There are always artists who blow up off one album and then plateau from there. In some cases, they’ll release a deluxe for said album, and it’ll keep the brand going until the “moment” has passed. But once an artist has done both of those things and then dropped an EP to the same level of praise, you know they’re here to stay. The 6-track EP titled “Avant Nova” is only a precursor to slayr’s upcoming album “Fabula Nova,” and what it lacks in runtime, it makes up for in absolute bangers. As...

Ask Brooklyn-based rapper rivan where his name comes from and you get a family tree with a folk tale tangled in the roots. It is his father's middle name, borrowed from Rip Van Winkle, the old story about a man who would rather do anything than his chores, drinks himself into a decades-long sleep, and wakes up to find the world has carried on wthout him. Where Rip Van Winkle slept through his own life, rivan has spent the past few years determined to stay very much awake for his. That...

Anything that has a Danny Brown feature will immediately grab my attention, but sometimes his verse is all I’ll get out of the tracklist. That is not the case at all for Wesley Joseph’s debut project “Forever Ends Someday”. As a vulnerable, coming-of-age record, 13 songs and 37 minutes is all it took for me to decide that he is one of the most exciting acts coming out of London today. With silky smooth vocals from Jorja Smith and a verse from aforementioned hip-hop legend Danny Brown, this...