SWARVY is a producer from Philadelphia who has been releasing music for over a decade now, perhaps best known for his collaborative projects with Ioji on Fresh Selects, or his solo material on Paxico. The last time we heard from him was last summer, when he gave us a dub EP called Smoked Out Dubs Vol. 1. Now he is back with a new EP, Karate. When you’ve been around as long as Swarvy has and worked on as many varied projects as he has, sometimes it can be nice to sit down and make music with no restrictions or expectations, just getting back to the roots of the type of music that you love.

The 50x50s is the Connecticut duo consisting of emcee Sketch tha cataclysm and producer Deto 22. The two first linked up over a decade ago, and they’ve been returning the project periodically since then, usually in the form of shorter, intense releases. Their most recent collaboration came last summer, when they teamed up with CrissB.Amazing to release the two-song project, Peace & Second Wind. Now they are back as a duo with a three-song EP, Chrímata.

Surprise Chef are a funk/soul/jazz group from Melbourne who have been releasing music since 2018. They made their debut on Big Crown last year with their third LP, Education & Recreation. Now they’ve returned with a follow-up EP, Friendship. Surprise Chef are a four-piece group, but they’ve always managed to make their sound feel much bigger than that, with some really full arrangements that give their funk a cinematic feel. This makes sense when you consider that they cite David Axelrod and Isaac Hayes as two of their biggest influences.

Bokoya is a relatively new group out of Cologne, Germany, consisting of Darius Heid, Ferdinand Schwarz, Leon Raum, and Lucy Liebe. With their first album, Introducing, released in 2019, they described themselves as a hip hop/jazz band, in which “four musicians play together as if they grew up inside a drum machine.” Essentially, what this means is that you have four musicians who all studied jazz in music school, but who also have a deep love of hip hop and electronic music.

Handbook is a British producer form York who has been releasing music for over ten years now. In that time, he’s worked with labels like Cascade, Hip Dozer, and Loci, just to name a few. We heard from him just this past April, when he released an EP called A Small Reminder To Be. Now he’s teamed up with Cascade again to release another EP, Desires. There are so many downtempo instrumental releases out there these days, with so many of them sounding generic and forgettable, it can feel refreshing to come across an EP like Desires, which will just immediately remind you of how good the genre can be when it is in the right hands.

Sankofa is the prolific emcee from Fort Wayne who has been at this for about two decades now. In the past year, he’s collaborated on projects with ACT-1, Bless 1, Supermuch, JON?DOE, and Agent Orange. Just earlier this year, we got a new project featuring a range of different producers called Multitudes Vol. 1. Now he’s back with a new project made with St. Paul producer Iron Mike Sharp, Iron Kofa Sharp.

Fybe:one is a producer from South London who started releasing music over a decade ago. His debut album, Elements, came out in 2014. Since that time, he’s done a lot of singles and remixes mostly, but he made his debut on Tru Thoughts in 2020 with the release of his EP, Sky Loops. Now he finally returns with his sophomore album, This is Ours. The core of the album began as a collaborative project with vocalist Liam Bailey, which makes sense when you glance at the track listing and see that he’s singing on four of the eleven tracks.

BusCrates is an artist from Pittsburgh who has been releasing music for over ten years. After spending a lot of that time releasing one-off projects here and there, he finally released a proper full-length album, Blasting Off, on Bastard Jazz in 2020. Now he is back to build on that foundation with a new full-length, Control Center. BusCrates grew up in the ‘90s hip hop era, but with a love of ‘80s keyboard funk.

Claud Six is an artist based in Portland, Oregon, but he grew up in Wisconsin. If you’ve ever spent time in the upper Midwest, you know that you’re never too far away from someone who knows someone with a spot on a lake, and they’d love to have you out sometime. In the case of Claud Six, his grandparents were the ones with lake access, deepening the connection to that life on bodies of water, sharing time with his family fishing, swimming, and just spending time with his family.

Emapea is a Polish producer who has been releasing music since the mid-2010s. He had a breakthrough stateside when he teamed up with Los Angeles emcee Kid Abstrakt to release the album Jazzy Vibes in 2020. Since then, he’s had some great solo releases, including Bees, Trees, and Flowers. Just this past November, he dropped another album, Still Got It, on Hip Dozer. Now he’s back once again, this time with a full-length album called Beat Catz Jazz.