Sweatson Klank is a producer from Los Angeles that has been making music for over twenty years, first under the name Take before switching over to Sweatson Klank a little over ten years ago. He’s never really slowed down or taken much time off, either, with a full-length album and an EP and a single coming out just last year. Now he’s back with a different type of project with an EP called Path of an Empath.

Conor is an artist originally from Los Angeles but now based in Sydney, Australia. He has been recording under this name for vocal projects but also under the name Tom Bombadil for production-based projects. We last heard from Conor in 2017, when he released a mixtape called 4D. Now he’s back with a new full-length album, …In The Shadow Of. Conor handles the majority of the production on the album, but he gets a couple of assists on tracks from kochetkow, antiquant, Opfour, and sleepingbutweeping.

Ackryte is a producer from Minneapolis who has been going strong for a little over a decade now. We last heard from him just about two years ago when he gave us the album Minor. Now he’s back with a new full-length for 2021, Focus. Over the years, Ackryte has given us some of the most beautiful and inventive downtempo music, and Focus is no exception. For this project, his focus seems to be on the smooth jazz of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, which translates into a really gentle listening experience as he reinterprets the sound into a hip hop context.

Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio was founded back in 2015, featuring Lamarr on Hammond Organ, Jimmy James on guitar, and Dan Weiss on drums. They released their first album, Close But No Cigar in 2018, and since that time have toured extensively and dropped a live EP and a single. Now they are ready to come back with their sophomore album, I Told You So. The sound of DLO3 falls somewhere in between Jimmy Smith and Booker T.

Wax Tailor is a producer from France that has been making music for roughly twenty years now. After keeping up a fairly steady pace from the mid ‘00s to the mid ‘10s, it’s now bean five years since his last album, By Any Beats Necessary. Now the wait is finally over as he presents his latest full-length album, The Shadow of Their Suns. Sometimes when an artist is taking their time in between albums, you might want to see them do something different or show some sort of discernable growth, something to justify the prolonged absence.

Australian emcee Thorts and Flagstaff producer (and one-half of An Illustrated Mess) Whatever Cecil first connected over the internet back in 2017. They had been bouncing ideas off of each other over the years, and at one point Thorts showed up on An Illustrated Mess song, “Phone Cards.” After all this time, they finally reached a point where things lined up and they had enough to make an EP that felt like everything fit together, a project simply titled Long Distance.

Vanilla is a producer from the UK that has been releasing music for the last ten years. In April of last year, he closed out a trilogy of solo instrumental albums with Into the Dream. To start the next phase of his career, he joined up with Cold Busted Records to release an EP as part of their Jet Set series, Pointbreak. The EP was recorded in Japan, but the feel of this project is much more Brazilian as Vanilla brings in heavy doses of samba and bossa nova along with smooth jazz to spice up this instrumental hip hop project.

Portland artist Claud Six has given us a lot of music over the years under a lot of different names and projects, whether it be R4PC4MP, Jellyfish Brigade, Hives Inquiry Squad, BCxLD, or Shut-ins and the Colony. As someone who is constantly working on different projects, Six found himself in the position recently where he wasn’t necessarily ready to start on a new project, but as he begun to look through his hard drive (pantry) and pull out some random songs (ingredients), he realized that he had a decent make-shift album (meal).

Black Plastique is a producer/emcee from Birmingham that had quite a busy 2020, which saw him launch a new label, Ego Def LLC and debut a new group, theSportingLife. He’s keeping that energy up as he starts off 2021 with a new EP that features him as a producer, Automatic Jazz. The concept of Automatic Jazz is that Black Plastique is collecting a few instrumentals along with a couple of collaborative tracks.

Back in the 1960s, a young Brazilian musician named Marcos Resende left home to study medicine in Lisbon. While in Europe, he expanded on his musical interests, and dove deep into the worlds of prog and jazz. He returned home to Brazil in 1974, following the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, where he began collecting keyboards and recruiting players to fill out his ensemble. This group, known as Marcos Resende & Index, released one album in 1978, Festa Para Um Novo Rei, which went on to become a sought-after record for collectors and producers.