Run The Jewels - Run The Jewels 3 [2016]

Hip-Hop is funny isn't it? Honestly, who would've thought that one of the best recent hip-hop groups would be formed from El-P, of abstract hip-hop Def Jux fame and Killer Mike, who earned his stripes working in an Atlanta hip-hop scene that couldn't sound any more different than that? Even more surprising is that the fruits of this combination have given both rappers, who could have definitely been described as veterans before Run The Jewels was even an idea, an unprecedented level of attention. In a way, RTJ operates as a modern day M.O.P. - although they sound radically different and (unlike M.O.P.) get blatantly political, there are two things that you are guaranteed on every RTJ album that you would be guaranteed in M.O.P's hey-day (Firing Squad, First Family For Life, Warriorz): aggressive lyrics filled with braggadocio accompanied by extremely banging beats.

Solange - A Seat At The Table [2016]

In recent years D'Angelo's Black Messiah and Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly, albums that undeniably pull from the rich past of black music, genres like funk, soul and jazz, but at the same time feel fresh and contain socio-political commentary ("The Charade", "Alright"), have been released to wide mainstream and critical success. Each album performed extremely well on the charts, with D'Angelo and Kendrick Lamar reaching number five and number one on the billboard charts respectively. If these albums are continuing any relatively recent musical lineage, it is that of the Soulquarians, an eclectic collective of instrumentalists, singers and rappers of which D'Angelo himself was apart of. The Soulquarians, which consisted of Erykah Badu, Bilal, Common, D'Angelo, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Pino Palladino, James Poyser, Roy Hargrove, Q-Tip, Questlove, J Dilla and Raphael Saadiq, created a number of beautiful albums during the late 90s and early 2000s, that were full of soul (be it the expression or the actual genre), jazzy, funky and at times contained socio-political - pro-black - commentary (e.g: Common - Like Water For Chocolate). 2014 gave us Black Messiah, 2015 To Pimp A Butterfly and 2016's gift is Solange's A Seat at the Table, the latest, Soulquarian-descendent to take the charts by storm.  

Noname - Telefone [2016]

In a by-gone era, when visiting the ridiculously big (and now non-existent) Virgin record store in Manhattan was one of the highlights of my life as a young music enthusiast, the first thing that would have drawn me to Telefone would have been the cover. Like many great album covers, the art that accompanies the mixtape makes a statement without words, a statement that, more or less, lets the observer know what the content of this project will be. It's a simple, but powerful image: a young black girl, with flowers in her hand and a skull on her head. She is young, innocent, but weighed down by death - mourning. Telefone is a mixtape that deals with innocence, youth and growth. However, the most interesting - and at times heartbreaking - aspect about Noname's debut is how she juxtaposes the innocence, sonically and lyrically, with the harsh reality, which comes in the form of racism, police brutality and loss.

Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool [2016]

Radiohead knocked it out of the park when choosing the two singles, "Burn The Witch" and "Daydreaming". Outside of the context of this album, they are both quite stellar, and in the case of "Daydreaming", hypnotically beautiful. Aside from that, a listen to this record reveals that these two songs were probably the two most effective, in terms of being a near-perfect teaser trailer for this album. The songs that introduced the public to A Moon Shaped Pool didn't give away too little or too much - they revealed just enough.

Aesop Rock - The Impossible Kid [2016]

Aesop Rock has been at it for a very long time now. The New York native, who is known for his lyricism, which includes crazy rhyme schemes, abstract wordplay and an impressively large vocabulary, released his first record, Music For Earthworms, in 1997. Since 1997, as is natural with the passing of time, Aesop Rock's music has gone through many changes. Over the years he eventually traded the beautifully gloomy beats by Blockhead that were part of what made Labor Days such an intriguing, and generally extremely well received album (to this day the consensus seems to be that it is his "classic") for a relatively faster and harder hitting, albeit still at times quite dark, production style. The key in this change being, that with Skelethon (2012), Aesop, for the first time in his career, handled all of the production himself. Skelethon, one of the best records of its year, confirmed many fans suspicions (he had already produced a good number of beats on his earlier records) that Aes' skills behind the boards are not that far behind his on the microphone.