Ackryte is a producer from Minneapolis who has been releasing music for over a decade now, collaborating with artists like J’Von and Broke and Repeat Pattern along the way. His most recent album, Spirits Up, came out at the beginning of 2022. Now he’s back with a new album, stillgood.

The thing about someone like Ackryte is that he works in such a subtle fashion, it can be easy to take him for granted. When you sit down with a project like stillgood, however, you can quickly see that Ackryte is not just giving you some generic downtempo music. He’s really clever with the samples and flips, with a heavy jazz influence to his compositions, and you can always hear the ways in which he’s trying to do interesting things with his rhythmic patterns and layering melodic elements in unexpected ways. The thing is, he’s so good at it, and it feels so natural, it’s easy to take all of it for granted. That is, until you’re in the moment, listening carefully, and you hear him manipulate a piano line or invert a drum pattern, and it becomes clear how much is happening with his music just below the surface. Because of all that work and subtlety, Ackryte is able to give us releases like stillgood that are really beautiful and peaceful to listen to, but they are also complex enough that they never sound boring or predictable.

Ackryte has been at this for a minute, and he continues to build and work to give us some of the finest instrumental hip hop out there. It’s lovely, jazzy, and gorgeous, but it’s also musically complex and layered in such a way that you can keep coming back to it and unpacking another layer to the project each time through.