One of the first albums I downloaded to my bulky iPod Classic as a teenager was Curren$y’s Pilot Talk. The song that brought me there was the smoker’s anthem “Breakfast,” where the New Orleans smooth-talker hopped on the most laidback-yet-blaring Mos Def beat and described his day-to-day as a blur of NBA 2K, munching on snacks, and smoking weed. Growing up on the larger-than-life New York rap of the 2000s, where Dipset or G-Unit made up most of my childhood hip-hop arguments, hearing a song as down-to-Earth as “Breakfast” blew my mind.
I thought of that moment recently as I looked back on my favorite rap albums and mixtapes of the year. Since I’ve worked at Pitchfork, my taste has become more interior. I’ve grown less interested in the lyrical showmanship and character-driven feuds I grew up on and become more fascinated by rap that gives me an unfiltered emotional glimpse into the inner workings of an artist, no matter how low the stakes. That’s part of the reason I found the rap event of the year, the world war that sprouted from Kendrick Lamar and Drake’s beef, to be such a drag. I wanted there to be more hip-hop melodrama, but it was instead more focused on tired meta-conversations about legacies, reputations, and stardom that went on to infest so much of the year’s popular rap.
A year that was also haunted by new white grifters falling from the sky every time you blinked; Trump’s ultra-conservative political campaign buying the support of street rappers; the labyrinthine YSL trial; the countless early deaths of hip-hop icons and stars of all ages; and accusations of sexual assault that keep piling up on Diddy, exposing a genre that has been long overdue for a reckoning. Being a hip-hop fan has always been a morally complex endeavor, but this year felt especially fucked up and sad.
The projects that connected with me the most this year made me laugh or made me want to dig further into a scene. They were the mixtapes that soundtracked my life for a few weeks or had some sort of supernatural hold on me. My favorites were the ones that felt like they rewired my brain, or took a sound that I had been following for a while to another level, or just made me go What the fuck is going on here? My list reflects how the mainstream and underground rap landscapes feel more disconnected than ever, which is why of my 27 rap album picks, some will and some won’t crossover with Pitchfork’s Albums of the Year list.
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2024 wrap-up coverage here.
(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)
Jlovely: Joyce Bailey
The British underground rap scene had a soft crossover moment in the States this year. There were tentpole records like Conglomerate, but I prefer things like Joyce Bailey, a tape of glacial, blurry mindpoems by Jlovely that seem as if they were recorded in a bunker. Heavy on flickering, minimalist beats, done by an army of producers with unpronounceable names, Jlovely’s melancholic dreaming—in the tradition of other hermetic rap of the last decade or so—usually circles back to God, hanging out, and drugs.
Listen: SoundCloud
Fucksnowrr: #NotADeluxe
#NotADeluxe is like the final battle in an existential mecha anime: turbulent yet sort of majestic. The clipping, paranormal beats of Indianapolis producer Balenci02 set the tone; shimmering melodies beam in, ballistic classic drill-inspired drums rattle with the intensity of a firestorm. All of this noise would overpower most rappers, but not South Carolina’s Fucksnowrr, whose barely mixed, bulldozer voice and rambling bars make him seem perpetually pissed off in the void.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Cuzzos: Stay Safe
During his Pop Out Concert, Kendrick should’ve passed the mic to the Cuzzos, because the clique (Teaawhy, Milly Mo, BB, Jasscole, and Big I-N-D-O) would’ve torn that shit down if they performed anything off their sizzling March mixtape Stay Safe. The slicked-tongued punchline rappers have fun, but they’re also unafraid to get busy. Across seven songs, they hot-potato the mic on fine-enough beats that pull from Michigan and the West Coast, rarely taking a break from punking whoever is talking sweet.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
LaRussell / P-Lo: Majorly Independent
P-Lo’s beats on Majorly Independent have so much soul that generations of uptempo Bay Area rap flash before your eyes, from the trunk-rattling pimp chronicles of Too $hort to the hyphy of Mac Dre to the block-party music of HBK Gang, the crew with which P-Lo came up with back in the late 2000s and 2010s. His thumping drums require elaborate sound systems; his basslines are shiny yet still funky; his sample flips bring new life out of throwbacks. LaRussell, the ultra-positive rapper (sometimes it’s overboard) who, through his backyard residency, has become an archivist of Bay Area hip-hop culture, is the perfect co-host, inviting MCs of all ages (the fiftysomething Oakland rapper Richie Rich improvising his “What We Doin!?” verse seconds after busting his knee on stage is one of the clips of the year) to this hysterical, cross-generational turn-up.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Mutant Academy: Keep Holly Alive
Mutant Academy has been holding it down for the Richmond, Virginia, rap scene like Mookie Betts has the dream of the Black baseball star. It took almost a decade of solo and joint mixtapes (personal favorites include Fly Anakin and Big Kahuna OG’s Holly Water and countless Ohbliv beat tapes) to build to Keep Holly Alive, which gathers the whole nine-man crew for a toast. Unsurprisingly, the smoke-session bars of Anakin, Big Kahuna, and Henny L.O. are on point and their deep bench of producers (the crew has more beatmakers than rappers nowadays) brings the soul sample–heavy grooves and grainy East Coast heat that ’07 Styles P would’ve walked down.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Tdf: Blueprint
Blueprint is the zooted-out audio equivalent of getting an invite to the Discord chat. Throughout tdf’s compilation mixtape, the Minneapolis producer—SoundCloud famous for his distorted and fucked-up 808s—plays clips of his beats getting roasted in underground-rap Instgram Live arguments: “wannabe Pi’erre,” “dickrider,” “That nigga put a nigga named Spoof on his fuckin tape! I can’t even say that shit with a straight face, bruh.” They’re doing more trolling than any niche meme page would, and, somehow, it’s sort of sweet. Hammering home the communal energy of a constantly beefing friend group is the mix of already-popular (the next generation of Southern rage Osamason and che) and fast-rising (Midwest crooners 1oneam and Okaymar, the real white boy of the year, sorry to Mr. Ian) rappers in the tight-knit underground circuit who pull up just to blackout on tdf’s mad-scientist instrumentals.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Spotify | Tidal
Young Slo-Be: Slo-Be Bryant 4
The greatest compliment I can give Slo-Be Bryant 4 is that it’s a posthumous album that doesn’t sound like a posthumous album. There are no incomplete songs dragged to the finish line by shoehorned-in guest verses or ancient throwaways that sound like they were discovered on a hard drive covered with dust. The only sign that it is a tribute is all of the family members who sporadically show up to eulogize Young Slo-Be, the Stockton, California, rapper who was killed, in 2022, at 29 years old. Rolling with the sound of Slo-Be Bryant 3, one of the great West Coast tapes of the 2020s, Slo-Be’s steely, ominous murmurs give his sentimental gangster rap the air of sorcery.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
BabyChiefDoIt: Animals Only
Chicago’s new drill scene is pretty similar to Chicago’s old drill scene: too much hungry-ass rapping to comb through (Chuckyy, Mello Buckzz, VonOff1700) with tragedy hanging over the whole movement. To be straight-up, that made me reluctant to casually bump BabyChiefDoIt—a babyfaced teenager who looks to be about the height that Grizzlies guard Yuki Kawamura looks on an NBA court—but he seems like he’s having such a good time putting his own spin on the machismo of his hometown sound that he became a permanent fixture of my rotation. Whether he’s talking cash shit with fellow teen phenom Star Bandz, or leaving his body on “King of the Jungle,” which pairs his exorcized screams with the trumpeting of elephants, his intensity is magnetic.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Glorygirl2950: Queen of the Land
If I ever receive an invite to The Joe Budden Podcast, I’d make them sit through all of Queen of the Land just to watch their heads explode. Atlanta wild child Glorygirl2950 doesn’t give a damn about tradition: She sings but purposely torpedoes every note, and there are moments where, instead of rapping, she just flaps her lips. She also repeatedly ups her pitch to a dolphin screech that could shatter glass with the force of that ax through the window in Dario Argento’s giallo Tenebrae.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Kurious: Majician
Kurious, my old-head rapper of the year, preserves the vibrancy and humor of his late friend and collaborator MF DOOM with Majician. Executive-produced by DOOM—which seems to mean he gave a few of the album cuts a thumbs up—the Uptown MC, who has an underground heater under his belt with his 1994 debut, A Constipated Monkey, shows that, more than 30 years in, he still has that battery in his back. Grabbing cinematic funk from producer Mono En Stereo that will make you want to pop out like you raided Clyde Frazier’s closet, Kurious’ winding storytelling swings from dense to hilariously crabby to warmly reflective. And, given the rightful skepticism surrounding DOOM’s legacy being morphed into shiny reissues, books, and tribute shows, the anti-corporate bent of Majician is the realest nod.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Laila!: Gap Year!
Gap Year! is like a collection of voice notes compiled into a mixtape. It is the debut of Laila!, the coolest nepo baby out. (Her father is Yasiin Bey.) Following in the footsteps of the earnest, teenage R&B prodigy albums of the 1990s and 2000s, like Brandy’s self-titled, Aaliyah’s One in a Million, and Solange’s Solo Star—though less polished and manicured given that it is all self-written and self-produced—her lowkey balladry and chill sing-raps capture the unpredictability, confusion, and boredom of leaving your high school years behind.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Montana Jay / Tanapee: Southend
Fantasies of cracking credit cards, joyrides in “borrowed” Kias, and macking all over Milwaukee are at the heart of rapper Tanapee and producer (and part-time rapper) Montana Jay’s moody joint mixtape. Southend, apparently self-leaked by Montana without Tanapee’s approval, has the anxious, rushed energy of a project recorded in one drunken all-nighter. (You can only find the tape on YouTube in individual tracks.) And it probably was, as Montana’s synthy, hellish twist on the high-speed lowend sound fuses with Tanapee’s gloriously junky Auto-Tune wails to take on the vibe of party-hopping in their city at functions that keep getting shut down by the cops.
Listen: YouTube
Sexyy Red: In Sexyy We Trust
Hood Hottest Princess was one of those lighting-in-a-bottle moments you can really catch only once. I assumed Sexyy Red’s follow-up project would polish the sound up as an attempt to make her more marketable. But In Sexyy We Trust doubles down on the crude, regionally specific headbangers, unconcerned about anything other than soundtracking the clubs, highways, and bedrooms of the South and the Midwest. There are a few moments that are corny—she is too aware of what has the possibility to go viral, and she gives in too easily to the power of Drake—but they’re not enough to stop the Jordan Poole worthy heat check.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Dolo2k: In the Name of Harman
Whenever I was in the mood to daydream I threw on In the Name of Harman. On Dolo2k’s hangout mixtape, nothing is happening and everything is happening. There’s a casual malaise to his stories of posting up at clubs and shows, watching anime, facing blunts, and playing video games, as he roams around L.A. like a ghost. Driven by fantastical beats (mostly self-produced) and a deep bag of icy melodies that recall everything from Duwap Kaine to pluggnb-era Summrs, the ordinary is surreal.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify
MoneySet: Us Against the City
MoneySet might be D.C. rap’s Young Nudy: darkly comical, beat selection that leans toward the spaced-out fringes of his regional sound, a workman style where his rampaging raps work better across a mixtape than in singles. For example, Us Against the City isn’t as flashy or commercial as a few of the more popular projects to come out of the DMV crank scene this year (check: Nino Paid’s Can’t Go Bacc and Skino’s Youth Madness), but the dog-eat-dog wasteland he describes is vivid—like his neighborhood is Escape From New York except with shopping interludes.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Spotify | Tidal
AKAI SOLO: DREAMDROPDRAGON
AKAI SOLO’s brainbuster flow can be like untying a knot made by a fisherman. I’ve grown to love it, especially since 2022’s Spirit Roaming, where the focus came to be as much on AKAI the person as the obvious skill. On DREAMDROPDRAGON, with his words on a yo-yo, it’s like you’re eavesdropping on his inner monologue as he strolls through Prospect Park. That can range from heady musings on Freud, capitalism, and gentrification to bars that are funny and poignant (“Pullin’ up to my city just to have the deli in your video”) and relatable (“Shawty and I not speakin’, but she still do my hair”). He’s an NYC everyman that also happens to be a whiz on the mic.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
CoffeeBlack / WT M Scoob: Love at First Sight?
Ever since WTM Scoob ventured out on his own from World Tour Mafia—the young Detroit crew of playboys—he’s been tinkering with a misty, illusory spin on the casually hardened street rap of his hometown. Enter CoffeeBlack, a versatile producer based in the same city whose psychedelic sample flips on Love at First Sight? would have had the blog era on smash. The project is heavy on woozy tales of the erotic ups and emotional downs of falling hard, and the deadpan, adrift flows of Scoob and friends, like professional skirt-chaser Shaudy Kash, are like bumping Baby Smoove and Veeze with brain fog.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify
03 Greedo: Crip, I’m Sexy
Crip, I’m Sexy is a fucking mess, but there’s no other way I’d want my Greedo mixtapes. Maybe it’s the nostalgia I have for that two-year run he went on right before he went to prison where it felt like he was in a race to leave a stamp before his time ran out, so he was churning out bloated, pain-fueled epics on the regular. Crip, I’m Sexy brushes up against that urgency even though the stakes aren’t nearly as high, thankfully.
Over the course of a movie-length runtime, Greedo seems like he’s moseying around the country (I’d watch Greedo’s remake of Willie Nelson’s road trip rom-com Honeysuckle Rose) on a tour bus, picking up new Auto-Tune tricks, experimenting with regional rap microgenres, and wailing his heart out on collabs with some of the hottest rappers from Michigan (the Flint and Detroit heavies), Philly (Skrilla, Uzi), Houston (Guapo), and L.A. (Wallie the Sensei, 500Raxx) that seem like they were recorded on short pitstops. Shit, and when you least expect it, he might just cover Pretty Ricky or swoon with Roy Woods live from the OVO tents.
Listen: SoundCloud
Baby Osama: Sexc Summer
The image of New York hip-hop crystallized into my brain might be that video of Jim Jones buying a new Pelle Pelle. Back when NYC culture was controlled by the length of a subway ride, before the omnipresence of social media homogenized the five boroughs. Baby Osama brings that energy back on Sexc Summer, with smooth tales of romance in Uptown Manhattan and the South Bronx, where she was raised. Complete with flips of Max B and Roc-A-Fella-era Beanie Sigel and lovesick melodies sung from the gut, she beats all accusations of waveriding Cash Cobain’s “sexy drill” trend by replacing the horniness (though there’s that, too) with intimate tales from her hood.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
RRoxket: Red Ranger
RRoxket kind of sounds like the Looney Tunes’ Taz if he grew up in Atlanta. (I know there’s an airbrushed tee of Taz looking like he’s on the cover of Streetz Calling somewhere.) But, at first, I gave his mixtape Red Ranger the cold shoulder because I felt that his loopy, mumbly flows borrowed too much sauce from fellow ATLien Bear1Boss. That skepticism faded away the more I listened to the tape, which is undeniably on one in the greatest way. Over the kind of lush plugg-trap variants you can find on the Whyceg-produced 2Sdxrt3all tapes, RRoxket’s slurred punchlines are so batshit and silly that I don’t even care that the only thing on his mind is getting high as fuck.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
J.U.S / Squadda B: 3rd Shift
Two rap veterans clique up and put on for their cities on 3rd Shift. On the mic is J.U.S, a Detroit-raised punchline savant who is part of the Bruiser Brigade crew. The beats are done by Squadda B, the Oakland-bred rapper-producer who was once upon a time a member of the influential cloud-rap duo Main Attrakionz, who made one of my favorite tapes of the early 2010s. Building on the longtime kinship between the Black communities of their hometowns, the chemistry on the duo’s first joint mixtape makes it feel like they’ve been putting in work together since the Obama administration. Squadda’s eccentric spin on the brute force of Michigan rap is the perfect backdrop to J.U.S’ worn-down and often funny combo of shit talk and stress: “I got mortgage, I got habits, I got freaks I owe a few.”
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Big Steff: Get Yo Scat Dirty, Vol. 2
Find the best Buick-driving raps of the year over in Milwaukee. (Sorry to my West Coasters; you guys have Ohtani and The Valley; take your Ws.) On Get Yo Scat Dirty, Vol. 2, Big Steff’s relentless stream of get-rich-quick schemes and drug dealing soap operas could break speedometers. Backdropped by rubber-burning beats made to be blasted out of American-made SUVs with the check engine light on, the slap handbook has enough colorful vignettes to fill the script of a crime drama going straight to Tubi. Joined by a handful of the signature Milwaukee rappers of the year, including Chicken P, SME taxfree, Ghost 53206, and Superthrowed Fay Fay (his mixtape Baby Driver is a must-hear), the tape is the no-frills highlight from the scene that just won’t take its foot off the gas.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
SahBabii: Saaheem
SahBabii isn’t as much of an oddball as he was in the years before the pandemic, when it seemed like was the outcast cousin of YSL, over in his own world crooning about anime boobs and boning amphibians. But, on Saaheem, he finds a middle ground between the lighthearted horndog anthems he churned out in his early twenties and the grief-stricken tone of 2021’s Do It for Demon. Sometimes, the toughness is folded into colorful metaphors, like when he compares himself to a gigantopithecus on the cloudy “Everyday.” In other spots, he takes a plain and direct approach: “You worried ’bout bitches and I’m worried about poverty,” Sah raps on “Lost All My Feelings,” his bubbly flow ripped from Thug’s So Much Fun. He strikes such a delicate balance while also tinkering with new flows, from the Barter 6-coded “Viking” to the blissfully high coos of “Belt Boyz,” which turns cold-blooded warning shots into an angelic singalong.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Lisha G / Trini Viv: Groovy Steppin Sh*t
Sometimes I stare out the window and daydream about what Playboi Carti’s first official mixtape would have sounded like if he never left behind Awful Records and the intergalactic Atlanta beats of Ethereal. Maybe it would have sounded something like Groovy Steppin Sh*t. On the tape, the glazed flex-raps of South Carolina’s Lisha G meet the cyberfunk of Philly keyboard whiz Trini Viv. Lisha, who has been a constant in the underground plugg scene for years now, takes her loud whisper-raps to another level, backed by instrumentals that are like if Zaytoven grew up in the arcade instead of the church. But after a few listens, Trini’s waterfall of rainbow-hued synths and blaring digital horns start to transcend any comparisons that come to mind.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Loe Shimmy: Zombieland 2 (DJ Fetti Fee Fast Edition)
Lamar Jackson’s third MVP should be putting on Loe Shimmy, who was once upon a time the budding star of the quarterback’s record label, Lamar Jackson Entertainment. Now, Shimmy’s druggy earworms and tropical two-step anthems are the gold standard of South Florida rap. His spring mixtape Zombieland 2 transforms his Kodak sing-rap-gone-pop into wispy mutant R&B. There are a few slick, jazzy beats on this thing, too, that have me imagining myself in that Phil Collins scene from the Miami Vice pilot. This is all amplified by the fast edition of the mixtape by Broward’s air horn-addicted DJ Fetti Fee (including drops by Yung Miami and Shimmy, himself!). Usually Florida fast music turns the original songs into dance music, but, in Fetti Fee’s hands, Zombieland 2 is a head trip.
Listen: SoundCloud
DORIS: Ultimate Love Songs Collection
It was the final days of summer, on the rooftop of a Brooklyn venue, and DORIS, the Jersey boy with the most beautifully out-there rap album of the year, paced back and forth across the stage like he forgot there was a crowd. Holding the microphone with the iron grip of a pole vaulter, he screamed, mumbled, and crooned the barely one-minute pitch-shifting braindumps off his 50-track compilation of warped memories, Ultimate Love Songs Collection. In the process, I fell under the spell so hard that when the set ended it was as if I had emerged from the hibernation pods in Alien.
Listening to his overwhelmingly insular mixtape in your headphones, the feeling is even more hypnotic, as his boldly naked anthology of confessional bedroom raps and wanderlust ballads self-recorded over several years is a completely absorbing and occasionally goofy mindfuck. Chopped-up samples—that sit somewhere between the YouTube digging of MIKE and the digital archivist spirit of Dean Blunt—hopscotch between reimagined genres, as he spits out half-thoughts and smeared anxieties. By the end, there will be no in-between: You will either be as lost as the kid who got separated from their parents at the amusement park, or it will resonate to the point that you go, Oh shit, this dude is living my life.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
xaviersobased: keep it goin xav
One of the most adventurous (and polarizing) iconclasts of the last few years, xaviersobased, puts it all together on Keep It Goin Xav without losing the off-the-cuff randomness of fucking around on SoundCloud. Doubling as formal introduction to anyone who hasn’t attended a Bushwick warehouse show with 45 stoned internet rappers on the lineup, Xavier’s tape is loosely threaded together by interview clips and DJ drops that contextualize the Upper West Side native’s referential yet futuristic turn-up music. Pulling from a hodgepodge of foundational regional scenes (ATL trap, Chicago drill, jerk) and bygone underground movements (Goth Money, Metro Zu, Lil B)—organically, instead of like he’s cramming for a pop quiz—the tape is an improvisatory fuck-it celebration. Standing out from the pack of indistinguishable internet rappers by blending the digital with his Uptown roots. His woozy, Max B–lite melodies, hustler’s spirit raps that could work in classic Vado freestyles, and Dyckman shoutouts create a link between his Auto-Tune experiments and the fly party rap that’s been coming out of New York since the birth of hip-hop.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Listen to the Best Rap Albums of 2024 on our Spotify and Apple Music playlists.
