Unsung is an artist from Morgantown, West Virginia who has been releasing music for the past twenty years. We last heard form him in 2019, when he released his album, Wasteland Faceplant. Now he makes his debut on Damn That Noise with his latest album, Hand Painted Model Trains. For this project, Unsung is handling all of the production and rhyming duties, which makes sense given how personal of an album this is.

Lionmilk is a pianist/composer/producer from Los Angeles who started releasing music in the mid-2010s. In 2018, he made his debut on Paxico Records with the release of Depths of Madness. In 2019, he moved over to Leaving Records to release Visions in Paraíso, and he’s remained with the label since then. Most recently, we got his album, Intergalactic Warp Terminal 222, just this past March. Now he’s back with a collection of unreleased material from the past three years, Sauna Saudade.

Liz Przybylski is Associate Professor in the Department of Music at UC-Riverside and is the author of Hybrid Ethnography: Online, Offline, and In Between. Now she presents her new book, Sonic Sovereignty: Hip Hop, Indigeneity, and Shifting Popular Music. While hip hop has been covered from a variety of different angles over the years, and many different subgenres and populations have been examined, one major group has not been given the type of attention they deserve – the native populations of the United States and Canada.

Slowe is an up-and-coming vocalist/producer/multi-instrumentalist from Bristol, UK. While most people have not heard of her yet, what matters is that Tru Thought has, as they’ve signed her and now present her debut album, Where the Mind Wanders. Most of the time, when you listen to a young artists’ debut album, you tend to mostly talk about potential. There might be a few moments where things click, but mostly you can see where things might come together on future projects once they figure things out like how to marry all of their influences and how to best record themselves.

Lipphead is the combined forces of two producers – Eliot Lipp and Blockhead. After being in each other’s orbits for years, and with acclaimed solo releases on the labels like Ninja Tune, Mush, Pretty Lights, Man Bites Dog, and Backwoodz Studioz, they first officially joined together as a duo to release a 7” on Young Heavy Souls in 2019. In June of last year, they finally released their first full-length album as Lipphead, In the Nude.

Haz and Miloux are both artists from Auckland. Both started their careers as solo artists, but they found each other and released their first EP as a duo, Blonde, in 2019. Since that time, they’ve released a couple of singles, but now we finally get their follow up EP, Brunette. It doesn’t take long in listening to Brunette to understand why these artists started working together. The chemistry just feels really natural with Haz on the beats and Miloux on the vocals.

Rhys Langston is an artist from Los Angeles who has been releasing music since the mid-2010s. In that time, he’s given us ambitious and creative projects like Aggressively Ethnically Ambiguous, Language Arts Unit, and Grapefruit Radio. He’s also worked with such artists as Koreatown Oddity, Fatboi Sharif, and Black Milk, just to name a few. His last project came just this past February, when he teamed up with Canadian artist Andrew Mbaruk to release Affect Theory and the Text-to-Speech Grandiloquence.

junclassic is an emcee from Queens who is about fifteen years deep into his recording career. Along the way, he’s collaborated with the likes of Jazz Spastiks, Mr. Troy, and Wun Two. Just this past March, we got an EP from junclassic called Snapshots. Now he’s right back with another EP, one word all small letters. The title of the EP of course comes from the stylization of junclassic’s name. “jun” comes from the fact that he’s a junior, and classic is a reference to the style of hip hop that he likes to lay down.

Emceein’ Eye is an emcee from North Carolina who is more than a decade into his recording career. The last we heard from him was back in 2020, when he dropped his full-length album, Never Comply. Now he’s back with a new EP, Nothing Beats a Try. For this project, Emceein’ Eye is working with Richmond artist PT Burnem as producer. Together, they are both handling live instrumentation for the album, with Eye on guitar, vocals, percussion, and keyboards and Burnem on Synths, beats, sampling, and his “dustkat dream drum machine” (a contraption of striking solenoid pistons hitting bells and cymbals and all kinds of weirdness).

Lt. Headtrip is an artist originally from Ohio, and one of the founding members of The Karma Kids collective. We last heard from him this past November, when he dropped Steinway. Now he has teamed up with producer DOS4GW to drop a new album, Tap on the Glass. DOS4GW is a producer from Melbourne, but he’s already made a name for himself in American indie hip hop, teaming up with artists like Curly Castro and Armand Hammer.