Here’s your upcoming rundown of albums/singles releasing on December 12th, featuring Nas & DJ Premier, Conway the Machine, Nija, Tiara Thomas, and many others.

The Buffalo rapper navigates survival, betrayal, and spiritual reckoning across eighteen tracks that map the distance between five Grammy nominations and the friends who didn't make it out.

Male vocal groups, a new solo voice, a legacy act, and two soundtracks argue about what R&B is supposed to feel like. Chicago, Atlanta, and old-guard Motown all show their hand in how they answer.

With redveil, Infinite Coles, Skyzoo, Adi Oasis, Erick Sermon, Le$, Mark Lux, Hydra, Kymara, Ben Marc, Aklesso, JAHKOY, Josef Lamercier, and others, hit play on these projects released last week.

These are the records where West Coast pride, Southern hustle, and New York ambition all collide without a referee. The mess is the point, and the mess is honest.

The EPMD architect returns with a curatorial project that celebrates hip-hop chemistry across three decades, centering partnerships that built the genre’s collaborative foundation.

These R&B records strip away the excess to reveal raw emotion and deft musicianship. From neo-soul meditators to funk-infused groove masters, they prove the genre’s heart still beats strong in 2025.

Mass Appeal spent 2025 reminding the world why New York rap still matters. Ending the series with Light‑Years is their way of saying: the people who built the era get to tell you what it meant. Read over at Blackpolitan.

An op-ed on why his call for more camaraderie and collaborations clashes with the way hip-hop has always treated peers as opponents.

The Game hypes his first official Gangsta Grillz tape as a film. The mixtape wants to be an event, but the show playing on screen is a looping trailer for a movie the director never made.

Tha Carter II remains a monument in his catalog and a milestone in 21st-century hip-hop—the moment Dwayne Carter, Jr. definitively stepped into the spotlight as a generational great.

3LW remains a shining example of the magic that can happen when three voices, a handful of great songs, and creating something fresh for the future, while honoring the past.

Here’s your upcoming rundown of albums/singles releasing on December 5th, featuring Melody’s Echo Chamber, Lil Baby, GloRilla, Ice Spice, and many others.

A guitarist whose touch shaped generations of soul, jazz, R&B, and pop, Phil Upchurch left an imprint that stretches across some of the most enduring recordings of the last sixty years.

2025 finds Atlanta star Lil Baby coming off a misfired studio album and a disintegrating world tour. As a compilation, this felt less like generosity than a way to monetize leftovers.

While pain, joy, and everything in between are found in these songs, rising stars, veterans, and legends shared stages across 2025. Even amid uncertainty, they leaned on the story to keep hope alive.

A fourth album stretches the DMV-raised rapper‑producer across continents and into the studio, honoring the path that made him while confronting the weight of leaving home.

Between Moore’s polished risk, Sweat’s unshaken slow-jam discipline, K-Ci & JoJo’s Southern-soul obsession, and more, these albums show how messy, adult, and oddly fearless that year really was.

With MAVI, Andy Mineo, 9th Wonder, CRIMEAPPLE, Choclair, Body Bag Ben/Daniel Son, Esham, Von Pea/The Other Guys, Stogie T, Franchesca, and others, hit play on these projects released last week.

These projects catch Ja Rule, E-40, CNN, Afu-Ra, and Dice Raw in motion rather than in control. The friction between what they could do and what they actually did is the whole point.

The records that matter are giving these fans top-tier appetizers and doing it in over or under twenty minutes. Here are the best hip-hop, pop, and R&B EPs of 2025, unranked.

His rise from Baton Rouge classrooms to headlines carried a mix of clarity, confrontation, and consequence. That same force followed him into his years of exile, imprisonment, faith, and decline. Read over at Blackpolitan.

Siifu enters this project carrying the weight of every shape-shift he’s made up until the sprawling world-building of BLACK'!ANTIQUE. ONYX'! arrives as the splintered afterimage of that last record.

The beloved lead singer of Tavares has died peacefully at home, leaving behind decades of soul and joy. His family remembers his positive spirit and thanks fans for their prayers.

A multigenerational conversation in sound. You’ll hear legends and newcomers weaving fresh narratives; jazz in 2025 will not be pinned down. Expect anything but the expected.

People who suddenly show up white, AI slop, and creepy crawlies on faces: once again this year, rap music distinguished itself with bizarre cover designs.

While the charts chased EDM, these five albums doubled down on grown‑folks storytelling. They’re the kind of records that reward late‑night listening and make you Google who produced track seven.

Jazmine Sullivan channels the spirits of her musical foremothers while forging her own identity. Love Me Back gives so much love that it compels you to love it back in return.

Erykah Badu is still on the line, still experimenting with that perfect frequency. In a world more digitally tangled than ever, sometimes the soul connection is just a hello away.

A decade after her first break, Jessie J isn’t chasing the charts. The singer who once rode the line between pop hits and stage‑school bravado is balancing motherhood, illness, loss, and independence.

Here’s your upcoming rundown of albums/singles releasing on November 28th, featuring Jessie J, Pink Siifu, Stove God Cooks, Sweet Love, and many others.

Follow Tamar, Ol’ Skool, Elisha La’Verne, Gerald Levert, and Fishbone, and you get a different map of the year 2000. Follow the producers’ names in the credits, and it sharpens even more.

With Elujay, Myles Lloyd, Ben Reilly, Awich, SABRI, iAMLYRIC, André Mego, Tawobi, OLA, Flee Lord/Jansport J, Remey Williams, Hus KingPin, and others, press play on these projects released last week.

Each of these records was asked to do too much: fix a label, restart a career, honor the dead, prove a crew was still worth betting on. But you can also hear people refusing to back off.

MAVI works out from the chaos of his last record with a sober eye and a heavy heart. This mixtape traces how he confronts the cost of success and the scars he has been carrying.

With releases from ROSALÍA to Armand Hammer, here are notable releases in November that stood out to us as the best albums of the month.

Does this language elevate or erase hip-hop’s value? What does it say about respect, legacy, genre hierarchy—and who gets to define “artist”? Read over at Blackpolitan.

His voice moved through decades without ever losing the conviction he carried as a young singer from Somerton. This tribute gathers everything that shaped one of Jamaica’s most fearless artists.

Joe Budden’s Call of Duty jab at Megan Thee Stallion did more than drift past bad taste—it showed how casually women in rap get treated as fair game.

ian built his whole image on being easy to clown. The meme costume fit a little too well, so without further ado, let us introduce you to the worst rap album you’ll ever hear for the past decade.

Chamillionaire’s blend of vengeance and melody gave the album its identity: one moment he’s snarling that revenge is a dish best served cold, the next he’s sweetening the hook with a hummed tune.

Veteran West Coast ice‑cold bars, Southern trap appeals, and indie‑rap experiments all collided in the same strange year.

We’re still watching, still debating, and still moved by this lavish, confounding, and brilliant record. Kanye West’s modern man-myth fully came to life, in all its beautiful, dark, twisted glory.

Here’s your upcoming rundown of albums/singles releasing on November 21st, featuring De La Soul, Oneohtrix Point Never, Tank, Chris Patrick, and many others.

De La Soul returns with their first new LP in nine years. After the weight of Trugoy’s absence, the album is a tribute to a brother and a continuation of a group that refuses to be frozen by grief.

Pink Friday turned Nicki Minaj from an underground queen into a household name—a crowning moment, even if it meant swapping the wild style of her mixtapes for a polished pink coronation.

Ransom has never been a comfortable rapper, but his collaboration with Premier gave him a new dimension. Now joining forces with Conductor Williams, he pushes into his own misgivings.

These are the albums that make you rethink whatever you assumed from the lead tracks. The deeper cuts do the kind of work the marketing never bothered to point at.

With Grimm Lynn, Q Parker, Felicia Temple, Oh No, Sekou, Don West, Gabriel Jacoby, Jay Cinema, ABBIANA, Apollo Brown & Ty Farris, and others, hit play on these projects released last week.

Dave Hollister was best known for his gospel-honed vocals and a stint as Blackstreet’s original lead singer, but this sophomore solo effort would become his best work to date.