Blockhead – The Aux
For the followup to 2021’s Garbology with longtime collaborator Aesop Rock, veteran underground rap producer Blockhead now teams with billy woods to deliver a star-studded new solo LP, The Aux. woods executive produced and he’s releasing it on his Backwoodz Studioz label, and Backwoodz’ description deservingly calls this “an indie hip-hop All-Star game of an album.” The guests come from a variety of different generations and scenes of underground/indie rap, and they come together to create something that really feels like an album, not just a collection of tracks. Those guests include woods himself (and Armand Hammer), Aesop Rock, Navy Blue, Quelle Chris, Open Mike Eagle, Bruiser Wolf, AKAI SOLO, Defcee, ShrapKnel, RXK Nephew, Fatboi Sharif, and more; and the last track has Bruiser Wolf, Danny Brown, billy woods, and Despot all on the same song (it’s amazingly called “Now That’s What I Call A Posse Cut Vol. 56”). It connects the dots for so many different corners of the rap world, and it stands on its own as a great rap record.
Danny Brown – Quaranta
After embracing total chaos on March’s Scaring the Hoes with JPEGMAFIA, Danny Brown closes out 2023 with one of his most pensive albums yet. The long-teased Quaranta is Danny’s first solo album in four years, and he considers it the bookend to the chapter of his career that began on his 2011 breakthrough XXX. As the title suggested, XXX came out the year Danny turned 30, and “Quaranta” is Italian for “forty.” (Danny is 42 now, but he was 40 when he first publicly revealed the album title.) Quaranta is also Danny’s first album since he got sober, and he said in an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 that this album concludes a series of therapeutic albums that found him opening up about much of what he’d been dealing with these past 10+ years. Going forward, “I’m all about making music to uplift people and make them have fun,” he says, “and not necessarily be a trauma dump for me.”
Danny has made wise, reflective rap music before, but he’s never dedicated himself to that format for an entire album the way he does on Quaranta. With just 11 songs and no filler, it’s one of his leanest, most focused albums. Every song adheres to a similar vibe, but it never blurs or gets repetitive–Quaranta is one of those albums where every song stands out in its own way, and no individual track can fully convey the depth of the LP. (My favorite song on it at the moment is “Celibate” with MIKE, but even that song is just one small piece of the puzzle.) Danny opens up and gets immensely personal–or, on “Jenn’s Terrific Vacation,” laments gentrification–and the production from The Alchemist, Quelle Chris, Kassa Overall, Paul White, and others is the perfect backdrop for the mood of these songs.
H31R – HeadSpace
Brooklyn rapper maassai and NJ producer JWords quietly self-released their debut LP as H31R (pronounced “heir”), ve·loc·i·ty, in September of 2020, and the pair’s unique blend of rap and electronic music slowly but surely started stirring up some buzz. Now they’re back with a higher-profile followup, HeadSpace, their first release for Ninja Tune imprint Big Dada, and it feels safe to say that this one’s even better. JWords crafts a clubby head-trip, and maassai’s delivery is equally experimental. It transcends genre and scene, and really exists in a world of its own, and that world feels even more welcoming on HeadSpace than it did on H31R’s debut.
Wiki & Tony Seltzer – 14K Figaro
Wiki has been on a roll this year (not that he ever isn’t). Following a brief EP in May, he put out an excellent collaborative album with MIKE and The Alchemist in September, and now he releases his own new solo album, entirely produced by Tony Seltzer. From working entirely with one of his earliest collaborators to the hyper-local New York City themes in the lyrics, 14K Figaro feels like a return to form, but not a retread or a look backwards. It’s his most overtly New York album since his masterful 2017 album No Mountains In Manhattan, and it embraces the maturity, wisdom, and stylistic variety that he’s picked up in the six years since that LP. Tony Seltzer’s modernized boom bap is hypnotic, and Wiki leaves you hanging on every word, with help from Zelooperz, WiFiGawd, and Remy Banks. As far as classic-style New York rap albums go, this is one of the strongest ones I’ve heard in recent memory.