Shon Dervis is an up and coming producer out of Chicago. 16 marks his first release as a producer. I can’t tell you too much about Shon Dervis, since information on him is fairly sparse, but I can tell you about his first release, 16. It falls somewhere in between a beat tape and a fully formed album, which is to say that some tracks feel like fully developed songs and others feel more like beat demos.

Moderator is a young producer from Athens, Greece. He released his first two albums with Cult Classic Records, with his last album, The World Within, coming in 2015. He now comes back with his most ambitious album to date, Sinner’s Syndrome. Listening to Sinner’s Syndrome, I couldn’t help but think of the three-album theory. For those that aren’t familiar, the basic gist is that it often takes a young artist two albums to figure out what their artistic voice is and how to record themselves before they hit their stride.

The Hues Brothers is the collaboration between New York emcee Rabbi Darkside and UK producer Mr. Simmonds. It’s been a few years since we got a proper release from Rabbi Darkside, with his last full-length, Prospect Avenue, which came out back in 2013. Now, with this relaunch of Say Word that started last year, we get this new project, Radio Activity. It’s interesting to see the shift from one project to the next, from Rabbi Darkside’s last solo album and this new album as part of The Hues Brothers.

Henry Canyons is a Los Angeles emcee who has been putting out music for a few years now. The last time we heard from him was just this January, when he released an EP recorded in France, Le Cote West. Now he comes right back with a full-length album, Cool Side of the Pillow. One of the first things that hit me about this album is just how effortless it sounds.

The Sorority is the new group out of Toronto consisting of emcees pHoenix Pagliacci, Haviah Mighty, Lex Leosis, and Keysha Fresh. The four women originally met when TeamBackPack put together a cypher for International Women’s Day back in 2016, which turned into the single “Ladies’ Night.” The four women realized that they had something special when they worked together and decided to call themselves The Sorority. Now the time has come to release their first album as a group, Pledge.

It was only in March that we got the latest solo release from producer Calvin Valentine, Plush Seats. Well, here we are in April, and we’re revisiting the album, this time with Portland emcee ePP, giving us Chrome Seats. Valentine and ePP go back a ways, first meeting in 2006, then joining up with emcee Tope to form the group TxE. After a few years, Valentine went on to produce ePP’s first solo album, Chrome Plated Chronicles, in 2013.

The nomadic emcee known as Offsite who once lived in Wisconsin has now relocated to Maine to be with those involved with Ruby Yacht and now Soulfolks Records. Over his last three releases, Offsite had been working through the loss of a close friend. Now he moves on to the bigger picture of himself as he grapples with his alternate personality, Hex. Hex feels a little more like a mixtape than an album, and I mean that the way the term mixtape used to be applied, with snippets of different beats flowing together and emcees hopping off and on the mic.

Old Self is an emcee from New Haven without much to his resume yet, just a couple of singles, so you might not have heard of him yet. Fortunately, though, some that had heard him is Lt. Headtrip from the New York collective The Karma Kids. He got together with Old Self, and worked with him to produce his debut album, Word Art Gallery. There are plenty of debut albums that feature an artist that is trying to figure out who they are as they are making the album.

Emcee Dillon and producer Batsauce have known each other for a long time, both growing up in Jacksonville. They met in the early 2000s, and have been collaborating off and on over the years, releasing some EPs and singles together, but the full length remained elusive. This struggle was compounded when Batsauce and his wife up and relocated to Berlin. Over the next few years, Dillon would venture to Berlin to work on a few tracks, and then would reciprocate and host Batsauce at his own studio in Atlanta.

Offwhyte is one of the founding members of Galapagos4, the record label most notable for releasing music from Chicago acts like Typical Cats, Hellsent, and Asphate. He’s also a talented emcee, who’s last album, Dialogue, came out two years ago. Now he comes back with his latest effort, Both Sides of the Mississippi. Dialogue was Offwhyte’s Los Angeles album, his exploration of what the city meant to him after living there for ten years.