Norwegian producer Ol’ Burger Beats has been releasing music since 2014. Just this past February, he released an album with South African/Norwegian emcee Vuyo called Dialogue. Now that he’s back with the instrumental version of the album, it’s only right that he calls this release Monologue. For a while, it was almost standard procedure to release an instrumental version of a hip hop album shortly after the vocal album was released.

Georgia Anne Muldrow has been a mainstay in the indie hip hop world since the mid-2000s, releasing albums on labels such as Stones Throw, Ubiquity, Mello Music Group, and Brainfeeder, along with her own Someotha Ship Connect. Last year, she returned to her alias, Jyoti, to drop the beautiful Mama, You Can Bet! Now she’s returning to another recurring part of her catalogue as she drops her latest instrumental project, VWETO III.

Marc Rapson is a pianist/producer from Hertfordshire, England who has been releasing music for about the last fifteen years or so. While he doesn’t have an extensive solo discography, he has produced and played with artists such as Nuala, Replife, Deborah Jordan, and Georgie Sweet, just to name a few. Back in 2010, however, he released a full-length solo album called Dark Vs. Light. Now, as Futuristica Music celebrates their fifteenth anniversary, they’ve gone back and re-released the album, now expanded with additional tracks from the original recording sessions, which they are calling Dark Vs.

Oldchildren is a new group with some familiar faces in the London scene, with producer King Kashmere teaming up with emcees Booda French and HPBLK. They now present their debut album to the world, Push Start. Listening to Push Start, it doesn’t take long to realize what brought these three together. King Kashmere is laying down these gorgeous downtempo boom bap beats that are just left of center, and Booda French and HPBLK are taking turns going to town on the mic, coming at you from every angle as they rhyme in the abstract about philosophy and politics, to some good old fashioned shit talking.

French label Cascade Records has been bringing us some of the best instrumental hip hop and electronic music for years. Most of the releases are from artists that are from Europe, but Cascade does work with artists from all around the globe. For their latest release, they’ve traveled to Morocco to work with producer Hussein Ibn Faraji, who is working under a new name, Faraji Heritage Experiment. He makes his label debut with an EP called Mwili.

vHiktor freeze is a new alias from a familiar face, that of North Carolina artist Mikal kHill. He created this alias as an instrumental project to experiment with some new styles, and the first project, an EP called settle in, is now here. When kHill first announced this alias, my first reaction was, “But why? You’ve been producing and messing with different genres this whole time – why does this project need a different name?

El Gran E is a pretty young record label out of the DFW area, but they are already dipping their toes into some interesting projects. Just a month after releasing Perseph One’s Zenith, they are now putting out a collaborative project between a French group from Toulouse called 10 and some American artists, HOODIE ON | DE CEUX. For this project, we get a new twist on a traditional split EP, all done across the globe while under quarantine.

Nickelman is a producer from Osaka who made his debut on the Canadian label URBNET back in 2019, when he released his debut LP, Elements. He followed that up with another LP, Butterwax, in 2020. Now he keeps up his steady pace with his latest full-length album, Mangoes. If you spent the time with Nickelman’s previous work, you know that he is all about the record-digging, sample-flipping culture, and that absolutely continues here on Mangoes.

Evil Needle is a French/German producer who has been releasing music for the last decade or so. His last full-length album, Abyssal, came out in 2017, but Needle has still been consistently releasing beat tapes, EPs, and collaborations in the time since then. Just over a year ago, he released an EP in collaboration with chromonicci called Travelers. Now he’s back with another EP, Sound Escapes. On paper, there’s not a lot to Sound Escapes – it’s a short collection of beats that you can chill out to.

In April of 2020, Psalm One and Angel Davanport declared that their previous group with other collaborators, Rapperchicks, was no more, and that from this moment forward they would just be working as a duo to be known as Big $ilky. They released their first EP with this announcement, then released a second EP in July of 2020. Now they are back to finish out the trilogy with Vol. 3.