Latest Posts

Payroll Giovanni Still Serves Game

Blue Chips is a monthly rap column that highlights exceptional rising rappers. To read previous columns, click here. There’s a universe where Payroll Giovanni, YG, and Jeezy release a group album scored by the Grammy-winning […]

ICECOLDBISHOP: Generational Curse

Halfway through Generational Curse, the debut album by the South Central L.A.-born rapper ICECOLDBISHOP, somebody shoots up a house party. Like so many other things in Bishop’s writing—the deaths of parents and friends, the drugs that […]

Yaya Bey: Exodus the North Star EP

On her remarkable 2022 album Remember Your North Star, Yaya Bey unearthed grief and heartache amid a slow-burning patchwork of hip-hop, neo-soul, and Afrobeats. The Brooklyn-based singer’s new EP, Exodus the North Star, is a sparkling addendum and […]

Punter: Punter

Nathan Burns’ furious howl is the sound of someone who’s been screaming relentlessly for days in an otherwise empty room. His home city of Melbourne, Australia holds the record for world’s longest COVID-19 lockdown, totaling almost […]

Purling Hiss: Drag on Gerard

Back in 2009, Mike Polizze was sitting at home in Philadelphia staring down a pile of solo recordings when he decided to slap the name Purling Hiss on them like a provincial flag. It wasn’t […]

6lack: Since I Have a Lover

In 2023, every rapper sings and every singer raps, but 6LACK is one of the few who truly stands in the middle. Growing up in Atlanta’s infamous Zone 6, the artist born Ricardo Valentine was […]

A Certain Ratio: 1982

A Certain Ratio took to slap bass like Petrarch did to the sonnet. At the dawn of the 1980s, while many white UK artists emulated the endorphin rush of disco, the Manchester combo sounded more […]