About twenty years ago, two artists from Pontiac, Michigan named One Be Lo and Senim Silla joined forces to form the group Binary Star. After releasing their album, Masters of the Universe, they split before releasing a proper follow up. They finally released a new EP in 2013, but Silla soon split after that. However, One Be Lo decided to keep using the name, releasing an album with Decompoze called Water World 3 in 2017.

Two years ago, Toronto emcee/producer/deejay and Backburner member More or Les released his opus, Blow the Fuck Up But Stay Humble. About a year ago, he gave us a beat tape called Big Lunch in Little China to tide us over while he continued to work on bigger things. Now the time has finally come for his follow up album, Nerd Love. More or Les has had an interesting career, if only in the way that his releases seem to oscillate back and forth between deep dives into nerdom, and releases that appeal to the general hip hop fan base.

Back in 2007, Chicago emcee Serengeti released an album called Dennehy. On the album, Serengeti introduced a cast of characters, including someone named Kenny Dennis. We didn’t quite know at the time what we were dealing with, and for a minute it seemed like that was it. After a few years, though, Serengeti started to flesh out the story of this character, a fiftysomething guy from the northwest side of Chicago, with a thick accent and a chip on his shoulder that his music career never took off, and now he’s in a bit of denial about the blue collar life that he’s actually living.

Afrokeys is a keyboardist/songwriter/producer out of Minneapolis, best known for his work with Atmosphere. He’s been making music as a solo project for years, but he has recently teamed up with vocalist I-BE, also from the Twin Cities. They now release their debut EP together, All Figured Out. There are a lot of interesting angles to this EP. Afrokeys is a great producer, and one that seems deceptively simple, but it’s really a matter of knowing when to pull back and let a few key elements shine and knowing when a key melodic or rhythmic flip is all you need to keep a song interesting.

Mestizo is an emcee from Los Angeles, who has been putting out music since the early 2000s. Along with being a solo artist, he’s collaborated with the like of Doseone and Isiah Toothtaker. For his latest effort, he’s teamed up with The Heavy Twelves, a psych-electro-noise duo also out of Los Angeles. They’ve come together to release an EP on Fake Four called Big Bad Death. Over the years, Mestizo has worked on a wide array of underground West Coast rap projects, so depending on how familiar you are with certain parts of his discography, this EP could sound right on time or wildly different than what you were expecting.

Birmingham producer and emcee K1NG ELJAY has already had a bit of a busy year in 2018, collaborating with DJ Swole on The Graduation EP and releasing a beat tape in tribute to Common called Royalty. That was all the warm up, though, as he now drops his full-length solo album, simply titled K1NG. K1NG. is an interesting album in quite a few ways. As much as this is a solo album, this album is also about representing the hip hop scene in Birmingham, a really dynamic and talented scene that is largely overlooked on the national scale.

Hellsent is a Chicago emcee who’s been releasing music for over a decade now, first as part of the duo OuterLimitz alongside Qwazaar, then as a solo artist. Four years ago, he teamed up with producer Batsauce to deliver an album called Bat Outta Hell. Now they finally return with a follow up full-length album, Illegal Tender. There are a lot of interesting angles to this album, so let’s go through them.

Marcus Lewis is a trombonist/band leader currently based in Kansas City, who is probably best known for his work with Janelle Monae. While he’s played with others in the pop world as well, in his own solo career, his music has been more jazz-oriented. This is especially true with his recently assembled 18-piece big band. However, with their latest album, Lewis looks to blur the lines of genre, this time with Kansas City emcees Kemet the Phantom and Kadesh Flow to create some big band hip hop on Brass and Boujee.

The Backburner crew out of Toronto/Ottawa/Halifax is a large group, and as a result, there are many subsets contained within. One of those groups that’s been working at a steady pace over the last few years is Swamp Thing, the trio consisting of Chokeules, Timbuktu and Savilion, starting with the Grindhouse EP dropped back in 2012. The last time we heard from them was just October of last year, when they teamed up with fellow Backburner artist Ghettosocks to release an album called The Octagon.

In some ways, it was only a matter of time before Nostrum Grocers, the collaboration between ELUCID and Milo, was an official thing. The two have toured together and have shown up on each other’s projects over the past couple of years. So when they officially announced their debut album as a duo, it only made sense when they revealed that this project actually started three years ago when they initially started recording some ideas, only to pick things up in a more official sense last fall, when they went into the studio to record the album that is now released.