Equipto and Brycon are veterans of the Bay Area hip hop scene, and the two have collaborated over the years. Most notably, this happened in 2018, when they released The Watershed, which they then followed up in 2021 with Don’t Forget You’re Welcome. Now they have come right back with a slightly different sort of project, Can’t Stay Perched All the Time. As you begin to listen to Can’t Stay Perched All the Time, hip hop fans of a certain age might begin to feel a sense of nostalgia.

The Cloaks is the Los Angeles duo of AWOL ONE and Gel Roc. The Project Blowed veterans first teamed up for their self-titled album in 2014, but then returned in 2019 with Cloak Encounters of the Third Eye. Now they are back with their third album, A Cloakwork Orange. If there was a third member of The Cloaks, it would have to be Bristol producer Awkward, who also returns for his third go-round, making all of the beats featured on the album.

Jae Krxnalege is a producer/emcee from New Mexico. He originally connected with Cecil Tso from An Illustrated Mess while Cecil was traveling from Arizona. Cecil knew Jae through some mutual connections and was already a fan of his music before they met, and they hit it off right away. In 2019, Jae came to Flagstaff for a producers showcase, and since that moment it was just a matter of time before he made his debut on Fang Over Fist.

AJ Suede is an emcee from Seattle who has been releasing music at a steady pace over the last five years. Over that time, he’s teamed up with artists like The Historian, Camoflauge Monk, Wazasnics, and Bloodblixing. Most recently, this past September, he released a solo project called Re:Vada Kedavra. Now he’s ready to take the next step as he not only makes his debut on Fake Four, he does it by teaming up with former Blue Sky Black Death producer Televangel to release the album Metatron’s Cube.

We lost a lot of talented hip hop artists in 2021. One such individual gone far too soon was Ross Norton, aka kidDEAD, who left this plane in August of last year. Fortunately, before his untimely passing, he had been working on a project with his friend and artist Onewerd, which now becomes the final Freecember release of 2021, Cave Paintings. There are several things that will hit you over the course of listening to Cave Paintings.

Sleep Sinatra is an emcee/producer from Lincoln, Nebraska, who has been releasing music at a prolific pace since 2014. Just in 2021, he released Star City Vol. 1 & 2, Lull, Divinenation, and Sleep Gloriously. He finishes out the year with In God’s Image. In the course of Sleep Sinatra’s career, he’s self-produced some stuff, and worked with specific producers on other projects. In the case of In God’s Image, he’s taking the piecemeal approach, enlisting the help of Jlvsn, Big Flowers, Stu Bangas, BrainOrchestra, Loman, Passport Rav, HaNN_11, August Fanon, Messiah Musik, Nicholas Craven, and his own producer alter ego, SINAI.

Snotty Nose Rez Kids is the Vancouver duo of Young D and Yung Trybez. The First Nations group released their first album in 2017, and they been moving a steady clip since then. They released their third album, TRAPLINE, in 2019, and then followed that up with an EP, Born Deadly, in 2020. Now they are back with their fourth full-length album, Life After. You can listen to a million “trap” albums these days, and a lot of them will sound roughly the same.

Here we are at the end of another weird year. There were peaks and valleys and moments of sunshine and rainstorms, but throughout it all we had some brilliant hip hop to carry us to the other side. 2021 is going to be a tough year to decipher in a lot of different ways, but the world of independent hip hop did not stop turning out brilliant albums of all different styles from artists of all different walks of life.

Moka Only is the Vancouver hip hop staple who has been putting out music at a prolific pace since the mid-‘90s. In 2004, he started the tradition known as Martian XMAS, when Moka would release an album annually each December. Now, after the rare year in which he was relatively quiet, Moka Only is back with Martian XMAS 2021. A couple of years ago, Moka ditched the “XMAS” portion of his annual December release, since they weren’t really Christmas themed at all, but this year he decided to put the “XMAS” back in.

R.A.P. Ferreira, fka milo, has moved around a lot in his career, but these days he’s calling Nashville home. Way back at the beginning of the year, he gave us his most recent album, bob’s son. Now, just before the end of the year, he’s back with yet another album, the Light Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures. For a large portion of his career, most of the production for Ferreira’s projects was handled either by Kenny Segal or Ferreira himself.