Fort Ancient Records is a collective out of Cincinnati consisting of Homage CVG, Phonopage, Waldo From Cincinnati, Dren AD, and Samuel Steezmore. They’ve been putting out music for a couple of years now, but last year they developed a series of releases called Fort Ancient Airlines. The idea is that they all contribute to a short collection of instrumental tracks tied to the theme of a certain city, and they pull in a guest artist to serve as your pilot for the flight.

Chris Conde is an emcee from San Antonio who has been performing for over a decade. Despite all of his experience, we haven’t gotten a solo album from him until just now. He takes a major step forward as he now drops that album, Growing Up Gay. As you might have inferred from the title of the album, Growing Up Gay is a deeply personal affair, dealing with Conde’s journey to learn to accept himself as he is, battling with demons like alcoholism and drug abuse along the way.

Blossom is a producer from Poland who has previously put out music on such labels as DLoaw & Co., Project Mooncircle, and Dusted Wax Kingdom, just to name a few. His last release came two years ago, when he dropped the album Where Are You Hiding? Now he’s come back with a new EP that sees him teaming up with a guitar player, also from Poland, who performs under the name Wookie.

Blockhead is a New York producer who has been making music for years, first gaining notoriety for his work with Aesop Rock, then establishing himself as a solo artist with a series of strong instrumental albums on Ninja Tunes. Most recently, he released a solo instrumental album called Funeral Balloons, which came out in September of 2017. Now he comes back with a different type of solo album in Free Sweatpants.

MexStep is an emcee best known as one third of the San Antonio/Austin hip hop group Third Root. While the group is right in the middle of their Trill Pedagogy series of EP releases, MexStep decided to release a solo album, Resistir. If you’re familiar with Third Root, you won’t be surprised by the sound of Resistir. This is because he’s working with producer Adrian Quesada, who has also produced all of Third Root’s latest releases.

Weighn Beats is a producer from Boise, Idaho. Just this last March, he teamed up with emcees Clev Speech and Mo Digs to release an album titled Les Fortunate. Now he has come back with a solo instrumental project, Hip-Hopumentary. If you are familiar with Weighn Beats through the Les Fortunate album, or maybe with his work with emcee Oso Negro, you might not be prepared for Hip-Hopumentary. It’s not that this album is that unusual, but it is a change of pace from the left field boom bap that he’s throwing down on those projects.

The Last Jedi of Adelphi is a project that first came to light in July of 2018, when emcees Kaotic Rawkus and Jack Wilson got together to make an old school mixtape, just trading rhymes over dope beats. Now the sequel is here, and this time they’ve enlisted the help of French producer Keor Meteor. Keor Meteor is an interesting producer who has always got a few projects on the burners, whether it be beat tapes like I-40, which served as an imaginary score to the show Ozark, or one of his most recent projects, Central Service.

Fort Ancient Records is the Cincinnati collective of producers, consisting of Homage CVG, Phonopage, Waldo From Cincinnati, Dren AD, and Samuel Steezmore. The group have had a busy 2018, with a couple of releases from Waldo and Homage, along with some short group projects as well. After all that, they come back one last time to spread some holiday cheer with Winter Wonderland. Winter Wonderland is a fairly straightforward release, with all the producers coming together to put together some downtempo hip hop spins on some holiday classics.

One of the best parts of December is the Freecember series of releases that Fake Four puts out every year as a way to showcase lesser known artists. Three years ago, one such artist to participate in Freecember was Fresno’s Ersatz Splynter, when he released his Lalochezia EP. Now he comes back to join in the Freecember fun once again with an EP called Apartment Number One. While Ersatz Splynter has been making music for a while, he hadn’t made a self-produced project up until this point.

Back in 2012, Australian producer Ta-ku made a splash when he released a Dilla tribute project on HW&W called 50 Days for Dilla. Since that time, he’s been busy not only making music, but pursuing other projects like photography, a barber shop, and running an imprint label called 823. Now he comes somewhat full circle, paying tribute to the other major producer born on February 7th, Nujabes, with a project called 25 Nights for Nujabes.