Mister is an emcee from Detroit and one half of the group Passalacqua. A little over a year ago, we got his excellent album with producer Curt Cataract, Approaching Land. Just last fall, we got a collection of unreleased material, Relish. Now he’s back with a collaborative EP with Philly’s ialive, Sounds of Pets. Sounds of Pets is short, with three songs coming in under seven minutes, but this isn’t the throw away place holder it might look like on paper.

WHITENOISE is an instrumental side project from Sole, an alias he used starting in 2007, when he released Poly.Sci.187. He revived the name (a reference to the Don Delillo novel) in 2013 when he released nomoredystopias, this time bringing in his wife Yasamin to play keyboards on most of the album. He now revives the name once again, this time as a production duo with Yasamin, to release RUINS. If you’ve spent time with Sole’s recent solo output, you know that albums like Destituent and Let Them Eat Sand found Sole experimenting with sounds that referenced post-punk, early synth pop, and new wave, filtered through an underground hip hop lens.

An Illustrated Mess is a duo from Flagstaff consisting of emcee Prosodic and producer Patrick Tso. In December of 2019, as part of Fake Four’s Freecember series of releases, they released their debut album, Last Night, and All of Our Glorious Mishaps. Now they have come back and are ready to take the next step with their new project, One More for Safety. There was a lot to like about An Illustrated Mess’s first album, especially the ways in which it told the story of the struggles of their Native community, from alcoholism and depression to police aggression.

Funkmammoth is a producer from Lincoln, Nebraska, who has been releasing music for about the last five years. It’s been about a year since we last heard from him, when he released the un-themed collection, Odds & Ends. Now he’s come back with a more ambitious project, Retirement Resort. As we reach the dog days of summer and the pandemic becomes extremely real and vacations seem like such a foreign concept, it’s nice to get some music to help you escape and go to your happy place.

Ten years ago, Berlin-by-way-of-Jacksonville producer Batsauce got George Gershwin’s “Summertime” stuck in his head during a very cold winter. As a way to work through the harsh winter days, he sought about finding as many different versions of the song as he could, chopped them up, made some dope beats, and then started sending these different beats out to his rapper and vocalist friends. He eventually got enough back to mix with some instrumentals that he had developed, and then finally had a full-length album all built off of this one song.

mikedecline is a producer from Calgary who has been putting out music for about the last ten years or so. Just last year, he gave us an instrumental collection by the name of Lightning in a Bucket. Now, as we all stay home during this pandemic, he gives us a new collection that serves as a fundraiser for Safe Water Drinking Foundation, but also as an instrumental diary of his April, When It Rains, It Rains.

It feels so much longer, but it was only eight months ago, last December, when New York artist Rabbi Darkside released his EP, A Skeleton at a Typewriter. It was a project born out of a self-imposed challenge to produce and write solely within his home studio space, using a simple setup to get back to basics. The result was a really great EP with some really interesting hooks and really personal subject matter.

Just this past April, Chicago artist NNAMDÏ gave us his incredibly challenging and rewarding sophomore solo album, BRAT. It was a big step forward for him, and it remains one of the best albums of the year. Now he’s come back just a few months later with a much different project, Krazy Karl. The first thing that you might notice about Krazy Karl is that there are almost no vocals on the entire album.

Substantial is an emcee/producer originally from Maryland that has been based in Alexandria, Virginia for a while now. He’s also a veteran who has been at this thing for about two decades now. As you might imagine, over those twenty years, he’s been involved in a lot of different projects over the years. So while we’re still under quarantine, Substantial has decided that now is a good time to back through his catalogue and highlight a few of those projects with a compilation called What I Been Saying (Vol.

Over the years, Berkeley-by-way-of-Nashville artist Amerigo Gazaway has become best known for his mash-up albums, creating duets between artists like De La Soul and Fela Kuti, Yasiin Bey and Marvin Gaye, and Nina Simone and Lauryn Hill. Over the last two years, however, he’s been focusing more on original compositions, whether it be video game soundtracks, collaborative albums, or solo endeavors, such as last summer’s Endless Summer. Now a year after that release and in a much weirder place to appreciate the summer, we get the follow up release, Endless Summer Nights.