Earl Sweatshirt & The Alchemist – Voir Dire
Finally, after years of working together and teasing an entire collaborative album, Earl Sweatshirt and The Alchemist have released a full-length together. (The pair previously released the album on YouTube under a fake name, and a press release notes that it “was discovered by fans through a scavenger hunt that consisted of a series of real-life and digital puzzles that had to be solved before the album was revealed.”) As on the various tracks they’ve made together over the years, The Alchemist’s hazy samples and Earl’s abstract, stream-of-consciousness lyricism go together like two peas in a very trippy pod. It’s hypnotic from start to finish, instantly-satisfying but clearly requires multiple close listens to unpack the many layers in Earl’s delivery. It has one guest appearance–likeminded rapper MIKE–and is otherwise fueled by the inner-workings of Earl’s mind, without so much as a hook for the casual listener to latch onto.
Just as the music is off-kilter, so is the way to listen to it. The album is streaming for free on the NFT website Gala and the songs are also available to purchase as “digital collectibles,” and those who purchase it become eligible to receive additional awards.
Joey Purp – Heavy Heart Vol. 1 Bandmanrill, Sha EK, & MCVertt – Jiggy In Jersey
Jersey club has been infiltrating the mainstream, with artists like Drake and Bad Bunny nodding towards it on recent songs, but one of the strongest forces behind the genre’s latest wave is Newark producer MCVertt. MCVertt is behind one of Jersey club’s biggest crossover hits, Lil Uzi Vert’s “Just Wanna Rock” (a collaboration born out of mutual admiration, as MCVertt’s producer name was inspired by Uzi), but he spends much more of his time working with Newark rapper Bandmanrill. Bandmanrill has a sound that mixes both club music and drill, and he’s also a frequent collaborator of Bronx drill rapper Sha Ek. All three of them have teamed up for this new 27-song, nearly-hour-long project Jiggy In Jersey. The project actually kicks off with the new song that MCVertt produced for A$AP Ferg and “Pound Town” rapper Sexyy Red, which has all the makings of yet another crossover hit, and then hits Bandmanrill, Sha Ek, MCVertt, and a couple other guests (Lil Zay Osama, DJ Sliink) doing what they do best. It goes back and forth between thumping club beats and pounding drill beats, topped off by a seemingly endless amount of energy from Bandmanrill and Sha Ek. It’s a little long, but in its best moments, it shows how much magic can be made when three powerful artists come together and have this much chemistry.
Joey Purp – Heavy Heart Vol. 1
Following a 2022 collaborative project with KAMI, Chicago rapper Joey Purp has released his first new solo project since 2021’s UpLate, which marked Joey’s production debut. Like UpLate, Heavy Heart Vol. 1 has no features, but this time Joey enlists an array of producers (including Knox Fortune, Smoko Ono, Thelonius Martin, DEXLVL, and more). The result is a diverse beat selection that ranges from chipmunk soul to Chicago house to trap, and Joey sounds as charismatic and versatile as ever. It’s a short project with nine songs in 18 minutes, but hopefully “Vol. 1” in the title means more is on the way.
Mick Jenkins – The Patience
Mick Jenkins is tired of being patient, and that feeling informs his fourth full-length album. Some of the lush jazz-rap that informed his last two albums is present here, like with the fluttering keys of penultimate track “Guapenese,” but the Chicago rapper tends to favor a harder, more ominous backdrop on this one that matches his newfound urgency. He recruits fiery spitters like Freddie Gibbs, Benny the Butcher, and JID, and he stands tall next to all of them. As ever, he’s a masterful rhymer, an out-of-the-box thinker, and he has an ear for melody. On The Patience, he applies those familiar tricks in new settings and proves to be more versatile than ever.