Reasun is an artist from Pittsburgh that has been coming up for the last couple of years, releasing a handful of singles along the way. Now he’s ready to drop his debut mixtape, Resolve. The word mixtape gets thrown around a lot these days without much of a definition, but when Reasun says mixtape, he means it in much more of the traditional hip hop sense. By that I mean that he turned to a local DJ, DJ Thermos, to help him put together the tape, which runs as one continuous forty-four minute track.

Elias Wallace is an artist formerly based in Los Angeles but these day he calls Paris home. Over the years, he’s been part of groups like Otis Stacks and Dafuniks, but you also might know him as part of the Scribbling Idiots collective, where he worked alongside artists like Cas Metah and Theory Hazit, just to name a couple. Most recently, he has regrouped as a solo artist, and he now gives us his latest album, Walk With You.

Mount Ranier producer Sinitus Tempo had himself a busy 2020, dropping four different instrumental projects, along with a few singles. With that kind of pace, it should surprise nobody that he’s already back with a new project, Art Session 3. Art Session 3 isn’t going to catch anyone off guard if you’ve listened to other Sinitus Tempo projects, but when you do something very well, it doesn’t really matter if you’ve done it before, as long as you’re making good music that will connect with listeners.

Devin Burgess is an artist from Cincinnati that has been working at a prolific pace and releasing music for about the last seven years. This past year, we got a collection of unreleased demos, along with a couple of beat tapes, such as SayTheirNames and Baby Quiche. To start off 2021, Burgess takes us back three years to give us 2018. The music for 2018 was mostly written and recorded back in that year, as Burgess was processing a relationship running its course.

2Mex is a legend of the Los Angeles underground, with a recording career that spans over two decades, and includes working with a myriad of groups such as Of Mexican Descent, SonGodSuns, Mind Clouders, Shapeshifters, and $martyr, as well as a lengthy solo career. A few years back, 2Mex experienced a serious health scare that resulted in the amputation of one of his legs due to complications from diabetes, and it left many of us to wonder if he’d recover or make music again.

Myka 9 is one of the OGs of the Los Angeles Underground, coming up through the Good Life and Project Blowed, and being part of seminal groups like Freestyle Fellowship and Haiku D’Etat. He’s also had quite the extensive solo career. To that end, one of the most impressive things about his solo career is that not only has he never slowed down, he’s also kept looking for new partners to collaborate with, whether it be Factor Chandelier, or more recently with Jade River or Adriatic.

The Lioness is an emcee from the Twin Cities who has been releasing music for the past ten years. Her last album, Greater Vision, came out in 2018. She now returns to the spotlight and jumpstarts a new phase in her career with an EP, gem.INI. While this is a new chapter of The Lioness’s career, this EP isn’t directly about her career and recent professional and personal decisions she has had to make as an artist.

Eagle is a producer originally from Ukraine, but now living in Hong Kong. He made his name as a turntablist, winning competitions such as RedBull3style, FMDJ, and Yalta Summer Jam. For the last six years, he has been scouring second-hand shops in China and Dubai, looking for the rarest of grooves. He know teams up with Cold Busted to release the first volume of beats made from this time in his life, Records From The Basement Session 1.

Sivion is an artist from Dallas who has been working for about the last fifteen years, both as a solo artist and as part of the Deepspace5 collective. A little over ten years ago, he teamed up California producer DertBeats to release a project called Butterfly Sessions. Things got delayed slightly due to the pandemic, but this remastered and repackaged 10th anniversary edition is finally here. Like many projects released around 2010, when labels and artists were figuring out what the best new model for releasing music was, a lot of indie releases like Butterfly Sessions got lost in the mix and didn’t reach their full potential audience.

Back in 2011, Mega Ran teamed up with Lost Perception to release an album called Black Materia: Final Fantasy VII. The concept album, based on the 1997 game Final Fantasy VII, quickly became one of the landmark nerdcore albums and a fan favorite. When it was announced that Square Enix was going to be releasing a remake of the classic game, it was only a matter of time before Mega Ran would also revisit the game.