Neila is an emcee from Los Angeles who comes out of the Project Blowed camp, and one who’s been putting out music for about the past fifteen years. Her last album, Analog Jewelry, came out almost exactly one year ago. She now follows that up with her fourteenth album, Strangers Stories.

While her last two albums had some interesting inspirations and concepts to them, Strangers Stories is a much more straight-ahead hip hop album. For the album, she enlists the help of producers Klas, Avatar, Nemcis, and Vingthor the Hunter, and then gets live instrumentation from Aka Pepper Jack, Avatar, Tommy V, and Ceschi. When everything comes together, you get a little bit of everything from rock to funk to dub, all coming together under the umbrella of some weird West Coast boom bap. The majority of the album comes across on the midtempo grooves, which is exactly what Neila needs to sit in the pocket and spit her rhymes. She’s a vivid storyteller, with a real knack for some really interesting poetic imagery, which she will occasionally cut through with some really personal confessional tales. There are a fair number of guests on the mic as well, with Cam the Wiz, Dr. Oop, Xololanxinxo, Lord Zen, and Dannu, all hopping on to trade verses with Neila. What makes it noteworthy here is the way in which the energy on each track makes it fee like they are in the room with each other, really feeding off each other’s energy and trying to outdo each other with their verses. I can’t speak to exactly how the album was recorded, but however they did it, they managed to capture that magic. The whole album is one that sounds best on headphones as you’re walking around the city, drinking up every weird beat and loaded lyrical line, really getting in your head and letting everything bounce around.

Neila has been at this for quite a while now, and she knows how to put together a compelling album. Strangers Stories is full of great beats and rhymes that are slightly askew from the norm, with enough complexity that you’ll discover something new each time through.