Laughta is an artist born in Nigeria to Lebanese parents, but now based in the UK. With only a couple of guest appearances and one EP, BRB, coming out in 2021, Laughta now looks to take things up a level with her debut album, Dare 2 Be Different. To make this album, Laughta is working with producers GG, Jay Jay Musika, and Glitch, as well as producing a substantial number of tracks herself.

TMFSE, or The Man From Somewhere Else, is an emcee from New Jersey. Although he’s been around for over a decade, outside of his 2014 album with Aoi, Franklin Gothic Green, he’s mostly been an artist that pops up here and there to make an appearance before going back underground. As a result, not as many people know about him as an artist. That changes in 2023, though, because he’s now teamed up with producer Shape and The Karma Kids to put out a deeply personal album, Naked Brunch.

Mute Speaker is an artist originally from Brighton, but now residing in Cambodia. He’s had a career that spans over a decade and includes projects with the late great Los Angeles emcee, Gajah. Hs most recent solo project came back in 2021, when he dropped Creature Feature. Now he returns with a new project, Smoke Breaks. When you’ve been around as along as Mute Speaker has and have worked on as many different projects as he has, you learn that not each project has to be at an eleven.

Jazz is Dead is one of the best things to come out of the 2020s so far. Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad launched the imprint right as the pandemic set in, and all they’ve done since then is give us fresh music from living jazz legends like Roy Ayers, Azymuth, and Brian Jackson, just to name a few. For their sixteenth release, we get a couple of Detroit legends, Phil Ranelin and Wendell Harrison.

Ryan Kopperud, fka Homeless, is an artist from the Twin Cities who has been releasing music for the last ten years. After a five year hiatus, Kopperud released a couple of songs in 2020 and 2021, hinting that something bigger might be on the horizon. Now we finally get a new EP from him, Before What Came After. For this project, enlisted the help of Minneapolis producer Tru, best known for his work with Vision the Kid.

Oddisee is an artist from the D.C. area, but he’s been based in Brooklyn for a minute. We are also about fifteen years into a career that has seen a really compelling catalogue take shape with a lot of different looks over the years. Most recently, we got a quarantine album from him in 2020 called Odd Cure. Now he’s back with a more traditional album, To What End. For this project, Oddisee is once again rapping and producing the whole thing, but he’s getting some additional assistance from some live musicians, with Ralph Real on keys, Dennis Turner on bass, Olivier St.

Batsauce is a producer originally from Jacksonville, and over the years he has worked with artists like Qwazaar, Hellsent, and Dillon. He’s also been a bit of a global citizen, mostly setting up shop in Berlin, but he’s spent significant time elsewhere, including in Vietnam. When Batsauce travels, he always makes it a point to bring equipment to make music with him. While in Da Nang, he found himself running out of vinyl to sample from, but instead of stopping, he challenged himself to go the route of playing instruments and routing them through his sampler, trying to capture the feeling of Vietnam in the process.

Juan Cosby is a producer from Cincinnati who had a busy 2022, releasing a soundtrack to a movie, All Your Friends are Dead, a tribute project for Nobuo Uematsu, and an album as part of the group Counterfeit Money Machine. Now that 2023 is here, he’s showing no signs of slowing down, as he’s already back with a unique project with Farout and Wonky Tonk, ALPENGLOW. Wonky Tonk is a singer-songwriter from Covington, Kentucky, and Farout is an emcee from St.

AWOL One is a staple of the Los Angeles underground hip hop scene whose career spans over two decades and includes groups like Shape Shifters and The Cloaks. In fact, it was just about one year ago that we got the latest Cloaks album, A Cloakwork Orange. Now AWOL One is back with a new solo album, Scribbleface. Like many of AWOL One’s solo projects, he’s rhyming and producing it himself on Scribbleface.

If you were around during the second half of the 2000s, you know that the music industry was in a weird flux, and the traditional methods of getting independent music to the people didn’t work as well as it used to, and the newer methods weren firmly established yet. As a result, a lot of indie releases got lost in the ether. The people at Uncommon Records are definitely aware of this, which is way they’ve recently been going back through their early catalogue and giving a few of these albums the re-release treatment, because they didn’t get the love they deserved at the time.