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Aesop Rock: Integrated Tech Solutions
New album: The prolific and incomparably articulate American rapper returns with another sharpener, this time an intelligent, irony-laden, highly detailed concept-style album dissecting absurdist, infinitely excessive consumerism
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Tkay Maidza: Sweet Justice
New album: Stylishly funky, slick and soulful hip-hop and R&B with dark twists and tender moments come aplenty in this alluring second album by the eclectically talented Zimbabwean-born, Australian-raised and now Los Angeles-based artist
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Balming Tiger: January Never Dies
New album: Hugely enjoyable debut LP by the South Korean K-pop and hip-hop collective, who bring a heady mix of slick delivery and experiment with funk, pop, indie rock and playfully inventive changes of pace
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Nitin Sawhney: Identity
New album: The acclaimed British-Asian musician returns with a powerful LP themed very much as titled, and spurred by burning issues over how immigrants are portrayed, presents 17 tracks on different sides of heritage, sense of self, belonging and multiculturalism, with an impressive set of guest singers and rappers
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Ren Gill
New album: An outstanding new LP by the remarkably talented Welsh, Brighton singer-songwriter rapper and guitarist Ren Gill, influenced by years of bed-ridden mental and physical illness, expressing caustic, self-torn schizophrenia, his songs are packed with wordplay, wit, catchy tunes, gut-wrenching emotion and invention
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The Streets: The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light
New album: After 12 years since the last LP, British rapper Mike Skinner returns with familiar style of his debut Original Pirate Material (2002), of interweaving stories of candid spoken word, this time with a self-funded accompanying film based on the life of a DJ
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Armand Hammer: We Buy Diabetic Test Trips
New album: A mesmerically smart, articulate, experimental hip-hop LP packed with ideas, samples and slick delivery by the New York rapper aka Billy Woods and guests, interweaving endlessly inventive, dreamlike hazy maze of voices, stories and sounds
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Yussef Dayes: Black Classical Music
New album: Taking a title cue from Miles Davis, a brilliant, landmark 19-track debut LP by the supremely gifted British jazz drummer variously exploring and re-interpreting many sides of 70s funk, reggae and afrobeat, joined by a stellar group of musicians and vocalists
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Danger Mouse and Jemini The Gifted One - Born Again
New album: Delayed by almost two decades, but worth the wait, this stylish hip-hop follow-up to 2003’s acclaimed Ghetto Pop Life LP is a second collaboration between producer Brian Burton and New York MC
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Genesis Owusu
New album: A stylish, punchy, truly eclectic release by the Ghanaian-Australian singer from Canberra, (real name Kofi Owusu-Ansah) with a potent mash of hip-hop, punk, funk, metal, soul and electro-pop, and a running lyrical metaphor of cockroaches
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Noname’s second album, Sundial
New album: Super-slick, intelligent, angry but beautiful rap and and soul by the Chicago poet Fatimah Nyeema Warner in this second album after 2018’s debut, Room 25, building on her uncompromising perspectives on Black culture, racism, relationships and celebrity double-standards
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Little Dragon: Slugs of Love
New album: An inventive, very eclectic, enjoyably experimental seventh studio album by the Gothenburg quartet, mixing electronica, soul, pop, hip-hop and R&B with guests including Blur’s Damon Albarn and East Atlanta rapper JID
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Collapsed Lung’s nod to the old London Weekend TV logo
New album: Nearly three decades in, packed with slick, sharp, flowing humorous lyrics, catchy beats and rockin’ riffs, the British hip-hop band best known for the hit song Eat My Goal return with their first LP since 2018’s Zero Hours Band
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Killer Mike reveals the young Michael
New album: One half of Run The Jewels, the Atlanta rapper and social activist Michael Santiago Render releases a powerful, articulate, and frank autobiographical solo LP, candidly exploring his childhood and more of the other side to his Killer Mike persona
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Hak Baker: Worlds End FM
New album: Vibrant, witty, energetic debut by the east London rapper and musician, presented like a pirate radio station the mixes hip hop and storytelling with echoes of The Streets’ Mike Skinner and Ian Dury, as well more conventional, yet pointed indie about troubled Britain
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McKinley Dixon: Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?
New album: A short but poetically vivid and emotionally stirring fourth album by the articulate, flowing Richmond, Virginia rapper and musician, a title inspired by Toni Morrison’s book trilogy, and filled with city-inspired jazz soundscapes and great guest vocalists
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Comfort: What's Bad Enough?
New album: Truly original and arresting cross-genre electronica-postpunk-hip-hop by the Glasgow sibling duo of vocalist and transwoman Natalie and instrumentalist brother Sean McGhee who challenge gender norms and ideas of beauty
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Skinny Pelembe: Hardly The Same Snake
New album: The eclectic experimentalist from Doncaster, aka Doya Beardmore, with roots also in Birmingham and Mozambique, comes up with a powerful, visceral new LP, spanning indie, avant-pop, hip-hop, rock, electronica, gospel and soaring soul
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JPEGMAFIA x Danny Brown: Scaring The Hoes
New album: A frenetic, eclectic, mischievously ironic and culture-bashing collaboration between iconoclastic Brooklyn rapper Barrington DeVaughn Hendricks, and his Detroit counterpart Daniel Dewan Sewell in a crazed mish-mash of samples, voices and rhythmic restlessness
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Sleaford Mods - UK Grim
New album: Nottingham’s Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn return with another set of, angry, catchy, darkly humorous belters, pulling no punches when it comes to the shambolic state of Tory-led Brexit Britain
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