Shatter the Standards

Listen to new releases from Elena Pinderhughes, Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad, MC Eiht, Young Chris, Dpat, Terrell Grice, Luna Elle, H31R, Surprise Chef, MIRIAH, Khal!l, Telemakus, and more.

Seated together with a joint album between them, Cordae turns the racist judge and the Klan's torch into wordplay while Anderson .Paak raps about the porch where police took his father. Read over at Words Past da Margin.

Backed by a live orchestra and Noah Conrad playing nearly everything else, Ashe plays every woman a man has dreamed up and makes a scene big enough to get the real one seen.

Raised in a church choir, Khal!l turns its oldest reassurances on a woman he hasn’t told everything to, then carries them back to God, where they finally hold.

Raised around her father’s sound system and her grandfather’s mento band, McDoom builds hushed folk songs on the dub engineer's gift for clearing space, and her debut is gorgeous and sure of itself.

An East London rapper takes his dry, low-key voice into garage and two-step clubs and finds the dancefloor is the best room in the city for being alone with his own head.

Amy Winehouse borrowed a girl-group sound from the early 1960s and filled it with the pubs, brand names, and bad nights of 2006 London, and it kept her songs from ever turning into a costume.

A Crumlin singer brings her family and her Dublin postcode onto the house floor, turning a hometown’s pride into dance music built for the people who claimed her first.

Terrell Grice keeps the come-ons and the waiting for his own voice and lends the heartbreak and the prayers to his guests, building a frank, generous R&B record.

Adding seven new songs, Tierra Whack stacks puns on North Philadelphia street names and designer labels until the wordplay works as a demand for the respect she is owed and a place to keep her grief.

For seventy years Black spending has been filmed, measured, and pitched to advertisers, and all that counting has left the labels, banks, and brands. The money passes through in other hands. Read over at Blackpolitan.

Mahalia walks one breakup through all five stages of grief. Plus, a love potion, an ocean of tequila, and two R&B legends on a greeting card. Read over at Soulpolitan.

Decades of answering to no label have left GDP free and mostly alone. Cross Off Matthew puts his own vanishing act under the same hard light he aims at the country.

Between a wedding oath and a late-night text, Vedo makes an excellent R&B album about what a man owes the woman he keeps.

On their latest album, Ishmael Butler writes himself into legend as a one-of-a-kind and puts that legend on the court against the people who would beat it, where his writing turns funny and exact.

Building her beats under songs about rent and a friend in withdrawal, Laila! sings youth's oldest farewell line as someone who fought to grow up, and her comedy and her grief get the same close care.

Alone after City Girls, Yung Miami hands the rest to her elders, a line of paying men, and her own body, and the letters she writes to that body and to JT, into a writer with something to lose.

On a duo album thick with punchlines, Anderson .Paak and Cordae run the money brag straight into divorce, custody, and a karma bill. And about being gone and the father’s apology for it as one story.

As new albums and singles get constantly flooded into our radar, look no further than skimming through the release week of October 23rd. We know it can be a task, so let’s help you cut through.

Che Noir opens with a sermon about organized people and then follows her fasting, saving, and self-made routine back to the Black women in Buffalo who drilled it into her.

Michael Kiwanuka opens on Chick Corea telling musicians to trust their own ears, then calls in choirs, string sections, and a band of co-writers to get that private ear out into the room.

Over Pharrell’s horns, strings, and church organ, John Legend prays over the women in the club, then turns the prayer on himself through a divorce and a fire, and the turn makes Muse a grown record.

Luna Elle writes the invitation herself on her debut, sets the hour and the terms of her wanting, and sings what it costs when the guest gets comfortable with the same warmth she gives the asking.

With her brother at the piano and a band that answers every phrase, Elena Pinderhughes makes the flute and her wordless voice say everything a lyric would.

The funniest album in the Native Tongues catalog is also the most underrated.

A nineteen-year-old Oakland rapper turned his cousin’s P-Funk arsenal away from the West Coast’s war music and toward buses, couches, and chores, and the Hieroglyphics underground grew out of it.

Over loops Knxwledge cut from overlooked gospel records, Anderson .Paak plays a church-raised player whose bargaining with God carries more weight than any of his boasts.

With Flying Lotus, Liv.e, and Karriem Riggins playing the parts he hums, Telemakus keeps the chords for himself and builds his best music out of what he gives away.

Listen to new releases from Nao, Donnie McClurkin, Casey Veggies, AKTHESAVIOR, Mansur Brown, Gotts Street Park, JHart, Kaicrewsade, Ella Thompson, JGRREY, Skip Waiters, Ryan Trey, FIG, and more.

Doechii detonates a silicone double of herself on a desert flat, and the swagger of the second verse belongs to the woman who pulled the trigger.

Fred Durst’s sample about gossip bookends Megan Thee Stallion’s verse, and inside it, Tina Snow builds herself out of kingpins, a pimp, and a row of blondes, selling the body and running the sale. Read over at Words Past da Margin.

The Great Migration carried the blues north. Where publishing contracts wiped out the pay with the names carried in the signature, hip-hop artists and storytellers now decide who keeps the record.

JGRREY splits herself in two to survive a motherless childhood and an addiction, then lets the split give way and writes the collapse while it happens.

Jaz Donell’s third Free the Slaves tape puts sin, poverty, and the system in the same chain, and his confessions of doubt and guilt turn Christian rap into a testimony the block can use.

Skip Waiters runs his own life as a cable drama with an announcer, recaps, and a renewed season, keeping a showrunner’s power to cut away from every woman who leaves him.

Playing everything together in one Leeds room, Gotts Street Park keep a warm, slow soul pocket for guest singers who walk in with grief, depression, and hope that belong to right now.

Kaicrewsade surrounds a young man’s come-up with trumpet, saxophone, singers, and 808s, and his faith turns real every time he hands the song to someone else.

blackchai talks dread through the workday and aims it at the people who built the trap, and his writing turns concrete every time the pain gets an address.

Plus Snoh Aalegra’s sixteen past lives, a Durham singer who took her name from Showgirls, and one candlelit slow jam we couldn't get behind. Read over at Soulpolitan.

With a live band playing the old soul shapes, Ella Thompson sings promises built out of heartbreak, and the vintage form holds every one of them.

Near thirty, with everyone counting down her clock and her father long gone, Grace Carter takes on the job of raising herself and does it in songs built for the dance floor she used to hide on.

Chrissi keeps a running count on a man whose calls she can’t stop answering, and she writes every exit over live horns and cello with a comic’s timing and a clear eye for why he keeps getting back in.

Masta Ace was a sharper writer at thirty-five than he’d been at twenty-two. His supposed farewell album proved it, and then the label died.

The former Angie B of the Sequence gave twenty years to other people’s records. Her second solo album was a grown woman running her own room.

On her first country record, the Memphis singer takes the honky-tonk sinner’s part that country handed its men and sings Saturday night and Sunday morning as one life.

With Patois and Zulu folded in beside his Yoruba and Pidgin, Fireboy DML carries one warrior from the church to the club and turns that warrior’s exhaustion into frank, affecting Afrobeats.

Back in the 2000s R&B he once wrote for other men, Lucky Daye lets a grown man’s bravado tell on itself, and his songs about waiting on her answer are funny, wounded and gorgeous.

As new albums and singles get constantly flooded into our radar, look no further than skimming through the release week of October 16th. We know it can be a task, so let’s help you cut through.

Working with Dave Okumu and a live jazz-soul ensemble, Nao writes songs about slowing down and healing and hands the proof to the players, so rest comes out as something a whole room keeps time for.