Art by Evan Solano
Snakebite antidote is made from venom. The cure can be found within the poison. “Tweaker,” LiAngelo Ball’s early 2025 viral hit, represents humanity’s complete surrender to brainrot. It also charts our best path out. We just have to swerve, bend that corner, whoaaaa.
“Tweaker” debuted on a N3ON stream and found fleeting omnipresence across demographically-targeted algorithms. It became popular because of its inherent virality: a person famous for not making music making music even CTE couldn’t shake out of your skull. A LiAngelo Ball rap song was destined to be shared, memed, remixed, and reacted to, no matter what it sounded like. Athletes dropping rap songs is a tale as old as Diesel, but LiAngelo didn’t gain a platform from playing in Lithuania. Some families are Costco Guys, the Balls are Basketball Boys. Whether or not they’re in the league, their reality stage dad ensures they’re in the feeds of everyone who loves or hates to see them there.
The thumbnail-face-esque shock of “Tweaker” was how massively it crossed over like LaMelo, from streamerville into the aging mainstream. Within a few weeks of its debut, “Tweaker” was blaring inside NBA arenas during pregame warmups and soundtracking Inside the NBA’s commercial transitions. Def Jam signed GELO to a $13 million contract. He performed during All-Star Weekend, made it into NBA 2K25, and onto the Rolling Loud lineup.
“Tweaker” was funny until we realized it was good. They say extremist content creators amass audiences first through ironic exposure, which through repeated consumption becomes radicalized pleasure. Someone should designate GELO’s hooks as a terrorist organization because “Tweaker” and the GloRilla-featuring “Can You Please” had me once again daydreaming about a life of money-blowing, ass-shaking excess that Bush-era pop rappers sold as attainable. Life, it seemed, could be fun, if we pretend hard enough.
GELO has a throwback aughts style that only makes sense post-2024 because of how it came about and reached us, and thus evades the trappings of nostalgia. The masses now recognize the fiction in that aspiration. In our welcomed self-perpetuated doom spirals we scroll on to the next bite-sized dopamine blast of blissful deception. We know we’re trapped in Infinite Jest’s future of endless entertainment, breaststroking through the sewage of celebrity-music-as-content. But by accepting “Tweaker” as a legitimate hit, undeniably so on a universally relatable level, we experienced a collective sigh of cathartic relief. Through a song that encouraged us to start letting shit go, together we re-stitched a few fragments of our lost shared humanity. – Will Hagle
The title track of Tyler, the Creator’s fewer-frills followup to last year’s Chromakopia plays on both readings of its title: urging people to stay off their phones, but also to let the animals on display roam free and pretend, for as long as possible, that they aren’t being observed. “Don’t Tap the Glass/Tweakin” returns Tyler to his natural habitat, one of unrestrained excitement and tongue-in-cheek aggression. – Tracy Kawalik
Even when he was far from middle age—a fresh-faced MC being passed over by Stones Throw for holding too much commercial potential, broken instead by a brave new world of rap blogs and .rar unarchivers—Blu’s victories were rarely simple. On the centrepiece of his debut Below The Heavens, “Dancing In The Rain,” he squared a love for music with the inability to afford the bus fare to the studio. Eighteen years later, on an album which celebrates his 40th birthday, Blu finally delivers a song which addresses the competing truths at the center of his philosophy. Built around one of the year’s most ingenious samples, its core question, Could it be that it was all so simple babe? is both ironic and nakedly-true. Yes, as long-time collaborator Sene raps on the middle verse, we may no longer live in a time when we “peasants get a shot to get their guaco” but the answer to Blu’s contentedness, to bliss in middle age? Well, that remains simple: we’re listening to the fruits of it. –Liam Inscoe-Jones
Some beats just go down smooth. evilgiane’s instrumental for “Next Move 2,” all pitched samples and frenetic thumb snaps, is one of them. It’s propulsive in a timeless way, drawing you into its warm embrace even if you’re the type predisposed to performatively convulsing whenever you hear the phrase “surf gang,” which is a thing that evilgiane is in. At least equal credit is due to LA’s RealYungPhil, the rare nu-skool rapper whose value prop is easily understood by old people despite in no way catering to their tastes. He’s just a really cool-sounding dude with the baritone of an old soul straightforwardly rapping about cool stuff. If I started an intergenerational exchange program where millennials with calcified tastes get sent zip files of stuff like this in order to re-evaluate their stance on zoomer rappers, this would absolutely be the first song that played once you opened the zippyshare. I’m not just saying that because RealYungPhil utters the phrase “same damn time” in the same cadence that Future once did, but it’s certainly helpful that he did so given that a of what this blurb has to do is convince 37-year-olds to listen to something that may very well have been recorded by kids with Labubus affixed to their belts. – Drew Millard
“Documents” is in the grand tradition of hip-hop transmutation. Like the Wu-Tang transformed Staten Island into Shaolin or Rick Ross made himself into Big Meech/Larry Hoover by putting it out into the universe like the Secret, Slick Rick transmogrifies his decades of immigration nightmares into a suave double-0 fantasy. Gone are the 17 months Rick spent in prison from 2002 to 2003 while an immigration court refused him bail, or the years DHS spent trying to deport him.
In their place: A jet-setting spy montage—more breezy To Catch a Thief than Le Carré, but still a bonafide story with a beginning, middle, and end— delivered in Slick Rick’s signature bemused under-his-breath flow. Rick’s wordplay, storytelling, his adept internal rhymes: they’re all here, like “La Di Da Di” came out yesterday and not forty years ago. And then, as if he didn’t end his grand Legend Has It project by “turning Ether to Etherium,” Mr. Cryptocurrency Scarface himself shows up to deliver his best verse in years.
Like Michael Jordan greenlighting The Last Dance on the same day LeBron celebrated his fourth title, Slick Rick has returned to remind everyone that, once again, the ruler’s back. – Jordan Ryan Pedersen
It’s a trick as old as time: Take a thing and double it. Triple it. Octuple it. Repeat it til the phrase loses all meaning and becomes a floating giddy vacuum of pure sound. Migos did it with Versace, Uzi did it with Balenci. Carti did it with JumpOutTheHouse. Trump did it with China. This year, New Orleans rapper Rob49 did it with “What The Helly.” The premise is simple—the word “hell” tweaked just a smidge, so it rhymes with the things in his pocket (Ben Franky), the things he puts on his wrist and neck (baguette diamonds), the things women call him (daddy), the things he calls the losers whose women he’s stealing (nerdy). Helly’s catchy as hell, it probably inspired that Severance character. Over a frantic two minutes, Rob49 riffs like RXK Nephew at his stream-of-conscious goofiest, unleashing every Helly Berry, HellyBurton, HellyBron James pun he can conjure before cracking up in giggles. – Kieran Press-Reynolds
Your girl? His. Her friends? Teaming up with the entourage. You? Left cranky in the cold, wondering where everything went wrong. The catalyzing moment came as a thumping four count of springy chords slipped from the club’s speakers, just as the club’s checkerboard-patterned dance floor glowed alive with baby blues and soft pinks. Shimmying from the velvet fortress of the VIP came rap’s most eligible bachelor, Lil Tecca: slender, draped in an obsidian biker jacket and leather pants to match, raising his plastic cup in the air, making all the eye contact in the world. Over a beat that could have come from The Neptunes Present…Clones sessions, the Queens hitmaker twists that mysterious-player archetype into fisherman’s knots. – Anthony Seaman
By the time Big Sad 1900 and Freddie Gibbs left Hawaii, the island had been stripped of Backwoods, prime cuts, and whatever was left of its moral compass. The strip clubs hit quarterly highs. The ocean wept styrofoam. Days were spent with toes in the sand, nights creeping down the H-1 in foreign rentals full of pretty passengers and poor decisions. Somehow, they even managed to track down the only syrup plug within 2,000 miles of the mainland.
With the underground groundswell behind Die A Legend 2, it only made sense Big Sad 1900 would close out the year with a co-sign from 2025’s undisputed heavyweight. Freddie’s acclaim for rapping over avante-garde production might steal headlines, but a few bars over this Cardo-type-beat proves that he hasn’t lost his footing in this lane. It’s a return to form–riding clean, talking slick, and making it sound like silk. – Diego Tapia
Unc Rap typically doesn’t do it for me. It kinda makes me sad—like, damn you still have to do this? Every now and then you get a project like Infinite that feels deliberate, not just a desperate swing at renewed relevance. His recent slate of joint albums with contemporary rappers could obscure the fact that Alchemist’s history with Havoc and Prodigy is every bit as storied as, say, Nas with DJ Premier; “Thug Muzik” and “Keep It Thoro” are taxonomically no different than “Nas Is Like” or “NY State Of Mind.” The slow, deliberate creep here is vintage Mobb: full of evil omens that have been brought under complete control. P would be proud. – Diego Tapia
Tyler, The Creator has unabashedly modeled his career after Pharrell’s, but thankfully he hasn’t gotten around to penning animated movie tie-ins yet. Instead, he is firmly retracing Skateboard P’s 2002, in which Pharrell followed blockbuster crossover hits by making canonical coke rap with Clipse. In Nigerian Houstonian Maxo Kream, Tyler has found something of his own Pusha T: a preternatural raconteur of drug-slinging self-mythology. With “Cracc at 15,” Tyler gifted Maxo one of his finest Neptunes homages, a minimalist, percussive speaker squeaker that perfects the prototype of their prior year collab “Cracc Era.” As the beat oscillates between a spartan bounce and its dreamy refrain, Maxo finds the devil in the details as he describes a childhood defined as much by Dragon Ball, Goldeneye, and Pokemon as it was gangs, guns, and grams. He flits between reference points to anchor his tenure in the game, from the sounds of his youth (“Trap Or Die”, Tha Carter III) to the fashion (Bathing Ape, Evisu jeans). It’s an effective method of lyrical carbon-dating, and one of the best Clipse singles in a year where we actually got a new Clipse album. – Pranav Trewn
With an razor-toothed pen game and a shamanic flow, Chester Watson transports his listeners to places previously unseen. Earlier works like Past Cloaks (2014) and A Japanese Horror Film (2020) plunge us through the permafrost. His latest album, Psychic Warfare Department, opts for higher perches among the cosmos. But “Glimpses of God” stands out for how it stays on common ground. Our protagonist doesn’t need a hexagram to find holiness, as he shows us in February’s loosie. It’s right in front of us—a mother’s fatigued smile, a lover’s look toward the night sky. There’s God in a sibling’s assurance and a friend’s snickering. Still having the will to groove after commercial air travel? That’s God, too. Elaquent’s backdrop glimmers with gossamer keys. There’s some compressed Dillatude in the warm synth and dusty drum kicks. Familiar, but still fresh. The self-directed video goes panoramic with just two shots, a snow-coated forest and a soft-light oak floor. For all his ultra-dense scheming, Watson conveys so much with the simple fluttering of his eyelids. The grayscale portraitist sends an evergreen message. – Steven Louis
It feels like with every success for EBK Jaaybo comes another setback. Jaaybo watched from prison as 2024’s “Boogieman” broke regional containment to top charts and achieve mainstream virality; when he came home in February, he went on a torrid run of new releases—including the ferocious “I’m Koming”—that introduced the Stockton native to a bigger audience than ever before. Every music video garnered millions of views on YouTube, XXL put him on their Freshman cover, and then, just days after being announced as an opener for YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s MASA Tour, he was re-arrested during a traffic stop in May. Jaaybo currently faces up to 30 years in jail for gun and drug possession charges.
Still, Jaaybo stands as the breakthrough and most enduring artist of his city’s rap scene. On “I’m Koming,” he trades out the nightmarish choir samples from previous hits for a more frenetic beat where his threats fly fast and free. The venom is pure when he raps about false boogiemen and smoking his opps like soul food, but a sense of loss forms the scaffolding: “Every time I had to blow my pole, I lost one so I was in my feelings.” This duality, an ouroboros of pain and punishment, is what has always made Jaaybo’s music so special. For any one of his songs where he might diss his every enemy by name, there’s another dedicated to his lost ones – family, friends, fellow Stockton rappers. This is why he’ll never get caught lacking. Even as the confines of the carceral cycle grow ever tighter around him, Jaaybo is making it bigger than anyone else from his city ever has. He knows he can’t fail now. He’ll never stop coming. – Kevin Yeung
A $ilkmoney song demands dozens of plays to catch half its quips. Punchlines soar past your face in a flurry. Quadruple entendres are rattled off with the ease of a slow 16. He’s the best rapper whom no one claims as the best rapper. “THE JURY DUTY SEAFOOD BOIL BAG FROM THE LYFE JENNINGS PAPERWORK PARTY” is typically irreverent; the Virginia native sneers at sacred cows like Kendrick Lamar, mimicking his flow. But beyond that dismissive humor, “JURY DUTY” at least partially unshrouds the mystery of how $ilkmoney writes his songs. “For all the facts sung, alphabets hit me with the heart-attack gun,” he raps, “then zapped me back up, then gave me my file with data redacted in black with a cap caption.” $ilkmoney has created his own vernacular, and “JURY DUTY” is the dictionary. – Josh Svetz
Producer ToddGleeFul has been on one of the wildest runs since Goose first linked up with Thug. He’s behind some of the best recent tracks from Sexyy Red, Glorilla, Chief Keef, and Osamason, and here he makes my personal favorite rap beat of the year with “Don’t Feel Em Yet.” Sleigh bells tinkle through a freezing wind, and Santa drops the top in his Cartier buffs just for this one.
Houston rapper Guapo has been teasing this song for years, and while it may not sum up all of rap in 2025, it more than makes up for it by being a straight-up banger. There’s an air of invincibility here. You break into Guapo’s house? He’s already stripped you down. Even his styrofoam cups are top-shelf. He rides the icy current of the beat, worships Ben Franklin like a deity, and double-times his flow into a sneaky pocket, with punch-ins that slither across the measure.
Ffawty, originally from the U.S. Virgin Islands and now Miami-based, injects a burst of energy, sliding from a low, nasally growl into a Patois-adjacent cadence, then hitting a Keed-like squawk that ties the track together with a bow that smells faintly of Za. His accent thickens as the verse goes on, giving the song a sense of momentum. This is a hood ballet, nimble and beautiful, tippity-tapping over a beat that’s both icy and alive. – Harley Geffner
There are two distinct roads to a great posse cut in rap. One is a team of disparate artists with a certain amount of gravitas and status joining one other over a monumental production, their assembly news in itself. The other is when a swath of befriended artists are able to translate their off-mic chemistry into ProTools.
It’s in that latter category that we find Fly Anakin’s “My N—-,” where three of Richmond, Virginia’s finest are joined by Detroit’s Quelle Chris. It’s a warm, swaying affair produced by Brussels native Shungu, reminiscent of a pleasantly sprawling conversation with friends after a big meal, clinking glasses and knives on plates as the sun goes down. Or passing a “blunt burning with the sibilance,” as Big Kahuna OG expertly notes, his overemphasised S’s mimicking both the fire itself and how they might sound on a less expertly mastered vinyl record. There’s a word for merging form and function like that: magic. – Jaap van der Doelen
Jay Worthy reached a multiple career milestones in 2025: He got his billboard on Fairfax. A long-form profile in GQ. More importantly, he finally dropped his highly anticipated debut solo album, Once Upon A Time, the culmination of a decade’s worth of relationships built within L.A.’s rhizomatic music scene. George Clinton, DJ Quik, DJ Muggs, B-Legit, and Thundercat are just some of those he manages to bring into the fold.
But virtually no collaboration could be as potent as “Jive 95,” where Worthy enlists Spice-1 and Bun B to drop game and talk shit over a string section that sounds like it was conducted by Max Julien. The video finds the guys grabbing a bite to eat at Bun B’s Trill Burgers restaurant in Houston; Worthy pays homage in front of a Pimp C painting. It’s a bookend for different generations, different coasts, but for the same rules of the game. Proving that memorable can sometimes be as simple as a parking lot full of friends and something strong in your cup. – Evan Gabriel
“Play This At My Funeral” is fascinating because its production is undeniably saccharine. The simple one-pattern drum, the “we fell in love in October” sample; the portentous negative space reminds me of the mid-career Eminem songs that became popular through sheer middlebrow sentimentality. This makes sense: On my podcast, Nino told me that he was a big Eminem fan, a somewhat surprising admission from a 23-year-old street rapper from Prince George County, Maryland.
But those songs by Eminem were frustrating in part because they were a departure from his devastatingly magnetic instincts to be whimsical and crass at the same time. Nino, though, is a compact and grounded rapper, opting for a deliberate plainspokenness flow that sounds like a speech in front of a class. Some rappers try to wow you with double-time flows, quick enunciation that curbs potential emotional connection, or slang that defines their scene; Nino’s gift is in his macro songwriting. Every sentence of this track (and it is filled with sentences) operates on its own without nested layers of context or decoding. Instead, it’s filled with the sorrows of his life and the hunger for greatness they’ve given him. The streets have its new blues man. – Jayson Buford
When Netflix booted up their clone version of Pimp My Ride last year—now heavily sanitized as Resurrected Rides—they tapped Chris Redd to host. Redd is a solid comedian who carried SNL’s music writing while a cast member in the late 2010s. But the show was creatively dead on arrival; that feeling just couldn’t be restored. The tech overlords should have called zayALLCAPS, who settled instead to channel this bit of nostalgia into an unlikely song of the summer.
“MTV’s Pimp My Ride” isn’t exactly a rap song, but we’re too busy singing along to Zay’s karaoke video to really care. The Sacramento native’s harmonies slink through a glittery synthscape that disorients you into a body rock; zay then gets belligerent with his sweet talking, convincing you to dump your old whip for some new tints. Before you know it, he’s handing you keys and popping your collar—your ride’s officially been pimped. – Kevin Crandall
“Hypnagogia” starts as a familiar chest-puffing trunk rattler, Detroit oddball Zeelooperz squawking in a register not unlike his Bruiser Brigade boss Danny Brown. Then, 30 seconds in: his voice is injected with helium, the bass stripped off like a tablecloth, and a violin loop seemingly bestowed by Sudan Archives begins hammering away. Not another minute goes by before the beat transforms yet again, decaying into a one-two punch of squelchy pinball sounds and Yeezusesque rumbles. It’s a three-part movement that reaches its conclusion well before the two minute mark, an economical experiment stitched together by Zeelooperz’s breathless runthrough of cartoonish non-sequiturs: “Poppin’ these beans like an astronaut,” “We pourin’ your blood out, just like condiments,” and my favorite, “Martin Luther King told me life is but a dream/ Once again? Bitch, it ain’t Evanescence.” It’s an ambitiously animated performance, both delightful and disorienting like the best Saturday morning cartoon. – Pranav Trewn
In a just world, contemporary culture would be flooded with YoungBoy discourse. He feels like our last true rap star in an era of shitkickers, theater kids, and indie sleaze cargo cultists: the heir to Pac’s charisma, Wayne’s grind, and Boosie and Future’s pain, selling out arenas while his peers drop rote event albums that flop on arrival. Sadly, he’ll have to make due with generational success and dodgy pardons alone, but if anything should convince critics to engage with his music more deeply, it’s “Nussie Freestyle.”
A breathless barrage of boasts, threats, and non sequiturs, “Nussie” is proof that there’s more to Youngboy than pain raps and sugary hooks. This is rap music for and by the streets but more crucially, street rap that remains coded as youth music. That should be unexceptional, but this year we were told to prefer coke rap by quinquagenarians with Louis Vuitton roll out money, so I will champion the 26-year-old Louisiana misfit who claims he “shitted in a cup” when asked for a piss test, every day of the week. – Son Raw
At the end of the “L.O.A.T.” music video, Veeze deadpans to the camera that he no longer flexes by holding money, instead by flashing psychotically expensive aftermarket body kit pieces that have fallen off his car. Such is the nature of Veeze, a man who resolves the hegelian dialectic between genius and genious. Genius, of course, is straightforward: The Detroit rapper’s laid-back flow is one of the most subtle in contemporary rap, rewarding repeat listeners with little clever nuggets of joy such as his assertion that his heavily armed friend is the Wicked Witch, that he’s got “two thick bitches wrestling me / it’s WWE in the house,” or announcing he needs lean by rapping that he’s about to have a temper tantrum. Genious, meanwhile, is the fact that his brain functions in such bizarre and brilliant ways that he’d say any of these things at all, or that he delivers them all in a subdued mumble so you have to strain to make out what he’s saying, or that the visual sensibility of the “L.O.A.T.” video is vaguely “Tim Robinson directing Belly.” In other words, God is a DJ and tonight he’s gonna play some fuckin’ Veeze. – Drew Millard
No one knew “6-7” was going to make Philly’s breakthrough star Skrilla into public enemy number one among parents and schoolteachers. The noise could threaten to drown out the music, if Skrilla weren’t so evocative an on-mic presence. His pen is impeccable as it is unpredictable, as on “Sleepwalking” when he bellows “All these fucking diamonds on my neck my Adams apple sank,” or when he riffs on the hook from Megan Thee Stallion’s “Body.” Skrilla ran up a tab of features this year, but few rose to the occasion as tall as the fiendish Floridian Kent Loon. Where Skrilla enunciates in all caps calligraphy, Kent strings his verse in a stream of lowercase, practically whispering with a nonchalant menace and scoring the best moment of the track when he shushes the beat and croons “in that Rick like I’m Reuben!” Over an unhurried instrumental that creeps like a confident predator, the two rappers prove enviably inimitable. – Pranav Trewn
Forty is the new 30, and 30’s the new 25. There’s Botox for the wrinkles, GLP-1s for the bloat, and Turkish Air for the hairline. Perhaps the only marker of seniority left untouched by the scorched-earth war against aging is whether one is able to walk the day after a run of pickup basketball. It is perhaps the great unavoidable tragedy of a life spent bound in this mortal coil: one day, hooping will feel like walking the wrong way up an elevator. A switch is flipped and youthful diversion is recast as grueling punishment; you can shake your fist at the sky or you can laugh about it and work on finding your roller.
“California Games” casts woods, ELUCID, and Earl as chuckling elder statesmen kicking their feet atop a breezy and triumphant Alchemist beat that one can only assume has been aging like Californian wine in his pre-AI cellar. It would be foolish by now to conflate Armand Hammer’s preoccupation with games as an investment in escaping life’s rougher edges—Earl coolly depicts jailbirds “singing like Toni Braxton,” ELUCID tush-pushes through the passage of time, and woods conjures broken homes bugged by feds. The point, rather, is that things can be both hard and fun at once. – Ock Sportello
At the turn of the century, when YL, Papo2oo4, and subjxct5 were still in grade school, every rapper rising from the Big East conference was a platinum-touting go-getter, collecting plaques like park fountains do pennies, giving the blueprint for disaffected cool. It was only natural the trio would emulate these icons when it was their time to shine, but with a little tweak here and spruce of flair there.
Now near the pinnacle of the tristate’s vibrant indie rap scene, they present “100 On,” a slick summertime anthem that hits its maximum potential when paired with a nutcracker, a spliff behind your ear, and fresh memories of the Yankees three-peating. While subjexct captures the essence of a breezy afternoon watching back-to-back games at the Rucker, YL slithers through with his dead-eyed put-downs, setting up for Papo’s raspy 50 Cent impression and reminders of how far from fugazi he and this synergistic conglomerate are. – Anthony Seaman
It opens with Pink Siifu defining his mystique—“They swear they got me figured out, they always tryna figure me out”—and ends with him standing alone, singular, still as yet undefined. The Baltimore-via-Cincinnati-via-Birmingham rapper seems to prefer it that way; he’s as much a shapeshifter as an auteur, a cosmic visionary cannonballing through genres. His catalog contains takes on lo-fi ambient, throat-shredding punk, buttery neo-soul, muggy Southern funk, and bombastic, noisy trap, yet his records are unmistakably the work of the same artist. All of these show up in some form on BLACK`ANTIQUE!, the first of two records that bookended 2025, and “LAST ONE ALIVE`!,” its penultimate track, is like the album and Siifu’s career in miniature.
Siifu’s voice, glistening with a sheen of reverb, sinks into producer Bobbyy’s doleful jazz loop, floating between the wailing saxophone and massive bassline. A simple drum pattern propels the song forward, but other elements begin to accumulate: ratcheting hi-hats, snippets of a drumline, a high-pitched vocal sample, tremolo guitar. Each new sound threatens to topple the structure completely, but Siifu bobs and weaves between them, expanding and contracting his sentences to heighten or ease the tension. It’s a masterful understanding of space and its manipulation. The song is a four-minute explanation of Siifu’s virtuosity: his ability to find pockets in the most cluttered production and to refract disparate styles through his distinct prism. – Dash Lewis
We Know The Truth. We also know how that Truth gets weaponized within the Los Angeles labyrinth. To Live and Die in L.A. is to subvert infernal jealousy and four-lane swerve from different extractors. The police are watching via a billion-dollar helicopter fleet. The sheriffs recite slang to court stenographers. The video voyeurs comb through every last social media post, then monetize beef without personal liabilities. And the streets funnel into zero-sum games. Margins have never been thinner.
The trio behind “Authentic” have lived this out in Southern California’s public square. Ralfy witnessed his brother’s assassination at a contracted performance. Greedo spent a half-decade in prison at the height of his ascent. Dody went from solitary confinement to gnx hype, then got mocked for losing the roof over his head. “Authentic” is a chilly bop, but it’s also an ethos and a rallying cry. Greedo decorates the hook with purples and blacks. He “made it back outside,” a flex of its own kind coming from Watts. Ralfy flows with slippery syncopation, re-upping his South Central anti-pop atop club-made bass. “All these rappers lying about bodies make me hate rap music,” he says with a smirk. Dody levitates from the Avenues and double-times into swaggy paranoia. EVOL’s video is a one-take studio look. Nothing fancy, nothing embellished. In a city of sand traps, straight shots can really go a long way. – Steven Louis
While others from the cadre of new-generation Chicago drill stars, like VonOff1700, favor a blitzkrieg approach to rapping, Lil Durk protege Chuckyy has made a name for himself by way of a more distant, even vacant delivery. “My World” delivers a wistful, poignant piece of sample drill. The sample in question: “i walk this earth all by myself” by EKKSTACY, an alt-pop song that beams bittersweet melancholy directly into your soul. The synths evoke euphoria, but the sampled chorus’s lyrics ache with solitude. A reminder that beauty and pain coexist in this world—and, as Chuckyy’s verses layer on—it’s up to you, and nobody else, to navigate it.
Over this production, Chuckyy’s deadpan delivery feels more like a foray into the domain of fellow Windy City native LUCKI than conventional drill. So much of the red-haired rapper’s sound/aesthetics revolve around the horrorcore/cathedralcore drill that’s been popular from Philadelphia to Stockton; it’s significant that his most commercially successful—and arguably best—song is the one where he breaks from that familiar formula. – Dario McCarty
“I’m so player with it, I ain’t gotta rap, I can really let the beat talk.” Thus lands the triumphant conclusion to “WENT WEST,” BabyChiefDoIt’s biggest hit to date—and the first that he both rapped on and co-produced, taking after a fellow Chicago rapducer shouted out in the title. The beat, co-crafted with Atlanta’s Questionizer, apparently came about when the two were recording and the teen rapper couldn’t decide on something he liked; after hours of fruitless searching, the Southern producer decided to guide Jayden Jones through the beatmaking process, eventually putting together a powerful symphony of 808s and trumpets, Lex Luger–style.
BabyChief was proud of what he’d helped to create, as he well should have been, and he took that pride to his track in a fitting manner. Sure, he coulda just let the beat talk, but BabyChief is a touch too humble in his kicker. “WENT WEST” is packed with cheeky, bombastic, hilarious, breathless bars and hooks, including some well-earned boasts about taking the boards. “I’m finna start blocking these producers, I don’t want to talk ’cause that shit weak/ You feel a way ’bout what I say, then fuck you too, I made this beat.” Mighty words from someone who made their first beat, with the assistance of a seasoned producer. Still, if any of his 2026 singles go as hard as “WENT WEST,” we won’t be able to say it was unexpected. – Nitish Pahwa
Since going viral early last year for “GOOCHIE MAYNE,” the five-woman L.A. collective CUZZOS have been keeping their feet on the gas. A fiercely regional act at their core, a cameo in Kendrick’s “squabble up” video late last year and the three-tape run that they’ve been on over the past three years, have nevertheless positioned Big I-N-D-O, TEAAWHY, Milly Mo, Jasscole, and BB as stars in the making. For their standout single of this year, TEAAWHY and Milly Mo of CUZZOS link up with ATL legend Tony Shhnow for a smooth yet undeniable heater. Tony’s girl damn near left him, so he’s with the CUZZOS to have a good time and forget about it. They’re copping designer duffles and sipping margaritas so nonchalantly that an order of fajitas was mysteriously delivered to the table. “Milly Mo is down with the bitches and hoes/Player shit I promote, that ain’t my man, it’s the bro.” – Isaac Fontes
There’s a brilliance in the construction of Babyfxce E’s breakout single, “PTP,” which stands for “Pop That Pussy,” and comes complete with a remix featuring Monaleo that nearly tops the controlled zaniness of the original. The opening keyboard on sounds like the auditory representation of a question mark. Babyfxce E matches the confusion, beginning with a question of his own, “How I didn’t know he was slimy? It was right under my nose,” he says before pleading for a chance to catch his bearings, “Had to pause the party, I just lost one of my hoes.” Babyfxce E is the sharpest shittalker to hail from Flint since Rio. I like to think of both Rio and Babyfxce E less as writers and more as naturally gifted orators, blessed with the intimate ability to tell complex stories without writing down a single word. It’s stream-of-consciousness rap that’s good enough to make every line a quotable. – Donald Morrison
After serving 3 years and 8 months of a five-year sentence, the premier Flint shit-talker Rio Da Yung Og was released from prison in December of last year and proceeded to go on an MVP-style run throughout 2025. Amid a 57-stop tour over the course of just 3 months, a stellar first-day-out anthem, two tapes (each with a subsequent deluxe edition), a viral performance backed by a live band, and multiple scorched-Earth singles, June’s “Braggin Rights” (which actually ended up on Rmc Mike’s Like Mike tape), is perhaps the pyrotechnic highlight of it all.
Produced by DannyG and Wayne616, the haunting piano loop and aggressive 808s are the prime, chaotic soundscape to back what’s about to ensue: The class clowns uniting for a group project and roping in their friend from down the hall, in this case Chicago’s VonOff1700. YN Jay aka the Coochie Man starts, cramming a superhuman number of crude innuendos into less than 60 seconds of airtime; Rmc Mike’s husky delivery follows, and hears him admit that he and his girl don’t even talk, they just have sex and stare at each other. It’s convincing. Rio, of course, synthesizes the broader argument: “I made a real 10 Ms, I got bragging rights/‘Cause I came from zero—sometimes we ain’t have no lights.” – Isaac Fontes
“Went Legit” is the crown jewel of the Best Rapper Alive, where G Herbo quells at least a bit of the anxiety about hip-hop’s mortality, channelling the days when Beanie Sigel and Freeway would rap on Hot 97 and Jadakiss would put on boxing gloves on DJ Green Lantern mixtapes. The Chicago native delivers meat-and-potatoes lifestyle raps to dazzling effect. “Everyday some new shit, beefing with my bitch right now but life’s still lit,” he smirks. But in the spirit of avoiding generic, colorless cliche, he juxtaposes luxury with the same hunger he had rapping with Lil Bibby back in 2014. Herbo still remembers when his pockets were stacked with lint before raking in seven figures at 18. The riches hold all the more weight contextually when you know the war stories that come with it. These are the foundations hip-hop was built upon, from boomboxes and graffiti to Funk Flex rants. G Herbo remains one of the last bastions upholding hip-hop’s core virtues. – Caleb Catlin
Give Chicago rapper thirteendegrees’ Google results a quick skim and it’ll quickly become clear that his fans exhibit a shared compulsion towards graphing his stylistic influences. It might be a structural characteristic of rap discourse that critics who came of age, like me, during the last meaningful period of rap monoculture (early-to-mid 2010s blog era) can’t help but treat that period as an eternal frame of reference, especially as the genre increasingly fragments into regional microclimates like NY sexy drill or Milwaukee bounce. What I’m saying is, that while I understand why everyone compares thirteendegrees to Young Thug, thirteen seems to be reaching for a different vision.
2025 was a prolific year for thirteen, but his single from last January, “Da Problem Solva,” offers the most compelling intersection of his influences and personal vision yet: a song that doesn’t just stop at evoking swag-era synths but seems to knit together four or five 2013 SoundCloud algo deep-cuts into an orbit of loose equilibria. thirteen’s signature approach is both obvious and immediate—simply put, he sounds like he is singing so hard he is constantly volume-clipping into the red and going to blow out the AutoTune plug-in. I would argue that Thug hasn’t embraced this sort of vocal full-throated-ness since the I Came From Nothings; thirteen’s Chicago compatriots and other frequent comparison Sicko Mobb are certainly the better unit comparison, or even some Skooly. But more so than any of those artists, thirteen exhibits a refreshing, bright, and earnest lean forward, an attitude that carried even a slightly more sonically inconsistent October major label debut. It’s a tantalizing vision of what might still be yet to come as he refines his approach. – Sun-Ui Yum
Two of Chicago’s young rap stars team up for some trash talk. Mello Buckzz is a 24-year-old from the East Side who first blew up in 2023 with Chicago posse cut “Mouskatool,” which he quickly renamed “Boom” to avoid beef with Mickey’s lawyers and remixed with a Latto feature. Star Bandz, 17 years old, signed a major label deal and performed at Lollapalooza with flossy, profanity-free verses she wrote in her bedroom in the south suburbs, “sitting here with my legs crisscrossed applesauce.”
On “Back Up On My Shit,” the two sink their teeth into a simple 808s-and-piano beat by JTK and Allday, the kind of thing that Gucci Mane would have annihilated in 2006, back when Buckzz was in kindergarten. Like fellow East Sider and past collaborator G Herbo, she raps ahead of the beat and squeezes four bars out of each rhyme. Mello might brag about putting the beef to the side on the hook, but when she sees an opp, she’s yanking her belt off to deliver an ass-whooping of the old school variety. Star raps like she’s trying to impress a big cousin at Thanksgiving. She uses an extended two-syllable rhyme to brag about “getting paid for halitosis” and swats away chauvinists with “I’m a girl but like I’m Smokey, I’m the man and you know this.” In the video Buckzz and Bandz alternate between messing around in the kitchen of a chicken restaurant and stunting in a blacked-out luxury car. It’s a great illustration of the way simple, hard tracks like this soundtrack the kitchens and loading docks of the world. I hope Mello and Star Bandz make another one every year. – Jack Riedy
While Papo2oo4’s modern take on DatPiff music is abound with cuts that emulate New York rap royalty—and longtime collaborator subjxct5’s time capsule beats—the crown jewel on Papaholic, Vol. 1 is the triumphant “Counter Strike.” Papo’s got “this life shit in a headlock” as he reminisces about Ma$e’s Murda heyday and Rob Schneider’s Hot Chick over sparse drums, deep kicks, and a sped-up soul sample that echoes peak Heatmakerz and Just Blaze.
The nostalgia is ramped up in the video, which looks like it was filmed on a flip phone. Recalling the grainy, street-level spirit befitting a WorldStarHipHop exclusive during the blog era, footage of NYC landmarks and everyday Five Boroughs occurrences are interspersed with Papo draped in throwback drip—complete with his beloved Dinosaur Jr. purple Nikes—and doing his thing. Much like the Cam’rons, 50s, and Max Bs who came before him and to whom he’s indebted, Papo’s tendency to weave New York’s past together with its present isn’t just him embracing a bygone era, but carrying it forward in his own way. – Oumar Saleh
Sometimes it feels as though the city of Atlanta is trapped in the strongest feedback loop known to man, where the endless churn of reference points from the Southern capital clouds the true endpoints of where trap and crunk have begun and left off. One starts to feel like a conspiracy theorist mapping the crossing lines between the D4L’s and Bankroll Fresh’s, with your face souring each time an allusion jumps the shark and loses its tasteful expression. The bellowing collaboration between Atlanta rappers Pluto and YKNiece, “Whim Whamiee,” blaring out of car windows and off phone speakers on public transit all summer, threatens to break free of the loop, akin to the moment where Rose gives into the sensation of weightlessness as with Jack holding her waist on the Titanic. When you finally let loose and scream “I’m talmbout innit,” at the top of your lungs alongside YKNiece’s glorious ad-libs, it’s hard not to feel like you’re flying at the top of the world.
It’s rooted in comfortable familiarity, without being an overwrought retread: an OJ Da Juiceman cut has been mutated with Zaytoven keyboard progressions to feel as though it’s one measure away from flying off the handle. Pluto and YK Niece bounce off each other like they’re trying to get thrown out of class, filling the negative space in their bars about putting Lululemon on his butt and letting the Draco sing like they’re mimicking the others’ echoes. In the Atlanta rap duo pantheon, their collaboration may be a flash in the pan, but cementing “innit” as a legitimate candidate for Webster’s word of the 2025 is more than enough evidence that they broke away from city’s tradition of tired retreads, at least for a brief moment. – Matthew Ritchie
Following his collaborative run with Nas, Hit-Boy has been having a major 2025, marked by his newfound creative freedom after being released from an 18-year publishing deal. “Start Dissin’” is a posse cut inspired by Drakeo the Ruler’s molten delivery, if you listen closely. Leave it to Hit to pull together the quick-witted BabyTron and AZ Chike, whose talent has been front and center since Kendrick Lamar’s “peekaboo,” to let them battle it out for the best guest verse. Chike is the victor, closing out the song with pointed bars like “God blessed you with two eyes and you see/I do shit n—-s can’t even do in deep sleep.” – Eric Diep
Bruiser Wolf is both the most original human to have ever lived and a public personification of a relatable archetype: fedora-donning wise street philosopher who effortlessly decrees irrefutable maxims like “Orange scrubs make nurses look like inmates” and “Gut to butt ratio determines fellatio.” As a hustler turned landscaper, youth football coach, and respected family man who never stopped rapping, Wolf’s hilariously real, game-laden revelations might’ve toiled forever in the confines of Detroit’s underground were it not for Danny Brown’s success lifting local eccentrics like him, ZeelooperZ, and the rest of the Bruiser Brigade.
In 2021, when his debut Dope Game Stupid came out, Brown said he knew he just needed to get the lyricist on “the right production.” It started with in-house producer Raphy, but through increased experimentation across his discography Wolf has found an ideal pairing in la musica de Harry Fraud. Wolf calls himself an instrument because he flexes his voice like a surrealist trumpeter, blowing impressionistic bursts of simile-rich melodies with unexpected pauses and emphasis. Fraud’s lush, hazy loops force his absurdist delivery into clarified focus.
On an album with beats from Knxwledge, Nicholas Craven, and Sango, Fraud’s “Air Fryer” was the standout track from Wolf’s third album, May’s POTLUCK, so much so that the two released a collaborative LP five months later. Fraud subverts expectations sonically, like a Funhouse mirror reflecting Wolf’s words back at him. A repetitive piano line and sparse muted drum kit give his off-kilter rhymes space to breathe, grunt and contort. Subtle embellishments like a double snare hit on “deuce deuce” when Wolf says, “Shoot from the hip, same release as Angel Reese/I spark a deuce deuce, call me Cameron Brink” reset the pace whenever Wolf tests the edges of typical rhythm. Wolf calls himself a mix between Tha Carter III and Tha Carter IV, and the beat builds accordingly, with an abrupt tonal shift and drop into a bumping bass-heavy outro.
Wolf evokes peak Wayne through his endlessly evocative literary devices. At his age, he’s unlikely to reach Carter-like ubiquity. On “Air Fryer,” he says “I’m playing my role like Ariza.” This could have been an analogy for Wolf’s career in the Bruiser Brigade, but his continued evolution across a growing discography has established him as a solo star. He’s capable of running an ISO, as long as someone like Harry Fraud is on the court to set him up for success. – Will Hagle
There’s the freedom in which gas money flows out of one hand to that of a homie’s that’s been long departed, only to be rejected in a fit of pride, grilled cheeses and prayers emanating from a grandmother’s hands and mouth, and frustration with your own romantic shortcomings spilling out—even granting room for memorializing the basketball career left on the table at eight years old. These laments on “RIP Brownsville KA,” the midway point on 1100 Himself’s stellar Janky K tape, flatten the distance between a fractured history and a cautiously blossoming present. At other times, the Oakland rapper imagines a biology lesson about the regenerative nature of devious snakes and other reptiles, drops off similes about being a tragic hero akin to The Iron Giant, and likens cropping former loved ones out the picture as the proof of a betrayal of biblical proportions (a fitting allusion based on the track’s remix of “I Love (Mimi, Moms, Kev)” by the late, great Ka).
Elegies, often winding and somber, are a fickle master to stay beholden to—especially when stoked in the lineage of Ka’s masterful original version. But 1100’s raspy, slinky delivery over the Leon Ware sample’s tender bassline is grounded in intimate admissions and sincere hopes, with a deep reverence for the permanent nature of the past. Even as he’s in and out of his heightened emotional bag in under three minutes, the calm, almost frighteningly measured tenor that he takes makes you wonder how far away in the review these memories really are. – Matthew Ritchie
Live through enough eras in underground rap and you’ll learn that nothing is promised: hotly tipped emcees vanish without a trace, fall off, get locked down or turn nuns, supernovas of talent exploding as quickly as they’re detected. Phiik & Lungs, however, seemed determined to overcome this entropy through sheer logorrhea – no one can say they fell off if they never stop rapping, filling every second of blank space with a hyperspeed mutation on NY slick talk. UPWO, like the rest of Bad News, sees the duo team with emcee YL and producer illsugi, who offer welcome twists to the duo’s already acrobatic proceedings. Rhyme wise, YL’s steady flow acts as an extreme counterpoint to Phiik & Lungs’s speediness, giving listeners time to catch their breaths but making sure every boast counts. Set against a sonic wall of extremity, his vocals are proof that smoothness can be just as radical as abrasion in the right setting. Illsugi meanwhile assembles a collage of abstract textures seemingly pulled from the subconscious of an overly medicated zoomer raised on a diet consisting entirely of Godfather Don records: attempt to recreate the swing on the drums at your own peril – believe me I’ve tried.
At a time when the term “underground rap” can mean everything from middle-aged boutique vinyl hawkers to couch locked hypebeasts hoping to cash in before anyone notices the lack of substance, UPTWO is subterranean rhyming done right: bar forward, stylistically diverse and New York as fuck. – Son Raw
Following a car accident in 2023 that left him with a broken vertebrae and an attendant surgery, Boldy James has reemerged with an unshakeable focus. In 2025, he cut projects with Rich Gains, Chuck Strangers, V Don, and Antt Beatz. Still, there’s an unreplicable chemistry to the music Boldy makes with Nick Craven, the Canadian producer who’s made the two-bar drumless loop a totem of his beats.
“Spiderwebbing Windshields” is this chemistry distilled. No beat build up. Craven cuts the vocal chop before you can decipher the words, reworking a new groove while cloaking the sample’s traceable elements. Boldly has a gift for making monotonous hooks memorable. “10,000 on your head, I’ll show you why they call it Hitsville/No Friendly Neighborhood shit.” A nod to the nickname of the first Motown recording studio in his hometown of Detroit and reference to the 2025 Disney+ Spiderman series. Every time Peter Parker comes to town, he always checks in on Hell Block. – Evan Gabriel
On May 24th, 2013 at 7:59 AM, Jeff (Passion of the) Weiss received an email:
“Good mornin morning. My names Travis Scott. I drop my free album owl pharaoh 3 days. I love your reviews. I was wonderin if you can check out the album”
It’s a cute message: “Mornin morning.” “I love your reviews.” “Wonderin.” Of course the album was—being a Travis Scott joint—bad. Autotuned wet burps over meretricious synth goop, unburdened by “charm” or “songwriting.” But Jeff is a nice guy. So he posted it on the blog’s now-defunct message board—RIP The What—and asked, sincerely, if anybody wanted to write about it. Because that’s what you do, when somebody is young and sincere and endearingly clumsy: you try to help.
Because “help” is what Travis Scott has always needed. Help from Starrah, who wrote and sang the hook to “Pick Up the Phone” that Travis repeated verbatim when he started playing the song in clubs without permission. Help from his ever-present panoply of “collaborators,” who despite all those boats somehow can’t rising-tide Travis Scott to an album that doesn’t suck shit. Help from his former collaborator Shane Morris, who claims to have helped Travis get his foot in the door in the industry, only for Travis to turn around and sue him for posting a song that Travis allegedly stole from another artist to begin with. Help was not something Travis provided when Morris had a seizure and Travis—allegedly—left. Nor did he help when concertgoers allegedly pleaded with him to stop playing at Astroworld when there was an ambulance pulling bodies out of the crowd.
Help is what Travis clearly needed when, according to Pusha, Travis cried in front of him about how much he hated the Calabasas Cinematic Universe, which Kylie Jenner had helped get him cast in. But Pusha knows he ain’t loyal. He was there when Travis played him “Meltdown”—I’m 39, I’m not capitalizing song titles anymore—without Drake’s verse dissing Pusha, only for Travis to turn around a year later and stab Drake in the back by playing “Like That” at Rolling Loud.
So when, over a beat like a chandelier falling in the dark, Pusha and Yes Malice come out of retirement, you’d think it would be to put Travis on notice, yes? But no. Instead, like Richie Aprile running over Beansie Gaeta with his car, the Clipse came back to establish dominance over the entire industry, not one cartoon dog-lookin’ nerd. “Your soul don’t like your body/we helped you free it.” Travis—poor Travis—is relegated humiliatingly to a bridge in which Pusha threatens to release the tapes.
What all of this says is that despite the millions of albums sold, the bevy of co-branded experiences, and his brilliant idea to dip french fries in barbecue sauce, Travis Scott is still a dork. A flunkie. A schmo. A human press release. An Instagram filter that crawled out of its square frame and became sentient. The product of curators who curate other curators. A ChatGPT hallucination when the prompt had to generate itself. He’s a wannabe, to his core, desperate for approval from people like Pusha, Kendrick, or Jeff Weiss. “I love your reviews.”
He sidled up to artists like Kanye, Young Thug, Quavo, Kid Cudi, Frank Dukes, and dozens more who were pioneering the sound of mid-2010s hip-hop—and synthesized, A&R’d, or outright swiped their sonics to craft an aesthetic that stitched all of them together without bringing anything but a stray hook to the table himself. He’s the Eagles, and man c’mon, it’s been a rough year and I hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man.
What all of Travis’s behavior really says though? Straight up? One word:
“Help.” –Jordan Pedersen
Washington, D.C.’s El Cousteau has been magnetic for a while now, infiltrating the fashion and music industries simultaneously without bending to the commercial demands of either. “Rose Ave” captures a dynamic back-and-forth between him and Niontay, the latter’s bassline providing a canvas for the duo to take turns trading uproarious, incisive boasts. A representative one from the headliner: “See, my daddy sold crack, my mama sold bowls/So I’m a product of the drug sold.” El Cousteau’s work is a confessional filled with drama and tension; in between the lines is a rapper who sees the world and brings what he learns back home. – Eric Diep
How much can two rappers in their I’m healthier than ever! arcs accomplish in 90 seconds? Well, when you consider that “Landgrab” is a duo of dancing cobras bidding listeners closer and one of my most-listened tracks at “a-fucking-lot,” you’d be right to be impressed. The single foretelling Mavi’s new tape, The Pilot, is gummy and elastic. “Landgrab” is one of those blitzing records that shows the pliable nature of language as two hip-hop technicians turn words to boulders, to putty, and back again.
Mavi and Earl trade bars, beats, breaths. Their chemistry and the way the tenor of their vocal tones weave together gives me chills. The people have since, rightly, begged for a collab album. It’s not a coincidence that Happy Earl Sweatshirt and Newly Sober Mavi join forces on a single that reminds us heady, thinky, wordy—whatever underhanded name you have for it—hip-hop is actually a ton of fun. The swing of the single makes it tuneful in a way I didn’t expect to describe either of these rappers at the start of the decade.
When Mavi arrived, the Earl comparisons were natural, deserved, and finally, overcooked. I’m guilty of it like everyone else, but “Landgrab” is no coronation moment. It’s a victory lap atop a summit, where Mavi and Earl dap each other up before taking in the view: “The moral of the story is get off your ass.” – Donna-Claire
It’s tempting to try and situate Stardust, Danny Brown’s full-length (forgive me) hyperpop family reunion alongside Yeezus and Big Fish Theory in the last decade’s electronic rap pantheon. Lead single “Starburst” complicates things a bit. The squeaking, blown-out Odyssey lacks the gravity of a statement single; it, refreshingly, just sounds like Detroit’s Tasmanian Devil having fun talking shit alongside the left-field new-genners he admires so fondly.
Across the track’s five minutes, producer Holly’s shapeshifting, flute-laden instrumental consistently threatens to swallow Brown in its bass. Brown, to his credit, hangs around for the ride like Timmy on the Dune worm—pickaxe in one hand, Subway Surfer in the other. One man’s mechanical bullshit is another’s mechanical bull shit.
That “Starbust” serves as the lead single to Brown’s first post-sobriety record is a sort of testament to the indomitably zooted human spirit. Our trip guide is as twitchy, geeky, and insistent as ever. Where his maturity and perspective shows is in his willingness to cede the spotlight to his brainrotted collaborators—it’s a rare thing to let the last ninety seconds of your lead single breathe so that your thizzed-out producer can climb to an ecstatic crescendo in peace. “Starburst” charts an alternative course for would-be rap kingmakers than the last decade’s Drake-inflected vampirism. Sometimes, “how do you do, fellow kids?” is an honest and welcome line of inquiry. – Ock Sportello
Open Mike Eagle’s music has long traced the psychosocial fallout of supposed technological advancements. On “ok but im the phone screen,” the Chicago-raised, L.A.-based underground rap paladin reflects on dropping his iPhone in the middle of the road and watching, hopelessly, on as it was smashed into pieces by moving cars. “I’m a little bit in mourning for that portion in my brain,” he raps, while hoping for a miracle from a rip-off merchant who promises salvation. As the song progresses, you begin to realize Mike is in the middle of serious withdrawals: his machine for instant gratification and offloading memory has been violently ripped away.
Aside from Mike’s colourful metaphors, where SIM card dust is compared to ashes, serious credit must go to the song’s producer, Child Actor, who combines gloomy guitar riffs with irregular heartbeat drums and spine-tingling vibraphone chimes, all of which go in and out of focus as if Stereolab were attempting boom-bap. It’s as though we’re soundtracking a lucid dream, because of course we are. – Thomas Hobbs
Sometimes you don’t have to oversell it. Banditdamack, who comes from one of those little pockets of the Inland Empire that from afar seems like it’s mostly composed of special task forces and Instagram fliers for house parties, doesn’t waste energy trying to make each detail of his life seem particularly sinister; he also doesn’t worry about the comic timing. Things simply are. On “Vamanos,” his appropriately understated single from earlier this year, “The sheriff taking pics of the rental, baby, it’s time to go” and its following line—“I don’t know why, but Ontario bitches cook best”—are delivered in indistinguishable fashions: calm, disciplined, a little bemused at life’s little ironies. When he reports that his therapist has told him he “needs therapy,” you imagine the verso Zoom window: a man in a sweater vest shrugging, throwing his hands in the air, smirking just a bit. – Paul Thompson
Atlanta rapper MexikoDro’s “No Date” is about something that is truly hard to do: stay grounded in adulthood while raw ambition threatens to swallow your mind whole. At only 30 years of age, Dro can channel the elderly alcoholic in a Black neighborhood, warning kids about the trappings of success from the stoop where his bottles clink on concrete. After helping to originate the plugg rap genre, Dro retreated in the shadows, satisfied to start over but still hungry, watching the industry chose to uplift his contemporaries instead of him.
“No Date” was released quietly, later blowing on TikTok where fans connected with its everyday realities. It could have only come from someone who considers himself an underdog. Where some anthems from past Atlanta stars like Young Jeezy, T.I., or Young Dro himself are about acquiring money through blow dealing—then receiving a bombastic amount of adoration and fame for it—MexikoDro has flipped that expected ambition into something quieter, and radically limited. Instead of tales about speedy cars from foreign companies or large swimming pools in gaudy cribs made for heavyweight champions, Dro is rapping about having his upcoming meals stacked next to each other like his mom makes them for the school week. He isn’t chasing virality; he’s putting one foot in front of the other. It’s tinkering with certain rap tropes that might be played out in the capitalist hellscape we’re living in, where fame never ends and being rich turns superstars into venture capitalists. MexikoDro’s raps are corporeal—startlingly human in how it describes a man who is tired but determined from his work—but they also appeal to the our spiritual and intellectual appetites. An act of defiance against monstrosity of behemoths. – Jayson Buford
Picture this: Minutes materialize into shadows that vine up until they etch off the sides of derelict buildings and fall at your feet. You peer down and see an oil slick of fear and you can’t look away. That is the bone-chilling sensation captured by billy woods’ triumphant “Complications” with Aesop Rock from his equally heralded 2025 record, Golliwog. The song is led by Aes unwrapping a mummy of death anxiety. August Fanon’s production sounds like the moment you realize the gas tank’s been leaking and there’s just nothing to be done.
A few years ago, I was on the phone with an artist close to Aesop Rock and we agreed there is just no way he can continue to be getting better, and better, and better with age. And yet. As the years have gone on Aes has gotten more fluid with his writing and the knots people expect from his work have been massaged out into a line like “We are being carried off in zipper bags by Disney staff.”
As for woods? Cue the maniacal laugh track. Golliwog is the best record of his career. The endless spill of writing about woods’ pen makes the old literary guard in hell’s parlor room jealous. “Complications” ends with woods’ picking up Aes’ harrowed themes on slow melt of time and, yes, I relent, the track is “horrorcore” at its absolute finest. – Donna-Claire
In 2021, Rio told us he’d be right back. On “Last Day Out,” recorded just before he began serving a 60-month federal sentence, he warned everyone they had three years to catch up. When he comes back, he said, it’ll be ten times harder. Then he went to sleep for damn near a presidential administration, and woke up in a Maybach headed to the Greyhound.
“RIO FREE” feels like someone found the remote and hit unpause: This slick-talking natural comedian in a Rick sweater is still dropping sinister wisdom with an instantly recognizable sonic style he helped define for his city. The world rejoiced. While his life was frozen, Rio’s pixelated scarred face grew into legend. Streaming numbers shot up. Archived recordings dripped out. Calls to “FREE RIO” grew deafening. He flipped the syntax for his entry into the first day out pantheon, a celebratory occasion he made seem regular. As for his “Last Couple Days Out,” a film crew was there to document him. He brought his “Legendary” gold record as a carry-on for the private jet flight back home to his kids and the booth. The song was momentous for Flint, for hip-hop, for Rio, and in retrospect it feels like a blip. He put out the FREE RIO mixtape within a month of his release, then dropped F.L.I.N.T. (Feeling Like I’m Not Through) in August, and never indicated he was anywhere close to through.
Rio’s mentioned he had to go away for his city, and on “RIO FREE” he shrugs “it wasn’t shit, though.” His resilience, defiance, casual confidence, and dry wit mirrors Drakeo’s, as do his circumstances. Rio’s post-incarceration material has been funnier, more energized, less risk-averse. His 2025 run ended with “Long Live Drakeo the Ruler,” with a video in front of the Drakeo mural, hangin with Ralfy & co. “RIO FREE” was the genesis of this second act, in which he’s become a similar folk hero, but won’t rest until the legend keeps spreading like that girl he’s Gmailing’s legs. – Will Hagle
“Gang Gang” doesn’t sound like a song so much as it sounds like a situation. It shows up the way any L.A. summer does, already in progress, loud, and unavoidable. One day it’s just there. In Instagram stories and captions. Blasting out of car windows on Rosecrans, through parking lots, barbershops, and backyard kickbacks. From the jump, you’re already in it, in media res, as Chef Boy launches into the now-iconic opening line: “And I be slidin’ down Rosecrans… with my close friends.”
This happens almost every year in L.A., when one song comes to define the ecosystem. ASM Da Bopster’s “Like The Way You Move,” (pre-Blueface version which has since been deleted) Greedo’s “Sweet Lady,” and further back, Radio Base’s “Pass The Bottle” all sit in this lineage. Chef Boy and his crew of Compton rappers are the next link in this chain. These songs catch the city mid-motion and feel less like hits than inside jokes the whole city shares. Somehow, it just feels inherited.
The beat hits like a massive stomp, every bass knock landing with the force of ten people jumping out of a pickup truck for a stick-up. There are technically five rappers on the song, Chef Boy, Rosecrans hopout, YS, PhoPho8ight, and Hitta J3, but it feels like 100. Each shoutout gets more geo-targeted than the last, orbiting each other in chaotic, hyper-local gravity. Rhyme schemes twist in impossible directions like gang signs flashing through the frame. Nobody steals the song, but everyone feeds it.
In the video, red flags, red cars, red shirts, and red booty shorts are everywhere. The only thing blue are the hundreds. There’s so much ass-shaking it borders on confrontational. Still, the hook overtakes you. Everyone is part of the gang gang. It feels like a chant you’ve known forever, even if you remember exactly where you were the first time you heard it.
What makes it one of the songs of the year isn’t innovation. It’s clarity. Rap as presence. Rap as proof of life. In a year loaded with faux-philosophical statements and algorithm-chasing slop, “Gang Gang” cuts through by doing the opposite. It commits so hard to its own world you don’t question whether you belong there because you’re already in it.
By the time it ends, nothing has resolved. That’s the point. “Gang Gang” isn’t trying to go anywhere. It’s stuck in LA, and that’s exactly what made it impossible to escape this year. – Harley Geffner
When hip-hop first became popular, a great accidental tradition came from watching clueless broadcast anchors flounder about trying to explain breakdancing or gangsta rap to local news audiences. The trend died out shortly after rap became big business. And the internet eventually ensured that anything sub-cultural could be lamely misconstrued on a Reddit thread. But “Doot Doot (6 7)” took it back to the idiot essence—with dozens of TV news segments, and articles in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and NPR, attempting to tutor tormented parents about the origins of the meme. All failed.
Rap was a riddle. A slippery post-modern mutation that hijacked and advanced our expectations of sound. A counter-culture from the start, it required deciphering hieroglyphics without a Rosetta Stone. Whether street omerta or hustler slang, the codes varied wildly between generations, dialects, and regions. A mechanized technique, a mumbled cadence, an esoteric reference could either be overly familiar or completely alien—depending on who was listening.
As it slides into middle-age, hip-hop has stiffened from the stylistic arthritis that affects every genre when nearly everything that can be done has been done. And like all modern art forms, the abnormal rot of social media has flambeed attention spans and forced the truly idiosyncratic to became memetic caricatures of themselves in search of mass commerciality.
With the new era starting to feel like an unending nightmare, the moments of genuinely weird original songs that permeate the mass consciousness are increasingly rare. Skrilla topping our rap singles of the year list may not be surprising. But it is amazing that he sparked a jubilant cultural phenomenon that wound up on South Park, became Dictionary.Com’s word of the year, sparked In-N-Out bans of the number “67,” and induced Christmas morning levels of glee in pre-adolescents. The same numbers being nonsensically used to educate American children about rhythm actually calls back to a scorching funeral pyre full of smoke signals towards fallen rivals, incarcerated 21-year old hood rap stars facing triple homicide charges, regional diamond merchants, and Hurricane Chris.
Skrilla is like a fun-loving poltergeist from Caribbean folklore who can only be summoned by offering him a cigar or circling a sacred tree 12 times at midnight. His voice sounds like a creaky gate being opened to offer entrance into Hell (or Kensington). Around the 42-second mark of “(6 7),” I’m half-convinced that he forgets that he’s recording. Time stops. The gothic Valkyrie death stomp from 1Ellis fills the negative space. After a quick pharmacy run for Percocets and rolling papers, Skrilla returns to life and starts ransacking the pockets of the beat for spare change.
This might not even be the best Skrilla song of the year. “Rich Sinners” is one of the more compelling explorations of the fall of man since “Paradise Lost.” But no matter how many videos of the 6 7 kid haunted American Discover Feeds, the song itself is still a brilliant distillation of one of the most creative rap stylists of his generation – a worthy heir to the crushed pills-and-purple levitations of Lil Wayne and Young Thug.
It’s fitting that “6 7” found a third life among America’s cookie dough-brained youth. There’s a childish playfulness in Skrilla’s music, whether he’s imitating baby shark, making “car go vroom” noises, or letting his voice trail off like he was too ADD to finish the thought. And as Drew Millard pointed out in his excellent profile of Philly’s most preeminent practioner of Santeria, Skrilla looks and acts exactly like Captain Jack Sparrow. Part Disney hero, part Zombieland demon.
Before the song’s meaning became fully inscrutable, Skrilla said that “6 7” was the hood where his “young bulls and crash outs” came from. Our comments section was quickly flooded by dissenters tracing the lingo back to another Philly drill rapper, YSN Uth – who repped the area around 67th and Elmwood. But as the song became a meme and wandered into the algorithmic headwinds, it was stripped of all symbolism. A neighborhood clique became a TikTok fragment and then a Tourettic classroom chant, whose meaning became more unintelligible, deracinated, and purged of substance the further it traveled from the source.
The original masked equation of the avant-garde, Rammellzee, once claimed that “too much information in the room is not good policy.” Skrilla probably never heard “Beat Bop,” but he knew to keep it mysterious. When the LA Times asked him, he “emailed” that “the term “6-7” has turned “into something positive and fun that people everywhere are enjoying…Remember where that energy come from.” In a world where everything needs to be explained, he left room for interpretation. As Rammellzee also pointed out: “the integer is a nation by itself. The function leads you into the future, without it, you have no control. To wipe out a language and make a new one is hard work.” 6 7.
No fad lasts forever—certainly not this one, which won’t make it into the New Year. But in a time of grotesque cruelty, true joy is in short supply. On “6 7,” Skrilla flipped a namecheck of a random intersection into a Dadaist creed that perplexed adults, enraged teachers, and tricked the world into repping southwest Philly. And he did it without remotely compromising the darkness, arcane lingo, and occult weirdness of his music. He reminded us that not everything can or should be solved. — Jeff Weiss
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