De La Soul "Itzsoweezee (Hot) [feat. Yankee B.] [De La Soul Remix]" [SINGLE]

A remix from 1996, issued as a single in 2026, because Stakes Is High is thirty years old and is being reissued in an expanded edition remastered, with a bonus disc, through A.O.I. Records and Chrysalis. This is one pull from it, and it is a strange and deliberate choice. " Itzsoweezee (Hot)" was the second single from the album and the one track on it rapped entirely by Trugoy the Dove. He died in February 2023 at fifty-four, after several years of congestive heart failure he had spoken about publicly. Pushing the remix the version that carries Yankee B., originally the B-side of the 1996 single as the standalone from a thirtieth-anniversary campaign means the group is leading with the song on which Dave is alone, and with a version of it that very few people own. The remix is credited to De La Soul themselves, with Ken "Duro" Ifill engineering. It opens by naming its allegiances rather than boasting: "Brick wall dedication / Yankee B affiliation / Attic representation / Beatminerz up in the location / Native Tongues appreciation." The chorus asks the question the album was built around "If money makes a man strange and dollars make the world go round? / we got to rearrange" and it lands differently three decades on than it did the first time, when the group was watching their own label situation turn into exactly that problem. Yankee B.'s contribution is the reason the track exists in this form, and he has essentially one credit to his name, which is this one. Whether the single carries the original 1996 master or a fresh mix has not been stated anywhere; the remastering is documented, a new mix of this particular track is not.

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Starvin B x Seasra23 "7 TRAIN LUNGS 2" [ALBUM]

A sequel, and a late one: the first 7 Train Lungs came out in 2015, produced by Seasra23 for Starvin B, recorded in Queens and mastered in a studio that put its name to it. This one arrives more than a decade later with the same two men in the same roles Seasra23 on every beat, Starvin B on the microphone, Top Shelf Muzik as the imprint and seven tracks in under twenty-four minutes. The album's own note is unusually direct about what is at stake. It describes Starvin B "reflect[ing] on a career as a serial face puncher," and then says that heart surgery has forced him "to confront the possibility of retirement." That is the label's framing, not a medical statement, but it explains the record's shape: the tracklist is a route, not a collection. "Roosevelt Ave" opens it, "Atlantic Ave Terminal" brings Ruste Juxx in at the third stop, "Viral Tap" with Mic Rippa sits in the middle, and it closes on "Concrete Clouds" at just over two minutes. In between: "Dreams Die in Queens" and "USA Jacket." The 7 train runs above ground through the whole borough, and the record uses it as a spine. Top Shelf Muzik was formed in 2011 by Apokalips The Archangel out of Jackson Heights and Seasra23 out of Woodside, and the label's own history is written on its page in capitals B.A.R.S, Underdog of the Year, Breaking Barriers, Another Side of Me. Starvin B, born Brendan Noer, is a Sunnyside/Woodside MC with a catalogue that runs through Soul Museum, Melting Pot and Sorry For Your Laws, and Ruste Juxx and Mic Rippa are the two guests whose names carry beyond the neighbourhood. There is a salute to DJ AKIL and Chez Rocka at the end of the note, and no formal credit block which, for a record this clearly organised, is the one thing the page does not do.

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Buckshot "What I Bring To The Table" [VIDEO]

A video from The Package, the album Buckshot released through Duck Down in July twelve tracks, thirty minutes, one producer. BDI Thug is credited on every single song, and he is credited again here, which is the kind of consistency that independent rap used to take for granted and now rarely bothers with. The track is the third on the record and runs 2:35; the video, directed by Sun Bronx, goes 2:43. Buckshot opens by placing himself: "You might have seen me with Tupac in two spots / or I might have been with Biggie on the rooftop." It is a claim about where he was standing rather than about who he knew, and the rest of the verse works the same way he lists what has changed around him ("times change, rhymes change, minds change, design change") and then says what has not. The hook is four lines repeated: "I'mma get mine. Better get yours. I'm breaking them all." That is not a threat, it is a work ethic, and it is the most Boot Camp sentence imaginable. He has described the album as the soundtrack to a short film about the future of Brooklyn, and it comes through Duck Down the label he helped build and has kept running as independent infrastructure across several different eras of the business. There is one guest on the whole record, General Steele on "Night Stress," which tells you the album is not a summit. It is one man, one producer, and thirty minutes, pressed on vinyl, CD and cassette.

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Nam Nitty "Da Nas Beat" (feat. Jay Royale) [VIDEO]

A visual from CRACK BABY 4 : MICHELE'S BABY BOY, and the fourth installment of a series Nam Nitty has been running since 2020 on his own Secret Sosiety Entertainment he is the CEO, and on the earlier volumes he was the entire production desk as well: produced, mixed, arranged, executive produced, all under one name. On this one the video credits give him a single line for production and a single guest. The credit is worth a second look. The video names Jay Royale and nobody else. Two independent listings of the album's tracklist give track four as "Da Nas Beat" featuring Jay Royale and Tone Spliff and Spliff appears twice elsewhere on the record, so his absence here is more likely an omission than a change to the song. Both names belong in the account, and the discrepancy is the kind of thing a label can fix in one edit. The song is a street-rap record with a hook that says exactly what it is about: "I ain't never had a job, but I had drug money." Nitty builds it around a refrain rather than around a punchline, and the video credited as "a film by Spike Tarantino" is structured like a short: dialogue scenes in and around a car, an exchange about a Knicks bet, a dealer explaining his clientele, before the verse lands. At just over four minutes it is the longest track in the album's opening stretch, and the title does what it says: a beat built to be ridden the way a certain Queensborough MC would ride it. The album runs ten tracks and around thirty-five minutes, nearly all of them carrying a feature, with the same names circling back Tone Spliff, Voice Watkins, John Jigg$ from the Mxnxpxly Family that Nitty came up in and now runs. Four volumes in, that consistency is the business model.

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Skinny Bonez Tha Godfatha & Draco The Drama Demon "Vash" [EP]

Four tracks, nine minutes, name-your-price. The pairing is Philadelphia and the Netherlands: Draco The Drama Demon raps and recorded his own vocals, Skinny Bonez Tha Godfatha made every beat, and the record carries a single institutional credit Marsten House Recording on all four tracks. That studio is the reason the record exists. Marsten House sits on North 9th Street in Philadelphia, was founded in 2008, and grew out of the city's hardcore punk scene; its owner, Steve Sxaks, came out of a punk band called Fruit Punch and also records as a solo hip-hop artist. The studio is best known for the Marsten House Cyphers live, one-take sessions with a rotating cast of MCs and Skinny Bonez, a Dutch producer and DJ who started making beats around 2010, has been supplying music for those cyphers for roughly nine years. That is how the two met, and how the earlier Housewarming EP happened last year. Vash is the first record credited to the two of them directly. Sxaks mixed and mastered this one himself and takes a feature on the closing track, "God Forbid." The Wampthing comes through on "All Fucked Up." Draco also did the artwork, which is a detail worth noting on a nine-minute EP: the rapper made the cover, recorded the vocals and drew the sleeve. What is on the page is otherwise thin and should be reported as thin. Draco is described only as a Philadelphia MC, with no previous releases verifiable, and the title is never explained anywhere in the credits or the notes. Nine minutes of boom bap from a Dutch producer and a Philly rapper who met in a cypher is a reasonable thing to exist. That is the whole of what can honestly be said about it.

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St. Ivan The Terrible "Don't Kill the Messenger" [VIDEO]

There is a detail here that reorders everything else: St. Ivan The Terrible does not put his music on streaming. Not as a statement, as far as anyone can tell it simply is not there. Thee Elder Statesman 2, Carmina Ex Catacumbis and the rest of the catalogue are sold through his own website and nowhere else. In 2026 that is a decision with consequences, and the 25 views on this video are one of them. He is in his fifties, from the Bronx, and has been recording under this name for more than twenty years, having earlier worked as Joust the Terrorist. His stated influences Kool G Rap, KRS-One, LL Cool J, Big Daddy Kane, Slick Rick, Rakim, Guru are the list of a man who learned to write when writing was the point. He put out two projects this year already: Thee Elder Statesman 2, ten tracks with a different guest on every one and all of it produced by him, and Carmina Ex Catacumbis, seven tracks with D.R.U.G.S. Beats. Thee Elder Statesman 3 is due before the year is out, self-produced again, and this is the latest video from it. He produced the track himself, with Device Trax also a guest on the second Elder Statesman co-producing on bass, and DJ OneshotDeal mixing and mastering, whom he has described as a brother. The title is the thesis. The verse is a long address to people he watches become what they used to complain about, delivered without a hook and without a raised voice: "Forgot where you came from. Can't see where you going." His own site sums up the position more bluntly "no buffoonery, no gimmicks, no fake flexing" and at this stage of a career that is not a pose, it is a description of the work.

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Westside Gunn "ZILLA" [SINGLE]

The video came first, back in late August, on Gunn's own channels. The single arrived properly in October, and it carries the announcement with it: HEELMATIC, sixteen tracks, out in November through Griselda Records and Mass Appeal his first release with Mass Appeal, the label whose Legend Has It series reportedly talked him out of whatever he had been planning instead. Denny LaFlare produced it. The two go back years; Gunn told an interviewer in 2022 that he thought of LaFlare and Conductor Williams as family and wanted them around him rather than just receiving beats in an email, which is a specific thing for an artist to say about producers and explains why this partnership keeps returning. Critics have described the beat variously as "lurching" and "sputtering" and as "droning," with Gunn's customary "boom, boom, boom, boom" threaded through it those are their words, not ours; the audio is not in front of us. The video was shot in Egypt, which is not a location Gunn has any obvious claim on: him at the Great Pyramid, on a camel, around Cairo. He has said he made the album while moving sessions near the Eiffel Tower, near the Acropolis in Athens, at the Saucony offices, in Berlin and Chicago and that the result is "grimey, dusty, raw, mixed w/ jazz but it sounds like gospel." Whether or not it does, the travel is in the record's DNA, and shooting a video at the pyramids is consistent with an album assembled in airports. The line people picked up on is a streetwear complaint: "Virgil rolling in his grave, they got Off-White in Costco." There is also a Waymo drive-by and a Jeff Bezos reference, which is to say Gunn is still writing about money the way a man who remembers not having it writes about money. It is track three on the album.

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Boe & Villa "Pullin' Up" [VIDEO]

Two minutes forty-three, produced by Black Sparx, uploaded through the producer's own channel. The description is six lines and says one thing that matters: this is "an exclusive banger … out of the vault," which is to say older material, pulled out and given a video now rather than recorded for one. That is close to the limit of what can be verified. There is no director, no label, no release date for the audio, no location and nothing on either Boe or Villa that holds up to checking. A track called "Pullin' Up" featuring a rapper named King Jaffe Boe exists elsewhere online, but there is no way to establish that it is the same person, so it stays out of the account. What the song itself does is legible from the words. The hook "Don't ever let them tell you you ain't good enough / especially not the ones who ain't pulling up" is a loyalty test as much as a boast, and the verses run on chess: "If it ain't chess, don't ever play with us," "that checkmate is bittersweet," "I hit your queen bee, get your honey clipped." Two voices trade it back and forth. Beyond that, nothing here can be assessed honestly no audio, no credits, no context, and four views on a video that has clearly not been pushed anywhere.

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BlabberMouf x Merlin Alexander "2 Underground" [VIDEO]

Four countries on one song, which is not unusual in European underground hip-hop and is still worth saying out loud. BlabberMouf Ruben Widdershoven, from Heerlen in the Dutch province of Limburg, rapping since he was fifteen and a member of Het VerZet and Da Shogunz shares the microphone with Merlin Alexander, who comes from Zürich. The beat is by Chang Kee Jazz, a Basel producer who works on an SP1200, an EPS 16 Plus and an MPC60 and describes his output as "boom bap to the fullest." Mix and mastering came from Figub Brazlevič in Berlin, who runs Krekpek Records and has been connecting exactly these kinds of people for a decade; Alexander has been in that orbit since at least 2016, when he appeared on "Europe Under Pressure" alongside BlabberMouf. This is the first single from a forthcoming EP called Misfitz, and the song is honest about where its authors sit. "We in the upper echelon," goes one line, and then, immediately: "We down, but I don't know if we still too underground." That is the whole question for two MCs who have been doing this a long time without ever becoming famous for it, and the track does not resolve it it just keeps rapping. "Send the FM lab a memo / tell them that the goons are ready to come through," which is either a joke about radio or a serious request, and probably both. The video was shot and directed by Samuel De Cataldo. It closes with the two of them trading "LAX / to the world / 20 hundred 26 / all year round," which is a modest boast from people who have been at it since 2003 and 2014 respectively. At 3:28 the song takes its time, and the EP is still to come.

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Choco Valens "👁️ Never Miss" [VIDEO]

Three minutes long, and the only line of information attached to it is a website address. No producer, no director, no label, no release date for the audio. This is as thin a submission as a release can be and still be a release. What is verifiable: Choco Valens is a Miami artist who has been covered repeatedly by one US hip-hop outlet over the past two years, and whose single "Hell On Earth" featured Gil Scott-Heron. That is a genuine line on a résumé. The same outlet, writing about "Hell On Earth," described "Never Miss" as a track on which Choco "confronts the music industry's gatekeepers" which suggests this recording has been sitting around for a while and the video is late rather than simultaneous. That cannot be confirmed, and it is worth saying so rather than smoothing it over. The track itself opens on spoken dialogue about sending money home, then moves into dense, associative verse Serena Williams, Skywalker, Chappelle, Buzz Lightyear, a marathon before closing on "I never miss stupid. Shout out to Nas." Beyond the words, nothing here can be assessed honestly: there is no audible description available, and the absence of credits means there is no way to say who built the track or where it was made.

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twogeebs "That Nigga Crazy (2nd Half)" [VIDEO]

Seventy-four seconds long, uploaded under a title that is itself an instruction: "2nd half of track 14 from Everybody Wanna Go To Heaven But Nobody Wanna Die." There is no album with that title. There is, however, a fourteen-track record called They Hated Jesus At First released last autumn through DITCD.COM, a label operating out of Kailua Kona, Hawaii and its closing track is called exactly that. Read the description that way and this is the back end of the last song on that album, which is also why it arrives more than a year after the record it comes from. The arithmetic does not quite work a 3:40 track halved should give roughly 1:50, and this runs 1:14 so either the video is cut tighter than the label suggests or the description is doing something else. It is worth flagging rather than resolving. What is on screen is mostly voice. The piece opens on a spoken monologue about normality "if you are normal in a world like this, you the one that's crazy… the ones that you calling crazy, strange and crazy, they have tapped into levels of spirituality that you don't understand" before the verse starts. The rap that follows is dense and unforgiving, moving through 9/11, a subpoena, and a line about song-after-song struggle that names itself: "It's trauma porn." The hook is a repeated "surf on the track," which is either a producer's name being chanted or a joke about how the beat moves, and without the audio it is not possible to say which. twogeebs works in Zilla Rocca's DITCD.COM circle, where he goes by Zilla F. Baby, and has released four projects since early 2025, including a joint album with Action Figure 973 this summer. Seventeen views on a video this considered is the least interesting number in the entry.

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Action Figure 973 "I MISS MAKING BEATS" [ALBUM]

The title is a statement of purpose, and the credit block backs it up: produced entirely by Action Figure 973, with every rap written and performed by one of the eleven guests. He does not appear on the microphone himself. The album's own note explains the premise in a single line these are beats that were sitting on his phone and deserved to see daylight which is a more honest description of a producer compilation than most. Action Figure 973 works out of Belleville, New Jersey, and the 973 in the name is simply the area code; he chose it over any explanation for the rest. He performs as a luchador, a masked pro-wrestling identity in the tradition that runs closer to MF DOOM than to anything else in rap right now, and the track titles carry the concept without ever making it a costume drama: "DDP Intro," "DDP 2," "Pillman 9 Mili," "Extreme Queen," "Teddy Sanchez." The other half of the titles are food "Red Lobster Biscuits," "Chinese Food," "'95 Denver Nuggets" which is the joke, and it never stops being funny. What he does on the record is curate. EricTheRed13 appears twice, and the rest of the roster HooksArthur, Echo, MC Wicks, Jay Rhymes, Bizzle, Con$piracy, Hound, Greybeard, Lex, Kesper, SHIRT, Act-Lo get one track each, most of them under three minutes, the whole thing running twenty-seven. Four separate names are listed on mix and master with no per-track attribution, which is consistent with a record assembled from material made at different times by different people and finished in batches. He has been prolific since 2022 two mixtapes, fifteen EPs, three albums and released a joint project with twogeebs earlier this year. This one is the producer stepping back and letting the phone's worth of beats carry it.

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Mic Gutz "Authors Of Pain" (feat. RJ Payne) [VIDEO]

Read the tracklist of Mean G from top to bottom and the concept announces itself without a press release: "Mean G," "The Immortal," "Open Challenge," "Repo Man," "L.A. Knight," "The Yes Movement," "Steiner Math," "Authors Of Pain," "Curb Stomp," "Night Of Champions." Eleven tracks, thirty-eight minutes, every title a wrestling term, and "Authors Of Pain" the name of a tag team which is exactly the joke the song is built on, since the track is a two-man feature. Mic Gutz is from Toronto and has been releasing consistently since the mid-2010s through his own We Eat Beats operation, with a deal from Motive Music Canada along the way and a hand in Connect The Dot, which puts Ontario artists on bills together. He is a compiler as much as a rapper: Mean G carries Jux Cain, DJ Mercilless twice, Dan-e-o, Choclair, Black Tye Chi, Specs, Mark Jordan, Dre Specz, Swann, $ource and Grinz. Grinz Beats produced this one, as he produced "Screwface Cap" earlier in the year; Prince Beatz Media shot the video, and had shot Mic Gutz videos before that. The guest is the draw. RJ Payne born Robert J. Evans, once known as Reign Man came up in battle rap out of Brooklyn by way of Philadelphia, made his name on a "Murder In Less Than 60 Seconds" freestyle series, and has spent the last few years releasing at a rate most artists cannot sustain; 2026 alone has produced three projects. He is a punchline writer first, and the hook here gives him the frame for it: "People's scripture is the authors of pain," which he flips in his own verse to "Pistol scriptures is the authors of pain." Two verses, one title, and two different people being blamed for the damage.

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Sha Hef "Hell's Kitchen" [VIDEO]

The lead single from Shark Tank 2, produced by Nicholas Craven and directed by Miguel415. The title is a load-bearing double meaning and Sha Hef knows it: "I cook the work so good, I need a Michelin Star." The whole verse runs on that register kitchen and kilo, plating and product and he never breaks character to point at it. Hef, born Rashaad Harcum, comes out of the Bronx and records variously as $ha Hef and Hunnit Round Hef. The album this leads is a sequel: the first Shark Tank came out in 2023 on Black Market Records, eight tracks with Craven on every beat, and the two have been working together long enough that "their forthcoming album" is accurate phrasing rather than marketing. Craven's own catalogue runs through Crime Scenes with Ransom and Gia … À La Carte with Raz Fresco and Estee Nack, which is a useful shorthand for the sound sample-driven, unhurried, built to sit under a talker. What separates the verse from a routine coke-rap exercise is that Hef keeps letting other things in: "little bit of Malcolm in a quarter," a judge "turn[ing] paper soldiers into origami," and a recurring line about things never adding up "until we even the hearts." The hook circles rather than resolves, and at 2:39 nothing overstays. Between this and June's Hustlin Ain't a Sin thirteen tracks in thirty-seven minutes he is working at a pace that makes the album's arrival a question of when, not whether.

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Suttle "My Way" [EP]

Seven tracks, just over nineteen minutes, and the first record to come out of a collaboration between two cities that do not usually get mentioned in the same sentence. Suttle is from Penrith, in Western Sydney. DJ Begzy is from Newcastle, about a hundred and sixty kilometres north-east up the coast. The EP's own note opens by asking what the two places have in common and answers, more or less, "this." The division of labour is clean. Suttle wrote every lyric and takes four of the seven tracks alone; Begzy produced and cut the rest; Bigredcap another Novocastrian mixed, mastered and did the front cover, with Breanna S on the back. Three guests come through: Dunn D on "No Chance," Omac on "Big Night Out," and label mate RapperB.Raw on "Punchline Funk." At 3:59, "No Chance" is the longest thing here by a distance; "Intro" runs fifty seconds and "Nah, Yeah, Nah" closes it at 2:19. That is an EP built with an eye on total length rather than on filling space. The page carries a back-link to a label, Rah! Records, though nothing on the release itself states the affiliation, so it stays a link and not a credit. The note calls the record "a taste of things to come from both artists," which is a promise rather than a description. What is actually on the page: a rapper from Western Sydney, a producer and a mixer from Newcastle, and forty minutes' worth of decisions made about what to leave out the whole thing is under twenty.

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Bogey & TOAST187 "HUSTLE OR STARVE." [ALBUM]

Eleven tracks, just under twenty-nine minutes, and a credit block with no ambiguity in it: all vocals and lyrics by Bogey, produced entirely by TOAST187, released through Digital Toast Music. One writer, one producer, no guests, no co-producers, nothing to argue about. TOAST187 is a Harlem producer whose own description of his work is "raw cinematic hip hop beats" with the nineties as the reference point, and the label's write-up for this record says what you would expect it to say dusty vinyl samples, chopped soul, jazz and funk, boom-bap drums, no gimmicks, no shortcuts. That is the label describing its own album, and it should be read as a statement of intent rather than a review. What can be said without having heard it: the running order is tight to the point of severity. Nothing crosses four minutes except "Vintage:Bobby Garnett," two tracks sit under two-and-a-half, and the whole thing closes with "The Game is Pain" at 2:29. This is a record built to be finished in one sitting, which is a decision, not an accident. The gap is on the other side of the credit line. Bogey writes every word and raps every verse on the album, and there is nothing publicly verifiable about him no biography, no previous release, no location beyond the New York tag on the page. The producer has a profile; the MC arrives on his own work and nothing else. For a record with this much craft in its packaging, that asymmetry is the most interesting thing about it. The page is currently promoting a free listening party with both artists.

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NEZZY "Poltergeist" [VIDEO]

The producer credit is the story. NEZZY raps out of Sandusky, Ohio; the beat comes from DJ Fastcut Valerio Alessi, born in Rome in 1986, a turntablist and producer who has worked with KRS-One, Busta Rhymes, Snoop Dogg, Ghostface Killah, Sean Price and Ruste Juxx, and who built the Dead Poets album series into a standing institution in Italian underground hip-hop. It is not the pairing anyone would predict, which is part of why it exists: Fastcut has spent a career working outward from Rome, and NEZZY is exactly the kind of American lyricist that network reaches. This is their third outing together. On NEZZY's The Infamous N.E.Z. released in the spring, his fourth album Fastcut produced "Def Jam Vendetta" and the lead single "Kaboom Bap," and the working relationship clearly held. "Poltergeist" is a standalone, released on his own Infamous Studios imprint with a Halloween tag, and it is not attached to any announced project. The writing is horror as method rather than costume. The hook "Now hold on, Charlie. There's something cold inside me. Might be a poltergeist. You will be my host tonight" is sung as an address to a mark, and the verses stack concrete images instead of adjectives: skeletons in a closet that are getting hard to ignore, a pentagram carved into the hardwood, a figure leaping out of television static on an old Zenith, an EMF reader blinking red, a cemetery visit at thirteen that ends with a car that will not start. That last one is the tell. The song is not really about ghosts; it is about the moment you realise you brought something home with you. NEZZY, born Tanner Slade Nesbit in 1999, has put out two EPs, five albums and a second EP since 2022, most recently BLACKBOOK, a tribute to the late Tame One. He works fast and he works often. This is the kind of single that gets made when somebody with that pace decides to stop for a holiday.

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Will Sully & Sha Money XL "U Die Once" [VIDEO]

The second single from The Northside Connection, and the naming is doing the same work it did on the first one: the single, the album and the premise all carry the same name, so there is nothing to explain and nothing to soft-pedal. Sha Money XL produced it, Mike Laz mixed it, Matt Fingaz directed the video. Sha Money XL's credit carries history he was the producer and executive centrally involved in the rise of 50 Cent and G-Unit and pairing him with a New York lyricist under a title like this sets expectations that the track has to meet on its own. The album runs twelve songs when it lands next month, with four skits featuring Pat The Villain and a guest spot from D.V. Alias Khryst, which is the shape of a record built as a place rather than a playlist: intro, title cut, skits named after the people in the room. Sully writes in short, loaded lines and lets the hook do the holding. The refrain "you live and you die once" is simple enough to be a slogan and he treats it that way, repeating it rather than decorating it. Around it he moves through Spanish phrases, a Spielberg reference, Bruce Leroy, and a stretch of pure graffiti-writer braggadocio ("I'm the architect of the building"), which is roughly the register this kind of Queens record has always used. The video runs about twenty seconds longer than the album version, which usually means an intro or a tag; without the audio in front of us, that is as far as it goes. Sully announced the project over the summer by rapping a freestyle over Gang Starr's "Chaos," which is a reasonably bold way to introduce yourself and a producer like Sha Money XL.

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Armani Caesar x Benny The Butcher "Sephora In Ibiza" [VIDEO]

Two Buffalo rappers, one track, and a credit line that reads Armani Caesar Publishing and Griselda Records no producer is listed, so none gets named here. The video, directed by Todd UNO with a VHS pass over the footage, does the obvious thing well. Armani drives through the city with her friends, filming them on a camcorder, which gives the whole thing a hand-held, we-were-there quality that a glossier treatment would have killed. Benny appears later, framed against fire, and the colour grading holds both registers together. It opens with her line "Fly Armani Caesar, out to Ibiza, go to the jeweler get flooded like FEMA" and Benny answers with the one that names the song: "She call my phone I ignore her, a bitch wanna make up and go to Sephora." That is the whole conceit in two bars: a cosmetics chain next to a Spanish island, played as a joke about money rather than about either. What makes it worth more than the sum of its parts is that the pairing no longer reads as novelty. Armani, born Joclynn Clyburn in 1989, has spent six years building a catalogue that does not depend on the co-sign "Simply Done," produced by DJ Premier, remains one of Griselda's cleanest singles, and The Liz 2 and this year's "The Liz Symphony" followed. A Benny feature in 2026 lands differently than the same feature would have in 2020, and he seems to know it: his verse closes by running through Detroit, New York, Upstate and Philly, which is a way of saying the record is not only for one city. The single is distributed through Roc Nation.

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Dillon & Paten Locke "Flying Fish" [VIDEO]

A video for a ten-year-old song, and one that arrives with a reason: Side Dishes is being pressed on vinyl for the first time, in tandem with a tenth-anniversary edition of the Food Chain album it was made to accompany. The EP came out in 2016 on FULL PLATE as a cassette-only companion piece a hundred tapes, instrumentals on the B-side and the only way to hear Paten Locke's beats without Dillon on top of them was to buy the tape. Locke made the beat, arranged the record and cut the scratches; Dillon, born Dillon Vaughan Maurer, rapped it, recorded and mixed it in 2016 at a studio in Atlanta, and edited this video. The clip was shot in Negril, Jamaica, by Janie Kol and Maurer himself, and the credits carry the line "Beat: Paten Locke | (RIP)." He also produced Rations, the pair's most recent full album together, which came out last autumn with Large Professor, Masta Ace, Diamond D and Black Sheep Dres among the guests so this reissue is not a nostalgia exercise so much as the closing bracket on a working partnership. At 3:44 the video runs nearly a minute longer than the 2:47 track, and the reason is visible: it opens on spoken dialogue between two characters arguing about lunch, tagged "Previously on FOOD CHAIN," before the beat arrives. The song itself is a food-chain joke taken seriously empanadas, rice and peas, quinoa bowls, "hit you with a full plate" and Lobsterdamus, who shares the credit on the original recording, is not named in the video's description even though the track carries his name on the EP. The cover art, like the hat thanked in the credits, is by Pete Chung better known as Cool Calm Pete.

Transparency Note: Content & research created independently by HHHEADZ. AI tools are strictly used for translation and language refinement.