Ego Ella May is an artist from London who has been part of the jazz and neo-soul scene for a few years. She dropped her debut album, So Far, in 2019, and followed that up with Honey For Wounds in 2020. Now she is back with the first in a series of EPs written during lockdown, Fieldnotes. It’s always interesting to hear how different artists are processing living through a global pandemic, since it doesn’t happen all that often.

Calvin Valentine is a Los Angeles-based, Eugene-raised artist. After an excellent run on Mello Music Group, he had a couple of self-released smaller projects released last year, including Save the Planet and High at Cobra Island, a project done with Lawz Spoken. Now he makes his debut on the new-ish Austin label Cream Dream Records with an instrumental album, Weed is Awesome. There are several different approaches to instrumental hip hop albums, but most people probably work with the assumption that an instrumental hip hop album is going to be downtempo, something pretty to listen to on headphones.

There are a few Halloween traditions in the world of independent hip hop, such as the annual release from Toronto’s Swamp Thing. Annual such tradition comes to us from The Bay Area, where producers Brycon and G-PEK have been putting together instrumental compilations for the past seven years, showcasing some of the spookiest tracks the region has to offer. Now they are bringing the era to a close with There’s No More Room in Hell 7.

Eric Harvey is an associate professor in the School of Communications at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. He as also written for numerous publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and The Village Voice. He has now written a new book about the history of rap and reality media, Who Got the Camera? While numerous people over the years have written about the time period of hip hop spanning the late ‘80s to the mid ‘90s, until this point no one has simultaneously done a deep dive to consider how the evolving media landscape shaped the narrative, namely the emergence of daytime talk shows, court TV, true crime TV, tabloid TV, and reality TV.

Gensu Dean is a producer formerly based in Dallas, now living in Austin. He made his debut on Mello Music Group back in 2012 with Lo-Fi Fingahz. Over the years, he’s teamed up with artists such Planet Asia, Denmark Vessey, and Wise Intelligent. Now he’s teamed up with another underground legend, Detroit’s Guilty Simpson, to drop the full-length album, EGO. A lot of the time when we get collaborative albums like this, we tend to think about how the producer will shape what the emcee does.

On June 2, 2020, a 22-year-old man named Sean Monterrosa was shot and killed by a police officer in Vallejo, California. As you might imagine, the information from the police has been slow to come out, and what has come out doesn’t point to anything that would justify deadly force. Meanwhile, a family is without a son and a brother, and a community is without a student, carpenter, and friend. The sad state of affairs is that unless you’re from the area, there’s a chance you haven’t heard this story, since the U.

Steel Tipped Dove is a Brooklyn producer who has been making music for over fifteen years, while also running a studio in Brooklyn. Over the years, he’s worked with everyone from PremRock to Armand Hammer to R.A.P. Ferreira to MC Paul Barnam, just to name a few. What he hasn’t done a lot of, though, is release proper solo albums. Now he has done just that with Call Me When You’re Outside.

Spoken Nerd is an emcee from Nashville who has been releasing music since the mid ‘00s. His last full-length album, I Need a Friend Like You, came out on Fake Four in 2018. Now he has teamed up with Cincinnati producer Juan Cosby to release a new album, GRAPES. The seed for this album apparently sprung from the excitement that Spoken Nerd felt from hearing the rumors of a possible Tales From the Crypt reboot, and the wheels got spinning in his head to do a themed mixtape, so he reached out to Cosby to see if he’d be down to make some spooky beats for the project.

DJ Nu-Mark is the legendary Los Angeles deejay and producer, best known for his work as part of Jurassic 5. Over the years, he’s worked with everyone from J-Live to Lonely Island. Most recently, he collaborated with Slimkid3 and Austin Antoine as TRDMRK, releasing their debut EP in 2019. Now Nu-Mark is back with a fun new project, Run for Cover. A quick glance at the title of the album and the track listing will let you know that this is a covers EP.

Kuna Maze is a producer from Lyon, France, now based in Brussels. He periodically teams up with producer Nikitch, but he’s also been steady working as a solo artist for about the last five years. His most recent solo release came in August of last year, when he dropped Backward EP. Now he’s back with a new EP, My Fish is Burning. Sometimes EPs can feel like filler material, an obvious attempt to get listeners’ attention before the more substantial release.