Funkmammoth is a producer from Ames, Iowa how has been putting out music for a couple of years now. His last release came last December, when he dropped his album Night Shift. Now he’s come back with a beat tape tribute to the Midwest, Pride of the Prairie. There’s not real secret to Pride of the Prairie. This is a beat tape that is built off of soul samples from Midwestern artists, and it’s good.

J-Live of course is the triple threat emcee/deejay/producer originally from New York, now residing in Atlanta, who has been going strong since the mid-‘90s. In December of 2016, he released an EP called At The Date Of This Writing (Vol. 1), which promised to be the first in a series of self-produced EPs. While things haven’t yet panned out that way, we do finally get a new EP from J-Live, called Lose No Time.

A little over a year ago, emcee Open Mike Eagle dropped his most ambitious album to date, Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, a concept album exploring the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. Now, after working on a show for Comedy Central and doing some wrestling, we get a new EP from Eagle called What Happens When I Try To Relax. Over the course of his career, Open Mike Eagle has followed a general pattern of releasing a big album and then following up with a smaller stakes EP, so it makes sense that before he reloads and tries to match the major artistic achievement of Brick Body Kids, he can just give us a collection of six songs that we can enjoy on face value.

It’s been a minute since we last heard from Detroit/Atlanta emcee Boog Brown. After making a splash in 2010 with her Brown Study album with Apollo Brown, and then following that up with The Late Bloom in 2013, Brown has been relatively quiet since then outside of a few features. One person that reached out to her for a feature, though, was producer Tom Caruana, who was looking to make a track for his Son of Sam album.

The Asheville group known as Free The Optimus has been going strong for several years now, and they’ve alternated between group projects and solo projects as they went along, meaning that we’ve got a lot of different looks from them. One look that we haven’t gotten up until this point was a live album. That all changes as they release Asheville Downtown Live. Free The Optimus has always been about repping their hometown of Asheville, so it would make sense that went it came time to make a live album, they would use their performance at the long running Downtown Live After 5 concert series as the platform.

Lee Reed might not be a name that American hip hop fans know, but Canadian fans have been following the Hamilton, Ontario artist for about two decades, both as part of the group Warsawpack and as a solo artist. In 2015, Reed opened for Sage Francis at a show in Guelph, Ontario, the two artists really connected, and Sage knew that he wanted to put out Reed’s next project on Strange Famous.

Back in 2013, a young emcee in Minneapolis by the name of deM atlaS released an EP called Charlie Brown that caught a lot of peoples’ attention, including those at Rhymesayers, who soon thereafter announced his signing to the label. He followed this up with an EP called DWNR the next year that solidified his reputation, as he delivered his own brand of energetic and deeply emotional hip hop. He continued to tour over the next couple of years, but fans continued to wait for that full-length album to push his career to the next level.

Walter Cornelius is a French-born, London-based producer who made his debut on Cascade Records a little over a year ago when he released the EP Waco. Now he’s come back to show how much he’s grown with a new EP titled Bulk. When Cornelius released his last EP, the real problem with it was that there wasn’t enough space for him to get through all of his influences, and that he hadn’t yet found a way to make all of his different influences speak to each other and become his own unique style.

Eugene emcee/producer Sammy Warm Hands has been making music about two decades now, and he’s been working at a very steady pace these past few years, whether it be releasing solo albums, pairing up with artists like Ogar Burl, getting back to his roots as a singer songwriter, or going to the vaults to release material from his old group, The ILLusionists. While he’s certainly kept busy, it’s been three years since Sammy Warm Hands last official solo album, Vacant Eyes.

Junclassic is an emcee from Queens who has been putting out records for a minute now, including his classic collaboration with Mr. Troy, Thinking Out Loud. After remaining relatively quiet for the last year or two, he returns now with a brand new EP, Muscle Memory. If this title is meant to imply that getting back in the studio and rapping again would be like hopping on a bicycle, then the proof is in how Junclassic sounds so effortless on the mic.