It’s no secret that Michigan producer The Lasso has been on a creative tear over the last couple of years. Just since 2019, he’s released two solo albums, along with collaborating on full-length albums with Psyspiritual, Chris Orrick, and ELUCID. This past February, he released the genre-defying solo album, 2121. Now he’s teamed up with two of his frequent collaborators, Jordan Hamilton and Saxsquatch, to make another unique album, Tri Magi.

Virginia producer Stimulator Jones has been busy in 2021. In January, he released his sophomore LP, La Mano, via the Oslo-based label Mutual Intentions. He then came back in May to self-release an uptempo dance project called Dance of the Universe. This was followed up in June with Dust Bunnies, a collection of previously unreleased beats. Now he’s back once again, this time with a brand new instrumental album, Low Budget Environments Striving For Perfection.

Deantoni Parks is a drummer/producer/songwriter who has been working as a solo artist for about the last ten years after working with the group KUDU. He also works as part of the songwriting duo We Are Dark Angels alongside keyboardist Nicci Kasper, who was also in KUDU with Parks. Most recently, in January of this year, Parks gave us a project called Glitchwood, which was a project built around microsamples of artists like Anita Baker and Luther Vandross built into new compositions with live drums and synthesizers interacting with the samples.

Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band are a group based in Hamburg, but their roots go back to Trinidad & Tobago, where group leader Björn Wagner lived and studied the steel drum before taking these skills back to Germany. Starting in 2007, Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band began garnering a following with a series of 7” releases. Eventually, they found a home at Big Crown Records, who helped them release their debut LP, 55, in 2016.

moshun is a young producer from Chicago who has been releasing music for the last three years. She first came on our radar last summer, when she released lullabies for your lonesome EP. Now she’s come back with a project to reflect on the emotional impact of the pandemic, Kinesis. While Kinesis might have a unique story as it relates to processing the emotions of living through a pandemic, musically this feels like more of a direct continuation to what moshun has been putting out with her last couple of projects.

JazzZ is a vocalist from Lagos, Nigeria. She released her debut, Practice, in 2017. After a couple more small projects, she made her debut on Tokyo Dawn Records in 2019 with the release of Yummy Vibes. She now returns to follow that project up with her latest album, Black Religion. For Black Religion, JazzZ finds herself working with Nigerian producers Black Intelligence and Nasser Sani, along with Tokyo producer Karl Forest.

Beatrock Music was formed back in 2009 by Fatgums in Southern California. While the label has worked artists of all different backgrounds and different locations, they’ve always been rooted in the Filipino American community of LA and The Bay. So when a 30-year-old man named Angelo Quinto was murdered by the police in Antioch, California on December 23, 2020 after responding to a mental health call, the artists and staff of Beatrock Music took notice and took action.

Shitao is a producer form Paris who is part of the ASP crew alongside Pi-Pol and akabrownsugar. As a solo artist, he’s been putting out music for about the last fifteen years. His last release came in November of 2020, when he released Aleph, a concept album in which Shitao composed a soundtrack to the Jorge Luis Borges short story. Now he’s come back with another concept album, Mono. If you’re going to make instrumental hip hop albums these days, it helps if you can come of with some sort of hook to inspire your creativity and to give your album shape as a way to stand apart from the pack.

In March of 2020, Toronto emcee Lex Leosis released her full-length album, Mythologies. Under normal circumstances, she would have ridden the wave of the album release into the summer and toured and played some festivals and really connected with her fans. Of course, we all know what happened last year as the pandemic hit and live music had to slam the brakes. With all this newfound time on her hands and feeling that this album was being lost in the mix a little bit, Leosis started to take the time to be thoughtful and build for the future.

Back in 2017, San Francisco producer Brycon teamed up with emcee Lightbulb to form the group Diamond Lung. They dropped their debut album, When Did Everybody Learn To Fly? After that, Brycon got swept up in about 10,000 other projects, and then it started to get to the point where you began to wonder if there was ever going to be a second Diamond Lung album. Well, we can all rest easy, because things finally lined up for a second album, and it is here in the form of Jeweler’s Loop.