Donald Morrison isn’t falling for Jelly Roll’s feigned ignorance during his 2026 Grammy’s acceptance speech.
Picture your grandmother, your mother, maybe your favorite aunt. Now imagine they’re home alone one night, minding their own business, when the phone rings. The voice on the other end says they’ve been trying to reach your loved one for some time; there’s a massive inheritance from a distant relative they’ve never even heard of. Or maybe they’ve “won” the lottery. They don’t remember entering, but who are they to argue? The caller just needs a few key banking details so the money can be “released.” Your mother, grandmother, or favorite aunt falls for it, hook, line, and sinker. Next thing you know, their accounts are drained, and they’ve become victims, your own grandmother, mother, or favorite aunt.
Now imagine the voice on the other end belongs to the hilarious, vocally dexterous SpacemanUFO who, despite his name, could only come from planet Earth, specifically Jamaica, a country that has long produced some of the rawest, most colorful artists in Caribbean dancehall. The song opens with Spaceman calling an unsuspecting woman named Jennifer, disguising his voice to sound like what I can only describe as the voice Dave Chappelle uses when he’s mimicking a white person.
What follows is perhaps the first true instance of Jamaican scam rap, with Spaceman breaking down the who, what, and why of cold-call scamming. The track does everything for me. It’s a loosely conceptual song that’s fun, funny, and deadly serious all at once, with Spaceman’s performance on “Nah Stop” becoming my most rewatched Instagram reel ever. “Nah Stop” captures humanity’s ability to squeeze value out of the very system whose exploitative nature creates the conditions where cold-calling and scamming the elderly in one of the world’s wealthiest nations can seem like a viable way to survive.
A new wave of rap crews is here. Denzel Curry’s The Scythe and rising Atlanta collective OWay are getting plenty of shine, but it’s 1 Umbrella — the five-man Bay Area superteam connecting San Francisco and Oakland — that has me the most excited. The lineup is loaded: ALLBLACK, Lil Bean, 22nd Jim, ZayBang, and Lil Yee all under one banner.
“The Blueprint,” the first single from their self-titled debut that dropped February 6, sounds nothing like what I expected. The booming production leans more toward ATL trap, with flashes of the glossy, flex-heavy energy you hear in a lot of Detroit rap. The slick beats and the crew’s combined local weight turn the project into a grown, victory-lap statement that still feels cohesive and locked-in as a group effort.
My favorite moment is DaBoii’s fiery closing verse, where his double-time flow is the final exclamation point on an already stacked posse cut. He rattles off his elite taste in guns and watches with lines like, “Two twin Glocks on me, got Zack and got Cody, I don’t fuck with no Cartiers, I don’t fuck with APs, I fuck with Pateks, might cop me a Rollie,” a perfect snapshot of the song’s mix of lighthearted menace and gleeful flexing.
MonaVeli is gearing up to drop her new EP, SIREN EXP26, on February 25, and its lead single, “HERO,” lands like a sharp statement of intent. In just over two minutes, the Massachusetts artist flexes multiple flows over production that keeps morphing, growing more hypnotic as the track unfolds. It keeps the scrappy, DIY feel of an artist still building from the ground up, without leaning on the lazy, in-vogue crutch of autotune and “vibes” over actual substance. You can hear it in the hook, sounding like a quick snapshot into MonaVeli’s fighting her innermost demons, “I don’t need to feed my ego, face ain’t enough, I could never be your hero, save face for what,” which sticks in your head long after the song cuts out.
LaRussell and crunk architect, Vegas–residency–having Lil Jon flip a Bay staple by interpolating the hook from Mac Dre and crew’s 1998 classic, “I Need An Eighth,” swapping “I need an eighth of sticky gooey” for “I rep the Bay, and I rep it hard!” Even though I’ll still take the original Mac Dre record, it’s an incredibly hard ode to the Bay as a whole, packed with smart callbacks while staying true to LaRussell’s mission of pushing the sound forward instead of settling for the national stagnation of the last decade. And with his recent signing to Roc Nation, it feels like that shift might be just about to happen.
It’s very hard for me not to write about Babyfxce E every chance I get. I feel like he’s the only younger Michigan artist aside from Babytron to truly elevate the punch-in rap popularized by Rio Da Yung OG and the Flint scene during the early days of COVID. The DIY, off-the-cuff, freestyle quality of this music only takes you so far. You have to be witty enough to write punchlines that stick out in an extremely saturated market for this type of rap in 2026. Babyfxce E succeeds by having a razor-sharp pen, a natural gift for timing, and the ability to create more than one type of song. It’s not all chorus-less, offensive onslughts of bars from him, as proven by last year’s runaway hit, “PTP (remix)” featuring Monaleo. “Trackhawk” is no exception, featuring some of his most auburn boasts yet, like “gang was finna’ rob him, I’m like ‘wait until his taxes comes,’,” or “got a pop it a lil’ more because I come from the trenches, yeah, the ARP got like 60, remind me the cost of my pendant.”
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