Brockhampton  – No Halo

Tonight at midnight, the much-loved West Coast rap “boy band” Brockhampton will release their new album Ginger, The follow-up to last year’s Iridescence. For the past few weeks, they’ve released a new single, with an accompanying low-budget video, every Thursday morning. The first three of those songs — “I Been Born Again,” “If You Pray Right,” “Boy Bye” — have all captured some of the chaotic, unstable energy that the group brought when they first showed up on our collective radar a couple of years ago. Today, in what’s presumably their final drop before the album arrives, they’ve gone a different direction.

“No Halo,” the opening track from Ginger, turns out to be a melodic and introspective songs, one built on the sound of fluttery acoustic guitars. The Brockhampton members do as much singing — or at least as much sing-rapping — as they do straight-up rapping. It’s a song about depression, with different members of the group getting into matters of religion and substance abuse. Deb Never, a Seattle-born and Los Angeles-based lo-fi singer-songwriter signed to Shlohmo’s WEDIDIT label, single the hook along with Matt Champion and Merlyn Wood. It’s her first time appearing on a Brockhampton song.

The video comes from director Spencer Ford, who seems to be Brockhampton’s primary visual collaborator this time around. It involves sailboats, owls, space blankets, churches, and shiny suits, and it’s got the same grainy slapdash energy as the other recent Brockhampton videos.

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Clipping. frontman Daveed Diggs has been quite busy over the last few years. The Tony-winning Hamilton alum just released an album with Rafael Casal this past week called Seven Nights In Chicago. The pair have been longtime creative partners, also having worked together on the Sundance film Blindspotting. They also released a song called “Vanity” last year with their Blindspotting costar Utkarsh Ambudkar.

But now Diggs is back to working with producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes as Clipping. The experimental hip-hop trio just announced their latest studio album There Existed An Addiction To Blood is due out in October, and today we get to hear lead single “Nothing Is Safe.”

This track is heavy in content and quite confrontational, coming across like a more serious version of their 2016 track “Shooter,” which with the recent uptick in mass shootings throughout the nation feels like a powerful reevaluation. A singular, eerie piano note is repeated throughout the beginning of the song, laying the groundwork for a massively intense build up.

Raining bullets and seeping blood are just some of the chill-inducing visuals illustrated lyrically, an onslaught that reaches its climax as Diggs says, “Truth, like death, comes for everyone.” Rising synths kick in, launching a sheer mass of volume onto the listener while Diggs picks up the tempo. A sample of what sounds like a dog barking is wedged between high hats and piano note accenting the trap beat. It’s horrifying and catchy all at the same time.

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Binki – Wiggle

Binki’s new eclectic indie-rap single “Wiggle” makes its much anticipated premiere today. His knack for smooth basslines wrapped (pun intended) in authentic lyrics made for much buzz in the underground community and “Wiggle”, the appropriately named release, delivered. Following this single, binki plans to drop a new song every month until the end of the year.

The debut single “MARCO” (which had been out for nearly 9 months) had shown traces of easy quirkiness paralleling other status-quo-divergent rappers in the genre such as Yeek and Bakar. Concurrently, binki is able to carve out a a genre-breaking, highly customized sound that transcends to attract and appeal to fans in all musical circles.

Having grown up in a “Suburbs as fuck” Pennsylvania and later living in North Carolina, binki made the decision earlier this year to relocate to NYC, venturing into opportunity and exploration of his talents.

I feel like a big part of being successful in any field, especially creative endeavors, is just being bold enough or naive enough to think you have something to add. So many people give up before they even try.

My goals are pretty nebulous at the moment. I really just wanna connect and collaborate with talented artists. I’d love to perform my music in some capacity, that’s been the mission for awhile.

NYC represents opportunity in my mind. There’s an energy. If you live there, you might inherently have it. If you move there you’re looking for something, and you gotta be driven to survive there. I’m looking for that energy.

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Megan Thee Stallion, Quavo and City Girls have joined forces for “Pastor,” a new collaboration off Quality Control’s Control the Streets, Vol. 2 compilation. Produced by Murda Beatz, the mid-tempo track sees Quavo taking the lead on the vocals, singing the first verse and all the choruses, with Megan Thee Stallion jumping on the second verse partway through. City Girls’ Yung Miami joins for the third verse.

Control the Streets, Vol. 2 dropped today via Atlanta Record label Quality Control, which is home to Migos and Lil Yachty. The collection also includes tracks from Migos, Young Thug, French Montana, Lil Baby, DaBaby, Gucci Mane, Travis Scott and Young Thug, among others. The label’s flagship compilation, Quality Control: Control The Streets Volume 1, came out in 2017. Quavo also features on Migos’ “Frosted Flakes,” which received a Mission Impossible-style music video.

Megan Thee Stallion recently released a new single “Hot Girl Summer,” which features Nicki Minaj and Ty Dolla $ign, as well as Juicy J as the producer. The track marked the rapper’s first collaboration with Minaj. Earlier this year, Megan Thee Stallion released her debut mixtape Fever and she has been working on her debut album, although it doesn’t yet have an official release date.

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