In a time when their former boss is experiencing one of the best second acts in hip-hop history as half of Run The Jewels, it’s a beautiful thing to see his most reputable signees continue to make such important and impactful street science as they enter their 40s as well. Fifteen years later, both Aesop and Lif return to the original recipe that put them on the top of El’s want list in the first place with their best albums since the Jux era.īoth The Impossible Kid and Don’t Look Down contain some of their most personal material, compounding the science of their craft with the gravity of their histories.
Signing both men at the beginning of their ascent into underground hip-hop superstardom, the releases of their respective full-length masterpieces Labor Days and I, Phantom solidified both MCs as the measuring sticks for microphone mastery in the early 2000s. There aren’t two better lyricists outside of El-P himself to have thrived within the annals of Def Jux’s halcyon days than Long Island’s Aesop Rock and Boston’s Mr. Lif, Don’t Look Down (Mello Music Group) & 6) Aesop Rock, The Impossible Kid (Rhymesayers Entertainment) Meanwhile, the guest list on Mountain is a brief but brilliantly curated elite force of acts representing the best of their crafts, from rap (a never-better Run The Jewels on “Nobody Speak”), experimental classical (German pianist Nils Frahm on “Bergschrund”) and progressive UK jazz (Manchester trumpet great Matthew Halsall on “Ashes to Oceans”).
Rather, the man born Josh Davis utilizes his past to launch a new means of beat building, one rooted in an intrinsic fusion of live instrumentation and sampled sounds and yielding such hypnotic science as “Depth Charge” and “Suicide Pact”. His first for the Nas-backed Mass Appeal label, these 12 new compositions don’t merely mirror the glory of its iconic predecessor. Following a pair of wildly uneven albums in 2006’s The Outsider and 2011’s The Less You Know The Better, Shadow triumphantly returns to his original recipe on the excellent The Mountain Will Fall. Twenty years ago, turntablism innovator DJ Shadow released Endtroducing, an album that revolutionized the concept of beatmaking, his multi-layered soul style inspiring everyone from Radiohead to Four Tet to Diplo to Prefuse 73 to the current Brainfeeder/Low End Theory movement in Los Angeles.
Best hip hop albums of all time 2016 full#
Adu with Sweetback is so fluid you can only hope Sean goes a full 79 minutes for volume two.Ĩ) DJ Shadow, The Mountain Will Fall (Mass Appeal) And the combination of the former Zev Love X and Ms. If there’s one thing that’s always made Doom so damn distinctive, it’s not so much the density of his verbosity as it is the smoothness of his delivery. The only thing that sucks about this EP is that it’s only about 20-something minutes long. This year it was site member Seanh’s mashup of Sade grooves over MF Doom rhymes, which comes together like two lost halves finally reuniting as a perfect whole. But every now and again something magical appears that transcends all the floss and flash. There’s a ton of dumb thuggery to contend with on the mixtape site DatPiff. Paak, Phonte of Little Brother, AlunaGeorge, BADBADNOTGOOD, Little Dragon and UK garage soul great Craig David among others to create a beautiful pastiche of rap, house, funk, jazz and trap that’s unlike anything you’ve ever heard.ĩ9.9% is a testament to every talented producer working quietly in their bedrooms that if you keep the hustle strong on sites like SoundCloud, BandCamp or DatPiff, your discovery could be just an email or PM away. Here are our picks for the 10 best hip-hop albums of 2016 (so far).įor a guy who still shares a bedroom with his little brother, Haitian-Canadian producer Kaytranada has earned his rep like a true G, spending the good majority of SoundCloud’s existence filling up his page with some of the hottest beats to ever emerge from Montreal while also producing and remixing for such names as Vic Mensa, Talib Kweli and even Janet Jackson.įor his XL Recordings debut, this amazing talent-who in April came out as gay in a feature for The Fader-breaks down the walls of hip-hop not only socially but aesthetically as well, recruiting the likes of Anderson. But when you have the trifecta, you truly possess the hip-hop Horcrux. Make no mistake, without fresh beats and dope rhymes you’re nothing in hip-hop, no matter how well you can sing, something well evidenced by the bottom half of this list.
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