Softscars, yeuleĪfter their sweeping electro-pop project Glitch Princess broke through with critics last year, yeule managed to both double down and adapt on their follow-up, Softscars. The Alchemist-another sample flipper in the midst of a legendary run-gets most of the headlines these days, but Fraud is putting together his own Hall of Fame career, like a batter who quietly claws his way to 3,000 hits. (Particularly Neph, who sounds unleashed on tracks like “Hunnid on the Dresser,” where he extols the virtues of his, uh, culinary skills.) It’s a testament to Fraud’s versatility-and the universal appeal of his sound. Despite having little in common aesthetically, both turn in some of their strongest recent performances. Music signee Valee and Rochester’s favorite outsider, RXKNephew. On his two best projects of 2023-both released by our friends over at Fake Shore Drive-Fraud wrangles two of the more original stylists operating in rap today: one-time G.O.O.D. Since then, Fraud has produced full-lengths for legends including Jim Jones and Curren$y and upstarts like Larry June and Benny the Butcher (and even a posthumous EP for Lil Peep). The common denominator here is producer Harry Fraud, who made his bones providing a new strain of New York boom bap for French Montana and his Coke Boys clique in the early 2010s. LIFE AFTER NEPH, RXKNephew and Harry Fraud Virtuoso, Valee and Harry Fraud It’s a sound worth following to those ends, if only for a glimpse of what the future holds. Yallah Beibe traipses the extreme outer fringes of a global rap paradigm and crosses over to the other side-beyond the borders of language and sonic orthodoxy. On “No One Seems to Bother,” the album’s crown jewel and multilingual sociopolitical interrogation, Yallah’s menacing flow shares space with the shredded wails of Lord Spikeheart, the vocalist in the Kenyan Ugandan grindcore band Duma. Yallah swaggers over the Japanese producer Scotch Rolex’s blood-churning beat on “Moss,” which, spiritually, sounds as if Migos’s 2014 hit “Fight Night” were sped up, inverted, and reconfigured to fit the acoustics of a 2073 cybernetic underground fight club. With a broader linguistic palette, she can match the specific tones and syllabic output of a dialect to the particular challenges of a beat.Īnd Yallah Beibe, her sophomore album, is full of challenging steel-on-steel soundscapes-by producers from lands as disparate as France, Japan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. So much so that Yallah raps in four different languages: Luganda, Kiswahili, Dholuo, and English. She attacks in double time, she bobs and weaves, she summons demons. She doesn’t ride beats she internalizes them. Ironically, there is an old-school boom bap heart beating within MC Yallah, a Kenyan Ugandan rap chameleon who has adapted her craft to grow alongside the dizzyingly futurist sound of East Africa’s experimental electronic scene. Her lyrics are maybe the best part: They’re unflinching, surprising, and vulnerable, and she maneuvers between devastating and hilarious like a little Gen Z Liz Phair. Blondshell, is one of the only artists both respecting the source material and dragging it into the present day with modern sonic touches and generationally referential lyrics. There are a lot of bands doing “grunge” these days (and thank God), but Sabrina Teitelbaum, a.k.a. Together, they tell the story of a great year in new music, which, despite what the headlines will tell you, isn’t going anywhere. We found the new music we loved, plus a few rap albums-and yes, even a few riffs. What follows is our ranking of the 27 best albums of 2023. (If 2023 proved anything, it’s that that’s the case even for the likes of Travis Scott and Drake, whose albums had monthslong rollouts and very little staying power.)Īll of this makes it difficult to put together a year-end list. Reality is, unless you’re Taylor Swift-whom you won’t find below-your album is probably a niche concern. We can explore the reasons for these trends for the umpteenth time (TL DR: There’s too much static for anyone to cut through), or we can acknowledge the actual truth: There’s plenty of very good music out there, just very few albums that unify us in 2023. As the end of the year approaches, The Ringer is celebrating the best in movies, TV, music, and more.
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