R.A.P. Ferreira, fka milo, has had a bit of a nomadic career over the years, but these days he’s calling Nashville home. Over the last decade-plus, he’s been one of the most consistent artists, both in terms of quality and the rate at which he’s been turning out music. After releasing the Light Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures just about a year ago, he took a moment to pursue his new blues project under the name Crow Billiken.

Rejoicer is a keyboardist/producer originally from Israel, but now based in Los Angeles. Over the years, he has been part of groups such as Apifera and Buttering Trio, as well as releasing a few solo albums on Stones Throw. In 2020, he began to collaborate with saxophonist Eyal Talmudi, best known to American audiences for his work on Sefi Zisling’s 2019 album, Expanse, which came out on Tru Thoughts. They continued to work on the project through fall of 2021, which is now here in the form of an LP, The Audience.

Illogic is an artist from Columbus who has been making music for over twenty years, both as part of the group Greenhouse Effect with Blueprint, and as a solo artist. Over that time, he’s worked with everyone from Blockhead to doseone to Lucid Optics to illpoetic to RJD2 to Bluu Edwards to Odd Nosdam, just to name a few. With all that he had accomplished as an emcee, Illogic decided a few years back that he wanted to learn how to produce beats as well.

AKAI SOLO is an emcee from Brooklyn who has really hit the ground running since he began to release music a couple of years ago, already working with artists like Pink Siifu, KeiyaA, and Moor Mother, just to name a few. He also caught the attention of billy woods, who has featured him on a couple of projects. AKAI SOLO now releases his debut LP on Backwoodz Studioz, Spirit Roaming.

A7PHA is the duo consisting of doseone and Mestizo. They first got together to release their debut self-titled LP in 2017. Now, after working on a bunch of different projects in the last few years, things have lined up again for the two artists to come back together and give us a second A7PHA album, II. For this album, the production duties are being handled by Chicago artist Meaty Ogre, best known for his various projects on Galapagos4, with additional percussion provided by Jel, who has been working with doseone for years and years.

Ghost Funk Orchestra is an ensemble from New York City, put together by Seth Applebaum. The group first started releasing music in 2014, but it was in 2019 when they made their debut on Colemine with A Song For Paul that things really started to pick up steam for them. They followed that up with their latest album, An Ode To Escapsism, in 2020. Now they are back with a new full-length album, A New Kind of Love.

Sault is a musical collective from the UK who have allowed very little information to seep out about their identity, but we do know that producer Inflo is one of the voices behind the project, and on past projects they’ve collaborated with artists such as Little Simz, Michael Kiwanuka, Cleo Sol, and Kadeem Clarke. They came to prominence worldwide in 2020, with the release of two albums, Untitled (Rise) and Untitled (Black Is), which captured everyone’s imaginations as they beautifully combined hip hop, R&B, gospel, soul, funk, and beyond as they sung these politically charged songs that addressed a lot of issues surrounding race, class, globalism, capitalism, and more.

Von Pea is a New York artist best known as one-half of the duo Tanya Morgan, although he’s been working as a solo artist for quite some time as well. Back in 2013, he teamed up with producer Æon to make an EP called Duly Noted. Now, after all this time, things have finally lined back up for them to reunite and make another EP, Duly Noted 2. Duly Noted 2 is great because it’s exactly what you want it to be, which is a fun collection of East Coast hip hop from a couple of veteran artists with great chemistry.

There are artists who have been busy in 2022, and then there is Sankofa. The Fort Wayne emcee has been churning out the projects this year, already dropping The Sonny Vaccaro Years, The Beat Shall Inherit the Verse, Harikuma’s Revenge, BLKTCHP 2, KofaSoCalfragilistic, and Legacy Materials. For most artists, this discography would stretch over a couple of years. Or, if they released this many projects in a year, you’d probably notice a drop off in quality and wish that they’d left some of it in the vault.

Dope KNife is an emcee/producer from Savannah who first came up as part of the Dope Sandwich crew/label in the early to mid 2000s. He’s been doing the solo thing for a while, but he’s really been hitting his stride in the last five years or so, with projects on Strange Famous, Fake Four, and Brick. His most recent project came in 2020, when he teamed up with Factor Chandelier to release an EP called Kill Factory.