Surprise Chef All News Is Good News

Published Nov 07, 2019

It's hard to square the realities of 2019 with the title All News Is Good News, the debut from Australian instrumental soul band Surprise Ch...

Rapsody Laila's Wisdom

Published Sep 26, 2017

Snow Hill, North Carolina only has 1,614 residents, but one of them has five mixtapes, three albums, a To Pimp a Butterfly Grammy and, now,...

Tangina Stone Elevate

Published Sep 26, 2017

Elevate is the debut album from Ohio-born, Brooklyn-based Tangina Stone, the followup to her EP The Fall, and the first release on Anastasia...

Mali Music The Transition of Mali

Published Jun 02, 2017

Even after 2014's Mali Is… earned him two Grammy nominations, Mali Music is still humble enough to overtly reintroduce himself mid-song. It...

Will Sessions Deluxe

Published Apr 21, 2017

Many will have first heard the name Will Sessions when they acted as the backing band for Elzhi's 2011 album, Elmatic, a recreation of Nas's...

Tuxedo Tuxedo II

Published Mar 24, 2017

Tuxedo II is the conspicuous continuation of 2015's Tuxedo, the lauded then-side project of Mayer Hawthorne and producer Jake One that found...

Ronald Bruner Jr. Triumph

Published Mar 01, 2017

It's a shame there's no music industry equivalent to the academic practice of adding letters behind one's name to signify learned experience...

Saba Bucket List Project

Published Nov 02, 2016

Chicago, the apparent poster child city for arts incubation, has again staked its claim to 2016 with the release of Saba's Bucket List Proje...

Kadhja Bonet The Visitor

Published Oct 21, 2016

On the surface, Kadhja Bonet's The Visitor appears as a throwback to an era of gentle '60s-tinged jazz records. Over strings and buried drum...

NxWorries Yes Lawd!

Published Oct 19, 2016

Anderson .Paak and producer Knxwledge's Yes Lawd! feels in many ways like the spiritual successor to Below the Heavens, the 2007 collaborati...

​NAO Takes Control

Published Aug 22, 2016

"I was learning about my sound quite publicly," NAO says, reflecting on the progression between 2014's So Good EP and last year's February 1...

NAO Stakes Her Own Claim with 'For All We Know'

Published Jul 29, 2016

NAO wants to set the record straight. "Essentially, everything about the album — and I don't think it's arrogant to say — the album definite...

NAO For All We Know

Published Jul 27, 2016

Two weeks before the release of her debut full-length album, UK R&B singer NAO was worried. The perpetual rumour mill of pending Frank Ocean...

Oddisee Alwasta

Published Mar 29, 2016

We are told to separate the art and the artist, but Oddisee makes that proposition difficult. His work is so rooted in his development as a...

Esperanza Spalding Emily's D+Evolution

Published Mar 02, 2016

On her fifth solo album, Esperanza Spalding asks, what if her younger self had not gone on to pursue jazz greatness and instead embraced her...

BJ the Chicago Kid In My Mind

Published Feb 22, 2016

BJ the Chicago Kid's EP of D'Angelo covers last month wasn't a dramatic reimagining of the material; there was no attempt to update the perf...

KING We Are King

Published Feb 05, 2016

Five years after first introducing themselves to the world, KING wish to do so again with the plainly stated We Are King, the group's debut...

Adrian Younge Something About April II

Published Jan 22, 2016

Los Angeles law school grad turned self-taught composer extraordinaire Adrian Younge has had a stealthy ascent following 2012's Something Ab...

Kae Sun Oceans Apart EP

Published Nov 20, 2015

Oceans Apart is the latest offering from Ghanaian-Canadian singer/songwriter Kae Sun, critically acclaimed for his 2013 Afriyie album. But t...

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings It's A Holiday Soul Party

Published Oct 30, 2015

The holiday album: occasionally classic; more often, a cash-in. As an audience, we mostly tolerate, rather than love, holiday albums. They d...