Doja Cat is a fascinating one-off. She’s a rap-centric Californian artist whose background dips into everything from new age philosophy to skate culture. She’s the epitome of a 2020s singer who’s as much a social media phenomenon as a pop star (and has also been featured artist on tunes by almost everyone). Unafraid of quirk and wacky throwaway humour, it’s taken her a while to convince the dubious that she’s more than an amusing flash-in-the-pan. Unfortunately, while her latest album initially contains interest, it settles to a set of samey slow-jams.The recent single “Jealous Type” is Read more ...

One of the great untold stories of the past decade is just how potent a cultural force R&B has been. It might not have had the wild musical innovation it did in the 2000s when the likes of Neptunes, Missy Elliot, Timbaland and Rodney Jerkins reigned supreme as producers – but through the 2010s and ‘20s, it has established a whole set of performers who are able to exhibit extreme range in subject matter, style and seriousness, held together with force of artistic personality.Post-Lemonade Beyoncé tends to absorb the majority of critical attention, but Kehlani, Jhene Aiko, Tinashe, SZA, H.E Read more ...

When I was writing the introduction to my book, Bass, Mids, Tops: An Oral History of Soundsystem Culture, I came up with a phrase, which I ended up putting on promotional badges: “BASS CULTURE IS FOLK CULTURE”. It referred to the way riffs, refrains, ways of acting were passed down the generations, from reggae to rave to grime and on. But it also quickly took on more meaning, about where soundsystem and club music exist in society.Hull-raised, longtime Bristol-based Sam “Binga” Simpson exemplifies a lot of this. First, he’s a scholar of the vernacular: this album in particular really shows Read more ...

Little Simz clearly believes in meeting situations head on. Her sixth full-length album kicks off, in every sense of the phrase, with “Thief”: unambiguously a lyrical barrage at her childhood friend and frequent collaborator Inflo, who Simz is currently suing for alleged failure to repay £1.7 million in loans for ambitious recording and performance projects.It’s a topic she returns to on at least two other tracks on the album, going into quite some detail about her sense of betrayal and broken trust and the impact of this on her sense of self and creative process. It feels kind of bleak that Read more ...

Sometimes magic really can’t be recreated. However hard it’s strived for. The incendiary magic that was Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg three decades ago has not been conjured again in this long-awaited reunion. There are sparks of genius, for sure, and some notable beats and samples but it’s certainly no Doggystyle. Maybe the clue is in the “cheeky” title and painfully obvious condom packet imagery on the cover. So far, so teen.One might expect a more mature vocabulary and smarter ideas from the now 53- and 59-years-olds but, sadly – and predictably – we are served liberal sprinklings of effing Read more ...

Rapper, actor and occasional media celebrity, Ice-T’s heavy metal band, Body Count have been around since the early ‘90s and have turned out some fine albums along the way – most notably their self-titled debut and 2014’s Manslaughter. Unfortunately, their latest offering, Merciless is unlikely to be viewed as a career high point, as it sees Ice and his buddies hit a musical dead end with some considerable force.At its best, Body Count’s sound is loud, antagonistic and seriously heavy but gritty and with a sly sense of humour that frequently leans into machismo without lurching into idiocy. Read more ...

This album only has one serious flaw: LL COOL J didn’t open it with “OK you can call it a comeback”. Sorry, cheap joke (if you didn’t know, his classic hit “Mama Said Knock You Out” starts with the lyric “Don’t call it a comeback!” and this, his 14th album, is his first in 11 years).But honestly no, there really isn’t a lot wrong with this record: LL is in fine voice and furious flow, and the beats – entirely produced by Q Tip from A Tribe Called Quest – are a reminder that old-school, sample-based hip hop can be as heavyweight, as compelling, as mind-bending as anything post-trap youngsters Read more ...

A few recent documentaries have challenged the definition of the genre through the cheerful and wholesale dramatic reconstruction of past events, key moments that weren’t captured by a camera at the time.This is unnerving to those of us brought up on old-school public broadcast TV where the rule was that even when what the director had put on screen was obviously a reenactment, a caption indicating "dramatic reconstruction" was obligatory. Not only did that mealy-mouthed phrase clutter the image, no matter which arty font was used, it also broke the viewer’s full engagement with the moment, Read more ...

The weather is perfect. Rare at a festival in this country. The sun shines. Occasional clouds pass. There’s a light breeze. Flamingods are on the Charlie Gillett stage. They are a London-based unit of primarily Bahraini origin who make psychedelic-electronic rock tinged with exotica and Middle Eastern flavour. Very WOMAD, in other words.All around are iterations of hippy, from gnarled Sixties originals, lined and lived-in, batik-patchwork panted, to psy-trancey youths, half-clad, sleek in bodypaint and retro pink Lennon shades. We jog and nod. The music is likeable, not ecstatic. The vibe, Read more ...

Joe Goddard’s torrent of creativity rarely fails to amaze. As well as eight albums as a crucial part of Hot Chip, he has made two in the 2 Bears duo with Raf Rundell, one as Hard Feelings with Amy Douglas, and there’s been various other collaborations besides (A Pulse Train, Extra Credit, Greco-Roman Soundsystem, Lightbox Of Magic Unknowledge), not to mention dozens of remixes and a none too shabby DJ career too. Through all of this there’s been a strong musical personality, circling around palpable love of the dancefloor and its communities, and use of synthesisers to conjure feelings of Read more ...

The noise in the international mainstream in recent years might be about dance-pop, hip hop beefs and the serious balladry of Taylor, Billie and Lana – yet at the same time, R&B has been strange, brilliant, ultra-popular, but generated a tiny fraction of the column inches and “discourse”.Jhene Aiko, Tinashe, SZA, H.E.R., Mahalia: these are radical artists, each making fascinating music that generates billions of streams, yet certainly in the UK they’re generating micro-fractions of the column inches that their contemporaries in other genres are. The reaction to SZA’s Glastonbury Read more ...

In 2023 Dave and Central Cee had the longest running number one UK rap song ever with "Sprinter", a song about the logistics of being very rich. The real star of the show, however, was the spritely, luxurious instrumental which was partially produced by South Londoner Jim Legxacy, who also released the best album of 2023: HNPM.This is my album of the year because it feels both like a snapshot of the internet’s genre-blending rap scene as well as of modern day Lewisham. Legxacy is fluent in mixing genres in a way that only an internet native could be, for example on the standout track "old Read more ...