Meredith Schweig is an assistant professor of musicology at Emory University. She now presents her first book, Renegade Rhymes: Rap Music, Narrative, and Knowledge in Taiwan, out with University of Chicago Press. Chances are, if you live in the United States, your exposure to hip hop in Asia is limited. Of course, hip hop has reached across the globe at this point, and there are many parts of Asia with their own unique hip hop story to tell.

saib. is a producer originally from Casablanca, Morocco, but now based in Berlin. He started releasing music in the mid-2010s, and over the years he’s put on projects on labels like Cold Busted, Hip Dozer, and Cult Classic. His most recent project, Under the Stars, came out on Hip Dozer this past April. Now he’s making his debut on Jakarta with his latest album, Unwind. Sometimes album title require a bit of an explanation, but other times they make perfect sense the first time you read it.

Spectateur is a producer from Nantes, France, who has been releasing music for over a decade. In that time, he’s worked with such labels as The French Touch Connection, Loci, and Melting Records. His most recent release came just this past April, when he released Nocturne. Now he’s back with another project, Elephant. Spectateur has given us a lot of different types of projects over the years, but a recent development he keeps returning to is his series of animal-themed EPs.

Sampa the Great is an artist born in Zambia, raised in Botswana, and based in Australia for the past decade. She made a splash in 2017 when she dropped her mixtape, Birds and the Bee9, on Big Dada, which essentially served as her debut album. She took a giant step forward when she released her full-length album, The Return, on Ninja Tune in 2019. Now she is finally back with a new album, As Above So Below.

Plenty of bad stuff happened in March of 2020, but one good thing that happened then was the launch of Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad’s new imprint, Jazz is Dead. Launched with the idea of getting older jazz musicians back into the studio to record all new material, they’ve already had a great run that has seen releases from Roy Ayers, Brian Jackson, Doug Carn, and Azymuth, just to name a few.

Sudan Archives is a Los Angeles musician who made her debut on Stones Throw five years ago. After a couple of EPs, she dropped her first full-length, Athena, in 2019. After taking some time, she is now back with her sophomore album, Natural Brown Prom Queen. There is sometimes talk of a sophomore slump after an artist has some breakthrough success with their debut album, and with good reason. After you spend all of this time pouring your heart and soul and all these years of experience into an album, how are you supposed to bounce back and give us something that is as good as the original, but also not the same and hopefully slightly better?

killer kane is a producer from New Jersey who has been releasing music since the mid-2010s. Recently, he has come on a lot of hip hop fans’ radar by working on projects with artists like Sleep Sinatra and Rich Jones. His most recent project was a solo release just this past January called Drifting Upstream 2. Now he’s back with a full-length instrumental project, BIG MAN, little table. There are a lot of different ways for producers to release solo projects.

There are some artists that are having a nice 2022, and then there’s Small Professor. The Philly producer has already released three instrumental collections, an album with AJ Suede, an album with Vic Spencer, an album with Torito, and contributed to a Wrecking Crew album. That would be more than enough for most people, but now he’s right back with another full-length collaborative album, this time with Rob Cave, called Respect Wildlife.

C.Shreve the Professor is an emcee from Ashville who has been working as a solo artist and as part of the group Free the Optimus for over a decade now. His most recent project came just this last May, when he collaborated with producer D.R.U.G.S. Beats to drop an album called Must be the D.R.U.G.S. Not done for the year, he’s now back with a new EP, Gymnastics. Gymnastics might seem like a small release on paper, but there is one key factor that makes this a bigger deal, which is that this is the first self-produced project of C.

Suzi Analogue is a producer from Miami who has been releasing music for over a decade, steadily building a following with her inventive and creative interpretations of Miami bass, experimental electronic music, and hip hop. Back in 2016, she dropped a mixtape of original production called ZONEZ V.1. She returned to this series at a frequent pace until she dropped the fourth volume in 2019. Now in 2022, she’s gone back and picked the best of the series and presented them in one volume, also putting these beats on vinyl for the first as well with Infinite Zonez.