Ill Camille is an emcee from Los Angeles who has been going strong all decade long. Her last full-length album, Heirloom, came out two years ago. That album had a lot of features on it, including one fellow Angeleno Damani Nkosi on the song “Home.” Nkosi has been at this for quite a while, too, though a good chunk of his career has been in a frustrating limbo of doing features and mixtapes and whatnot without his own projects seeing fruition.

Artist: Apollo Brown Title: Sincerely, Detroit Label: Mello Music Group Year: 2019 Reviewed by: Chi Chi Apollo Brown is a producer from Detroit who has been making records for years, working along the way with everyone from Boog Brown to Guilty Simpson to Skyzoo, along with being part of the group Ugly Heroes. Just last year, he released albums with Locksmith and Joell Ortiz. Now, Apollo Brown comes out with a love letter to his city, Sincerely, Detroit.

Back in 2015, San Francisco producers G-Pek and Brycon put together a spooky instrumental mix for Halloween that they called There’s No More Room In Hell. As the years rolled on, they kept revisiting this idea, inviting different friends along the way to pitch in with their eerie beats for the project. This year we return for a new volume with mostly familiar faces, but a few new ones as well.

TRP.P (pronounced ‘trippy’) is the Toronto duo of emcee/vocalist Phoenix Pagliacci and producer/vocalist Truss. They officially formed as a group in the summer of 2017, before releasing their debut EP that fall. However, Pagliacci was also part of the supergroup The Sorority, alongside Haviah Mighty, Keysha Fresh, and Lex Leosis, who released their amazing debut album, Pledge, in spring of 2018, to much acclaim. What was originally supposed to be a side project became much more successful than imagined, and began to consume all of their time, so Pagliacci made the difficult decision to leave the group so that she could focus on her own projects.

At this point in my life, I don’t need a calendar to tell me when it’s Halloween, I just need to wait for the release of the next Swamp Thing album. That’s because the Toronto trio of Chokeules, Timbuktu, and Sivilion have been releasing an album every Halloween since 2012, when they released Creature Feature. Now, all these years later, the horror/sci-fi-themed group have announced Halloween 2019 with their eighth full-length album, Cherry Mongoose.

Marcel P. Black is an emcee from Baton Rouge who has been putting out music for over a decade now, including his 2017 EP, Seven. Earlier this year, he teamed up with Dallas producer M Slago to release an EP called 4THA CLTR. Now he’s come back with his most ambitious release to date, In Search of the Black Messiah. The particular inspiration for the project comes from the idea that J.

Back in 2015, milo dropped his excellent solo album, so the flies don’t come. On that album, among other things, there was a killer guest verse from an emcee by the name of Hemlock Ernst. At the time, this sent a lot of us scrambling to find out who this was. As it turned out, this was the alias of one Samuel T. Herring, the lead singer of Baltimore’s Future Islands.

Anna Wise is an artist now based in Brooklyn, but best known for her West Coast connections, namely for winning a Grammy for her collaboration with Kendrick Lamar on “These Walls.” She’s also quite the accomplished solo artist, though, garnering much acclaim for her two solo EPs, The Feminine: Act I & II, which showcased not just her vocal talents, but her abilities as a songwriter and producer as well. In the two years since the last volume, Wise has gone through some personal changes, including giving birth, but she’s now back with her first full-length solo album, As If It Were Forever.

The Vapor Caves are the Austin duo of vocalist Yadira Brown of Keeper, and producer BoomBaptist. After debuting about two years ago and playing numerous live shows, the time has finally come for their debut album, Feel Yourself. If you were only aware of BoomBaptist’s releases from earlier in the decade, you might be a little surprised by the sound of this album, but if you’ve had a chance to see him live or heard some of the production he did with Brown’s group, Keeper, you’d know that he had transitioned from a soul-sampling boom bap style to electro-boogie a while ago.

Dallas artist Krum has been going strong all decade long, first under the name Playdough before making the switch over to Krum when he released Bare Knuckle Gospel with Rob Viktum in 2016. While he has self-produced before, he also understands the value of working with another producer, such as Viktum or Sean Patrick. For his latest project, he’s teamed up with Portland, Oregon producer Theory Hazit to release the album Here’s Mud In Your Eye.