Summer has officially arrived, and the past four weeks have brought a bounty of new hip-hop to soundtrack your warm weather activities. From hard-hitting gutter anthems, to genre-bending party starters, here are the best hip-hop albums of June 2024. Channel Tres — Channel Tres’ is a cool collection of Compton house and techno that doesn’t just invite you to shake off your inhibitions — it demands it.
While it might be a bit heady and left-of-center for rap traditionalists, it’s just the latest breadcrumb in a long trail of projects combining rap and dance music sensibilities going all the way back to Jungle Brothers‘ “I’ll House You” and Queen Latifah’s “Come Into My House.” It’s a fine addition to that canon while also challenging the conventions of hip-hop and traditional Black masculinity. “Gold Daytonas” is my favorite, but the most digestible tracks are “Cactus Water” and “Need U 2 Know.
” Lupe Fiasco — Lupe Fiasco returns with an — does he make any other kind — with a head-scratching concept supported by head-nodding production and some genuinely thought-provoking beats. The concept is classic Lupe overthinking, extrapolating on a vignette from an Amy Winehouse documentary to build out an entire hypothetical on the title track (“What would it be like if [Winehouse] was a battle rapper?”), and indulging in Lupe’s own love for anime and Japanese culture to unpack his own ambitions and contradictions. It’s one of his more .