Sleep Sinatra is an artist from Lincoln, Nebraska who has been releasing music for about the last eight years. In that time, he’s been fairly prolific and he’s collaborated with a lot of different artists, including August Fanon, Killer Kane, Stik Figa, and Bloodmoney Perez, just to name a few. His most recent release came this past December, when he gave us the album, In God’s Image. Now he’s back with a collaborative album with producer KNGKVMI, Brainstormz.

C.Shreve the Professor is an emcee from Asheville, North Carolina who has been working for over a decade, both as a solo artist and as part of the group Free the Optimus. His last album came in 2020, when he collaborated with Bristol producer ILE Flottante to make the album ILE.Pro. Back in March, C.Shreve and producer D.R.U.G.S. Beats dropped a teaser EP, but now they are back with the full-length album, Must Be The Drugs.

At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad launched their label, Jazz Is Dead. They had been planning this for quite some time, and they were sitting on some excellent material based on collaborating with older jazz artists, so it felt like they needed to plow ahead, even if they couldn’t perform anything live and promote it like they’d like to. The good news is that audiences were receptive anyway, and we’ve gotten some truly excellent albums from them over the past two years, including Roy Ayers, Marcos Valle, Azymuth, Doug Cairn, Gary Bartz, Joao Donato, and Brian Jackson.

sign one is an emcee/producer now residing in Columbus, Ohio, but he got his start in the early ‘00s down in Orlando, when he was part of Jerk Circuit. After a resurgence in the mid-2010s, which saw the release of his album, Bottom Dollar, sign one had been relatively quiet the past couple of years before appearing on Endemik Remote Ensemble’s They Fired With Their Lives, which came out this past March.

Julien Mier is a producer from The Netherlands who has been releasing music for about the last fifteen years. He made his name in the 2010s with a series of wildly creative instrumental albums and EPs that had interesting themes and concepts. In 2018, he started to transition to using the alias “santpoort.” He has now been working under that name for a few years, with two albums already released on Friends of Friends in 2020 and 2021.

Quelle Chris is an artist from Detroit, although at different points in his career he has been based in Chicago, Oakland, Brooklyn, and Los Angeles. He made his debut on Mello Music Group in 2013, with the release of Ghost at the Finish Line, and he’s been off to the races since then, not only dropping critically acclaimed albums like Guns and Everything is Fine, but also producing for everyone from Open Mike Eagle to Pharoahe Monch and dropping verses with everyone from Black Milk to Armand Hammer.

Sefi Zisling is a trumpeter from Tel Aviv who has been making music for the past two decades. Most of his early years was spent playing in groups like Funk’n’Stein and Liquid Saloon and as a session musician. He made the step to release his first solo album, Beyond the Things I Know, in 2017, which then lead to him signing with Tru Thoughts, with whom he released his second album, Expanse, in 2019.

Deborah Jordan is a vocalist from London who has been making music for years, first making her mark in the ‘00s as a featured vocalist for acts like Bugz in the Attic and Robert Mitchell’s Pancea. She released her first solo album, The Light, in 2009, and she’s been going strong since then. Her most recent album, See in the Dark, came out in 2020. Now she has teamed up with producer K15 for a new concept album, Human.

Chris Keys is a producer from Oakland who has been releasing music for about the past ten years. His biggest break came in 2020, when he worked on a full-length album with Quelle Chris, Innocent Country 2. Most recently, Keys released a project called Breathing Exercises this past February. Now he’s right back with another instrumental project, Scenes. For Scenes, Keys is working with no samples, just live instrumentation played himself, including bass, guitar, keys, vocals, drums, and VSTs.

Allysha Joy is a singer/keyboardist/producer from Melbourne, where she came up as part of the jazz/soul scene, performing with the group 30⁄70. She made her solo debut in 2018, when she dropped her first LP, Acadie: Raw. She then made her debut on First Word Records in 2020, when she dropped her EP, Light It Again. She continues to build upon that success with her latest album, Torn:Tonic. While Allysha Joy is writing and producing this album by herself, she has included a number of women and non-binary artists on the album to help build upon the spirit of collaboration between non-male artists in hip hop and R&B spaces.