Friday Afternoon Rap Roundup: AKAI SOLO

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New Release Highlight of the Week:

AKAI SOLO, DREAMDROPDRAGON (buy it / stream it)

With much respect to Mutant Academy outta Richmond and Feed The Family from Boston, I really can't think of a hip-hop collective with a better 2024 release program than New York's own Tase Grip. One of rap's most invigorating duos, Phiik and Lungs absolutely outdid themselves with their uncompromising Carrot Season project on POW Recordings. Erstwhile mutatis mutandis collaborators S!LENCE and Wavy Bagels spun off into their own respective efforts, the former vibing with crew producers ctyzn and iblss (among others) and for AGUADURA and the latter linking with New Jersey's DRIVEBY for A Carfull. Then of course, there's AKAI SOLO. Though the Brooklyn native and occasional Backwoodz Studioz rapper dropped two concurrent albums–Only The Strong Remain and Verticality​/​/​/​Singularity–on the proprietary Break All Records in 2023's final weeks, they only hit the streaming sites this past April. And now, with year-end listmaking season very much in progress, here he comes with this veritable buzzer beater of a third LP.

DREAMDROPDRAGON, or DDD for short, ostensibly focuses on the first third of its creative titular portmanteau, with strategically warped samples of a certain kooky Canuck popping up now and again to explain Freudian psychology. As cerebral and surreal as his proverbial pen gets, he lands his points like therapeutic breakthroughs on "Endless" (Perfection is a ghost / You'll be haunted your whole life) and "SOLO LEVELING" (Y'all a bunch of rappers not trying to rap / Wrap it up, Jack–fast). The production team should be familiar to those who've followed AKAI thus far, with returning players Roper Williams and Theravada part of a roster with the likes of August Fanon and Wifigawd. All involved deliver hallucinatory sonics over which he spits, a loose formula that yields melik's fractured folktronica framework "Let The Saved Solve Their Issues" and the bass blurred Wavy Bagels-helmed single "Bleeding Black." Some Quasimoto-esque pitch shifts on the pointed "Post Dark" make up for the presumably deliberate dearth of vocal guests. But as dope as it would've been for his rapping Grip pals to drop in, dreams are inherently solo ventures after all...

Here are some other new albums, EPs, and mixtapes from independent hip-hop/rap artists and labels worth your time this weekend:

Nappy Nina & Swarvy, Nothing Is My Favorite Thing (buy it / stream it)

Tha God Fahim & Nicholas Craven, Tha Myth Who Never Quit 2 (buy it / stream it)

Bub Styles & Vinyl Villain, BUSINESS CASUAL GOLD CAPS (buy it / stream it)

Philmore Greene, The Grand Design (buy it / stream it)

Sadistik, At Night The Silence Eats Me (buy it / stream it)

Lyrics Born, Goodbye, Sticky Rice (buy it / stream it)