adjacent,” and worst by far, “art rap,” as…