Listen: Navy Blue, “Pillars”
Niontay: “Thank Allah”
The Boston Celtics, Niontay’s favorite basketball team, don’t need your approval. By the luck of the Irish and the grit of each possession, they’ll outwork and out-magic your team to victory. This is how listening to the Brooklyn-via-Kissimmee rapper’s muted opus “Thank Allah” feels: No drums, no frills, just bars and a prayer, his warm Florida flows snaking around swampy keyboard and squiggly bass. As Niontay’s dizzying verse unfurls across various plays, Irish goodbyes and trips across the map, he remains poised and cold-blooded, like a buzzer beater in slow-motion: “Get a bag and go home, nigga, it’s the playoffs / Took a nigga shit, took his work, ain’t no days off.” When the drums finally kick in at the end, it’s like confetti raining down on TD Garden. –Mano Sundaresan
Listen: Niontay, “Thank Allah”
Noname: “Namesake”
Noname isn’t afraid to delve into the messiness of making art with a global consciousness while toiling within a capitalist economy. On “Namesake,” she laments the pervasiveness of complacency, admits we’re all complicit, and rails against war crimes from inside a cloud of blunt smoke. Over a percolating funk beat, Noname calmly eviscerates the very concept of sacred cows, adopting a faux-cheerleader lilt as she connects the dots between Super Bowl headliners Beyoncé, Kendrick, and Rihanna, and the NFL’s longtime association with the military industrial complex. In the next breath, she calls out the woman in the mirror for playing Coachella after she said she wouldn’t. “Namesake” is a ruthless song about accountability from which no one is safe—not even Noname. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz
Listen: Noname, “Namesake”
Ot7Quanny / Leaf Ward: “Power”
This year it felt like half of Philly’s rap scene was riding the feel-good bounce of club music (see: 2Humpy and the Philly Goats), while the other half was summoning evil spirits. Punchline sorcerers Ot7Quanny and Leaf Ward fit squarely into the latter camp. Their best outing as a duo is “Power,” where they lay the smackdown over an armageddon-ready beat. Leaf Ward, clearly raised on a steady diet of Meek and Major Figgas, has that old school Philly freestyle rapper swag: He can make you hit a stank face off his tumbling flow alone. Quanny’s patient delivery makes him sound like a boogeyman with an encyclopedic knowledge of animated Disney sitcoms from the early 2000s: “Pockets all blue look like the sisters off The Proud Family.” The half-second pause after every punch-in is loaded, like the creak of the floor in a horror movie. –Alphonse Pierre
Listen: Ot7Quanny / Leaf Ward, “Power”
RealYungPhil / Gud: “Winners Circle”
In the mid 2010s, the rapper RealYungPhil and the producer Gud surfaced far apart from each other on the hip-hop map: Phil was laying down rhymes over clap-heavy Connecticut dance rap; Gud was cooking up faded synths as a member the underground Swedish group Sad Boys. But that distance makes their unlikely collaborative album, Victory Music, that much more exciting. On the record’s best track, “Winner’s Circle,” Gud’s beat moves like snow melting in the arctic. To match the mood, Phil raps like he’s at three-quarter speed, his East Coast monotone sounding like the voice of God. –Alphonse Pierre
Listen: RealYungPhil / Gud, “Winners Circle”
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Photo by Thomas Dang
RXK Nephew: “Yeezy Boots”
In all of the debate over Kanye West’s place in our current cultural climate, no one has gotten to the point as quickly as RXK Nephew: “Jay-Z don’t even like you,” “the whole G.O.O.D. Music made bad music,” and most damningly, “you signed Big Sean.” The latest in the Rochester rapper’s ongoing series of appointment-listening diss tracks, “Yeezy Boots” works well enough as a litany of opinions about Kanye’s rapping (mediocre), street credibility (non-existent), haircut (dumbass) and shoes (same). But it’s also a meditation on an important concern for RXK Nephew, whose utter disregard for social propriety puts his career at risk nearly every time he drops a track: just how much out-of-pocket shit can someone say before they suffer actual consequences? “They doing Kanye like R. Kelly/I don’t care, I don’t wanna hear his music,” Neph mutters, knowing damn well that most of Ye’s sins would be absolved if he was still making hits. –Ian Cohen
