Chokeules is an emcee from Toronto who is part of the humungous Backburner Crew, as well as part of several sub-groups such as Swamp Thing and Toolshed. While he’s certainly kept himself busy (Swamp Thing traditionally release an album every year on Halloween), it’s actually been six years since his last solo album, Stay Up. Now he’s finally back with a new solo album, Nepotism. For this album, Chokeules enlisted the help of his cousin LRYBRDBTZ on production and DJiRATE on the cuts.

Emcee Curly Castro and producer Small Professor have both been having a busy 2020. Castro released an album with his group Shrapknel with PremRock and had a guest appearance on the latest Armand Hammer release. Small Pro has been busy releasing his instrumental “Jawn” collections at a rate of nearly once a month. Now they’ve come together to drop a full length album together, BLUu Edwards. Castro and Pro have been friends for years, and they’ve collaborated on tracks for different projects in those times, but this marks the first time they’ve made a full-length album together as a duo.

You ask any Texan what their favorite grocery store is, you won’t just get a simple one-word answer. You’ll get someone gushing about how great H-E-B is. There’s a reason for that, too, from the locally sourced produce that passes along the savings to you, to an excellent selection of house-made products, such as freshly made tortillas. And then there’s the fact that they are more disaster-ready than all of our government agencies.

Given the recent events in the U.S., Costa Mesa label Ubiquity and their soul reissue imprint Luv N’Haight went through their catalogues to put together some of the best political music from Black artists they have released over the years, with proceeds split between the artists and Color of Change. The result is the compilation simply titled Solidarity. Just one glance at the track listing, and you know your in for some great soul, jazz, and funk, with contributions from Durando, Mike James Kirkland, The Pharaohs, and Harry Whitaker, just to name a few.

Chances are that you might be familiar with Atlanta artist Dillon through his work with producer Batsauce or the late Paten Locke, but he’s been carving out a nice niche in recent years as a solo artist as well, both as emcee and producer. Just one year ago, we got the wildly ambitious concept album, Lobsterdamus. Just this past March, we got an instrumental collection from him, The Clean Plate Club Vol.

J.Rocc is one of the founding members of The Beat Junkies, has put out numerous projects on Stones Throw, and is just an all around West Coast legend when it comes to deejaying/producing. Most recently, he released a gospel-themed collection of instrumental hip hop called Beatitudes. Now he’s back with another instrumental collection, “Original Music.” It’s funny, because by putting the title in quotes, J.Rocc seems to be making a tongue-in-cheek commentary about people’s outdated ideas of sample-based production not being “real music,” whatever that means.

Before being based in Minneapolis, emcee Longshot called Chicago home. This is where he made some important musical connections early in his career, such as his longtime friend and collaborator, Psalm One. Another important friendship was with that of Ang13, who he recently connected with to create a new project, Army of 2. The great thing about an album like Army of 2 is that when you have two veteran emcees with established chemistry like these two, you don’t need to do much to make it a really enjoyable listening experience.

It feels a little odd to call this album Débuts, but the French duo of Nikitch and Kuna Maze have been so prolific as a duo and as solo artists, it just feels like they’ve been together for a much longer time period. However, they only made their debut as a duo in 2018 with the EP, Cake, on Cascade Records. There have been a few solo releases since then, and one more EP as a duo when they hopped over to Tru Thoughts in 2019, Mush.

Five Steez is an emcee from Kingston who has been releasing music since the early 2010s. Four years ago, he paired up with producer Mordecai to release an EP called HeatRockz. It was a short project with some hard beats with no particular theme, just some good old-fashioned hip hop. They gave us a full-length album in 2019, Love N Art, but now it’s time to get back to the basics with HeatRockz 2.

It’s technically only been three months since Psalm One and Angel Davanport officially said goodbye to the name Rapperchicks and reinvented themselves as the duo Big $ilky, releasing their first EP, Big $ilky Vol. 1. A lot has happened in between now and then, from the protests stemming from the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis PD, to a string of women coming forward to accuse a number of men in the Twin Cities hip hop scene of sexual assault, physical battery, emotional abuse, and more.