Top 10 Best Rap Albums of 2021
Kenya
11
2021saw several amazing Hip Hop releases from some of the game’s biggest artists.
Throughout the year fans received new music from Drake, Kanye West Nas, Juice WRLD, Young Thug and more
I will be narrowing down the endless amount of music released during the course of a year to the essentials, providing readers with a list of the must-listen projects.
1)Donda, Kanye West
Kanye West, who legally changed his name to Ye, released his tenth studio album Donda on August 29, 2021.
The album, named after his mother who passed away in 2007, addresses pain and heartbreak as well as joy, a glow up and elevation.
Donda is primarily a hip hop, gospel, progressive rap, and pop album that features elements of trap and drill. Ye explores themes of religion, divorce and pays tribute to his mother.
On Donda, Kanye manages to dramatize his struggles with bipolar disorder and his commitments to his faith with both more coherency and dynamism than ever before.
This is arguably the most vulnerable and broken that the rapper has allowed himself to appear on record.
The instrumental choices follow suit, with Kanye and his collaborators, for example, stripping down “God Breathed” to just an undulating bassline and menacing choral baritones.
Likewise, the swarm of demonic chirps that emerge behind Kanye’s vocal on “Heaven and Hell” as he discusses the devil are massive, twisted, and unsettling.
If previously there was a sense that Kanye’s foregrounding of his Christianity, something that was always an undercurrent in his work, would stifle his artistry, Donda emphatically disproves that notion
2) Call Me If You Get Lost, Tyler, the Creator.
Tyler, the Creator’s Call Me If You Get Lost continues the recent strides that the rapper-producer has made in production finesse.
His beats are immaculate without being showy, replete with horns and shuffling drums—but marries that to the immediacy of his early work.
Across 16 varied tracks, Tyler Baudelaire (his chosen alter ego this go-round) addresses race, fame, wealth, and love in clever, dense verses full of humorous asides and conflicted resolutions.
It’s also easily one of the most purely fun listens of the year, with a bevy of ecstatic guest spots, mixtape staple DJ Drama interjecting puffed-up commentary after every other line, and Tyler tossing off some of the best rap boasts in some time (“Got so much self-respect, I wash my hands ‘fore I piss”).
The MC morphs his delivery in so many different ways here, offering up skulking mutters, brash declarations, and soft croons.
3)The Off Season, J Cole
The nexus of love and basketball is the premise for J. Cole’s sixth consecutive No. 1 album The Off-Season.
For the first time since his Born Sinner album in 2013, The Off-Season is bound to go platinum with features including 21 Savage, Cam’Ron, Lil Baby, 6lack, Cole’s fellow Fayetteville native Morray, Bas and Diddy assisting the Dreamville co-founder across 12 tracks.
Cole reflects on his childhood innocence through the present in his own fatherhood, friendships and family relationships lost, and asserting his reign at the top of the rap game.
This album is the crest in Cole’s career narrative arc, left to ponder what’s next.
If Cole ultimately retires instead of releasing his long-teased The Fall Off, The Off-Season could be remembered as a stellar production synthesizing J. Cole’s cache of lyrical dexterity and melodic hooks over traditional underground boom bap (“applying pressure,” “punching the clock,” “close,” “the climb back”), retro-2000s Hip Hop homages (“95 South” and “my life”) and radio-friendly soulful motifs (“left go my hand” “hunger in the hills) and “pride is the devil”).
4) Vince Staples, Vince Staples
Throughout his eponymous fourth album, Vince Staples keenly draws contrasts between his upbringing and the life he now enjoys.
At his best, he peerlessly interrogates his anxieties with a bone-chilling sense of morbidity: “Hangin’ on them corners, same as hangin’ from a ceiling fan/When I see my fans/I’m too paranoid to shake their hands,” he confesses on “Sundown Town.”
The album’s production is the least showy of any of the rapper’s projects to date. Handled almost entirely by Kenny Beats, it’s sturdy but unobtrusive, favoring slower BPMs to match Staples’s less hurried pace and allowing the snares to smack resoundingly.
Composed of two-minute fragments that function as snapshots of his dim view of humanity, Vince Staples is another brief but trenchant effort from the rapper, his leisurely approach suggesting a newfound confidence
5)Hall Of Fame Polo G
Do you know how hard it is to make a truly great rap album in 2021? In its current iteration, mainstream rap exists as fodder for the algorithm, fuel for habit-forming streaming-service background-music playlists.
This is not a healthy state of affairs. The music, for the most part, is soothing and ephemeral, a softly thrumming soundtrack to the branding exercises and soap-opera storylines that have supplanted the music itself as the main attractions.
Eventually, something will come along and shake up that status quo. For now, though, the depressive Chicago melodist Polo G navigates this desiccated landscape with a grace and pathos that nobody else can touch.
In the sound of circa-now rap, Polo has found a vehicle for sadness and exhilaration.
Polo makes hits, and he keeps the virtual cash registers humming, but he’s also pulled off the miracle of transmogrifying commerce into art, using cynical tools for idealistic ends. On Hall Of Fame, his most high-profile album yet, Polo’s big-name collaborators scramble to keep up.
I wonder if they look at this young man and realize that this is who they could be. Polo G is not a big personality, and he doesn’t need to be one. He keeps telling his tender truths, and the world keeps stopping to listen. That’s how this thing is supposed to work.
6)Two Point Five Amine
Why does every album have to be so damn serious? Aminé refutes that idea by delivering TwoPointFive, an in-between offering that is a fun and experimental display of the Portland rapper’s most appealing skills.
As he explained when he dropped OnePointFive back in 2018, “The PointFive projects are the breaks in between albums where I give myself the freedom to make music without expectations, focusing instead of spontaneity and the best of what comes from stream of conscious creation, which is why they release unexpected and without a long rollout.”
Thus, this project sounds funky, in a good way, with left-of-center beats and playful bars. Aminé has always had fun on his projects, but TwoPointFive feels like an extra breezy ride through the park on your new bike.
It’s thanks to Amine’s charm that an intermission project like TwoPointFive works so well, leaving fans excited to hear what he has coming next
7)Punk Young Thug
In the distorted, rose pink-tinted world that Young Thug holds dominion over, he can turn water into syrup and the hardest rappers into rockstars, and Punk reflects the contradicting alchemy that the Atlanta rapper has become a master of.
Despite adopting the name of the popular rock subgenre, Punk sounds far removed from the raging roots of that scene. While the album is laced with guitars across its 20 songs, it sounds more like the strings being plucked while sitting around a campfire than the ones being pounded in some hole-in-the-wall club.
That doesn’t mean the songs are any less satisfying—they just diverge from the expectations fans had after Thug assumed an entire rock aesthetic for the album’s rollout, destroying a Rolls-Royce in the process. But Young Thug has always been an artist who defies expectations.
Punk is sonically and thematically diverse, with songs like “Hate The Game” and “Love You More” with Nate Reuss, Gunna, and Jeff Bhasker sounding like they would fit perfectly into the closing act of a coming-of-age A24 movie, while others, like “Scoliosis” and “Bubbly” featuring Drake and Travis Scott, are natural inclusions into King of Diamonds’ Saturday night playlist.
This album reflects the varied personalities of Young Thug, while maintaining his unique voice throughout.
8) USee4Yourself, IDK
IDK’s world is a series of rhymes and riddles. He hid the name of his sophomore album, USee4Yourself, in the last letter of each song title on his last project, Is He Real?
While the Maryland rapper is always vulnerable in his music, USee4Yourself feels like an audible therapy session as we follow him through the labyrinth of his mind, and he shows us how he grappled with some of his most traumatic memories.
Is He Real? found him coming to grips with his stepfather giving his mother AIDS, and on this album, IDK discusses other deeply scarring events like his aunt molesting him on “Hey Auntie” and his broken family on “Cry in Church.”
However, despite featuring these somber revelations, USee4Yourself still delivers a wide variety of sounds and impressive features from Young Thug, Jay Electronica, the late MF DOOM, and more.
This album is IDK’s way of telling listeners that these true and traumatic stories are no longer scars he’s ashamed of, but ones that he wears as constant reminders as to why nothing so minimal as critics or industry trappings could ever stop him
9)Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, Little Simz
There’s emotional outpourings at every turn of Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, but it always sounds so grandiose.
She’s as confident on the mic as they come and you can feel the cold, hard gaze in her eyes when she’s delivering lines.
You vibe hard with how cool she is on “Woman,” saying, “Brooklyn ladies, know you hustle on the daily / Innovatin’ just like Donna Summer in the ‘80s.”
She’s rapping for women, she’s rapping for Black women, she’s rapping for women all around the world, and she’s rapping for people who can appreciate how the hip-hop art form is built for marginalized voices to rise up.
There’s broad appeal to her overall aesthetic, too, and now on her fourth album, Little Simz is poised to highlight the mighty British rap scene for good
10) The Melodic Blue Baby Keem
The Melodic Blue is overflowing with ideas. If you don’t like what you hear at any given moment, just wait a few seconds and the beat will switch or Keem will try a new flow.
This album has everything—there are mosh pit anthems (“Vent”), introspective cuts with addictive melodies (“Issues”), experimental song structures (“Trademark USA”), and Grammy-nominated hits (“Family Ties”).
Keem makes the most of his family ties to get a few appearances from Kendrick (who wouldn’t?) but make no mistake about it: he has more than enough talent to stand on his own. All the hype was well-deserved. Baby Keem is for real.
What are some of your favorite rap albums released this year let me know in the comments
#2021WrapUp #Music #MusicReview
Throughout the year fans received new music from Drake, Kanye West Nas, Juice WRLD, Young Thug and more
I will be narrowing down the endless amount of music released during the course of a year to the essentials, providing readers with a list of the must-listen projects.
1)Donda, Kanye West
Kanye West, who legally changed his name to Ye, released his tenth studio album Donda on August 29, 2021.
The album, named after his mother who passed away in 2007, addresses pain and heartbreak as well as joy, a glow up and elevation.
Donda is primarily a hip hop, gospel, progressive rap, and pop album that features elements of trap and drill. Ye explores themes of religion, divorce and pays tribute to his mother.
On Donda, Kanye manages to dramatize his struggles with bipolar disorder and his commitments to his faith with both more coherency and dynamism than ever before.
This is arguably the most vulnerable and broken that the rapper has allowed himself to appear on record.
The instrumental choices follow suit, with Kanye and his collaborators, for example, stripping down “God Breathed” to just an undulating bassline and menacing choral baritones.
Likewise, the swarm of demonic chirps that emerge behind Kanye’s vocal on “Heaven and Hell” as he discusses the devil are massive, twisted, and unsettling.
If previously there was a sense that Kanye’s foregrounding of his Christianity, something that was always an undercurrent in his work, would stifle his artistry, Donda emphatically disproves that notion
2) Call Me If You Get Lost, Tyler, the Creator.
Tyler, the Creator’s Call Me If You Get Lost continues the recent strides that the rapper-producer has made in production finesse.
His beats are immaculate without being showy, replete with horns and shuffling drums—but marries that to the immediacy of his early work.
Across 16 varied tracks, Tyler Baudelaire (his chosen alter ego this go-round) addresses race, fame, wealth, and love in clever, dense verses full of humorous asides and conflicted resolutions.
It’s also easily one of the most purely fun listens of the year, with a bevy of ecstatic guest spots, mixtape staple DJ Drama interjecting puffed-up commentary after every other line, and Tyler tossing off some of the best rap boasts in some time (“Got so much self-respect, I wash my hands ‘fore I piss”).
The MC morphs his delivery in so many different ways here, offering up skulking mutters, brash declarations, and soft croons.
3)The Off Season, J Cole
The nexus of love and basketball is the premise for J. Cole’s sixth consecutive No. 1 album The Off-Season.
For the first time since his Born Sinner album in 2013, The Off-Season is bound to go platinum with features including 21 Savage, Cam’Ron, Lil Baby, 6lack, Cole’s fellow Fayetteville native Morray, Bas and Diddy assisting the Dreamville co-founder across 12 tracks.
Cole reflects on his childhood innocence through the present in his own fatherhood, friendships and family relationships lost, and asserting his reign at the top of the rap game.
This album is the crest in Cole’s career narrative arc, left to ponder what’s next.
If Cole ultimately retires instead of releasing his long-teased The Fall Off, The Off-Season could be remembered as a stellar production synthesizing J. Cole’s cache of lyrical dexterity and melodic hooks over traditional underground boom bap (“applying pressure,” “punching the clock,” “close,” “the climb back”), retro-2000s Hip Hop homages (“95 South” and “my life”) and radio-friendly soulful motifs (“left go my hand” “hunger in the hills) and “pride is the devil”).
4) Vince Staples, Vince Staples
Throughout his eponymous fourth album, Vince Staples keenly draws contrasts between his upbringing and the life he now enjoys.
At his best, he peerlessly interrogates his anxieties with a bone-chilling sense of morbidity: “Hangin’ on them corners, same as hangin’ from a ceiling fan/When I see my fans/I’m too paranoid to shake their hands,” he confesses on “Sundown Town.”
The album’s production is the least showy of any of the rapper’s projects to date. Handled almost entirely by Kenny Beats, it’s sturdy but unobtrusive, favoring slower BPMs to match Staples’s less hurried pace and allowing the snares to smack resoundingly.
Composed of two-minute fragments that function as snapshots of his dim view of humanity, Vince Staples is another brief but trenchant effort from the rapper, his leisurely approach suggesting a newfound confidence
5)Hall Of Fame Polo G
Do you know how hard it is to make a truly great rap album in 2021? In its current iteration, mainstream rap exists as fodder for the algorithm, fuel for habit-forming streaming-service background-music playlists.
This is not a healthy state of affairs. The music, for the most part, is soothing and ephemeral, a softly thrumming soundtrack to the branding exercises and soap-opera storylines that have supplanted the music itself as the main attractions.
Eventually, something will come along and shake up that status quo. For now, though, the depressive Chicago melodist Polo G navigates this desiccated landscape with a grace and pathos that nobody else can touch.
In the sound of circa-now rap, Polo has found a vehicle for sadness and exhilaration.
Polo makes hits, and he keeps the virtual cash registers humming, but he’s also pulled off the miracle of transmogrifying commerce into art, using cynical tools for idealistic ends. On Hall Of Fame, his most high-profile album yet, Polo’s big-name collaborators scramble to keep up.
I wonder if they look at this young man and realize that this is who they could be. Polo G is not a big personality, and he doesn’t need to be one. He keeps telling his tender truths, and the world keeps stopping to listen. That’s how this thing is supposed to work.
6)Two Point Five Amine
Why does every album have to be so damn serious? Aminé refutes that idea by delivering TwoPointFive, an in-between offering that is a fun and experimental display of the Portland rapper’s most appealing skills.
As he explained when he dropped OnePointFive back in 2018, “The PointFive projects are the breaks in between albums where I give myself the freedom to make music without expectations, focusing instead of spontaneity and the best of what comes from stream of conscious creation, which is why they release unexpected and without a long rollout.”
Thus, this project sounds funky, in a good way, with left-of-center beats and playful bars. Aminé has always had fun on his projects, but TwoPointFive feels like an extra breezy ride through the park on your new bike.
It’s thanks to Amine’s charm that an intermission project like TwoPointFive works so well, leaving fans excited to hear what he has coming next
7)Punk Young Thug
In the distorted, rose pink-tinted world that Young Thug holds dominion over, he can turn water into syrup and the hardest rappers into rockstars, and Punk reflects the contradicting alchemy that the Atlanta rapper has become a master of.
Despite adopting the name of the popular rock subgenre, Punk sounds far removed from the raging roots of that scene. While the album is laced with guitars across its 20 songs, it sounds more like the strings being plucked while sitting around a campfire than the ones being pounded in some hole-in-the-wall club.
That doesn’t mean the songs are any less satisfying—they just diverge from the expectations fans had after Thug assumed an entire rock aesthetic for the album’s rollout, destroying a Rolls-Royce in the process. But Young Thug has always been an artist who defies expectations.
Punk is sonically and thematically diverse, with songs like “Hate The Game” and “Love You More” with Nate Reuss, Gunna, and Jeff Bhasker sounding like they would fit perfectly into the closing act of a coming-of-age A24 movie, while others, like “Scoliosis” and “Bubbly” featuring Drake and Travis Scott, are natural inclusions into King of Diamonds’ Saturday night playlist.
This album reflects the varied personalities of Young Thug, while maintaining his unique voice throughout.
8) USee4Yourself, IDK
IDK’s world is a series of rhymes and riddles. He hid the name of his sophomore album, USee4Yourself, in the last letter of each song title on his last project, Is He Real?
While the Maryland rapper is always vulnerable in his music, USee4Yourself feels like an audible therapy session as we follow him through the labyrinth of his mind, and he shows us how he grappled with some of his most traumatic memories.
Is He Real? found him coming to grips with his stepfather giving his mother AIDS, and on this album, IDK discusses other deeply scarring events like his aunt molesting him on “Hey Auntie” and his broken family on “Cry in Church.”
However, despite featuring these somber revelations, USee4Yourself still delivers a wide variety of sounds and impressive features from Young Thug, Jay Electronica, the late MF DOOM, and more.
This album is IDK’s way of telling listeners that these true and traumatic stories are no longer scars he’s ashamed of, but ones that he wears as constant reminders as to why nothing so minimal as critics or industry trappings could ever stop him
9)Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, Little Simz
There’s emotional outpourings at every turn of Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, but it always sounds so grandiose.
She’s as confident on the mic as they come and you can feel the cold, hard gaze in her eyes when she’s delivering lines.
You vibe hard with how cool she is on “Woman,” saying, “Brooklyn ladies, know you hustle on the daily / Innovatin’ just like Donna Summer in the ‘80s.”
She’s rapping for women, she’s rapping for Black women, she’s rapping for women all around the world, and she’s rapping for people who can appreciate how the hip-hop art form is built for marginalized voices to rise up.
There’s broad appeal to her overall aesthetic, too, and now on her fourth album, Little Simz is poised to highlight the mighty British rap scene for good
10) The Melodic Blue Baby Keem
The Melodic Blue is overflowing with ideas. If you don’t like what you hear at any given moment, just wait a few seconds and the beat will switch or Keem will try a new flow.
This album has everything—there are mosh pit anthems (“Vent”), introspective cuts with addictive melodies (“Issues”), experimental song structures (“Trademark USA”), and Grammy-nominated hits (“Family Ties”).
Keem makes the most of his family ties to get a few appearances from Kendrick (who wouldn’t?) but make no mistake about it: he has more than enough talent to stand on his own. All the hype was well-deserved. Baby Keem is for real.
What are some of your favorite rap albums released this year let me know in the comments
#2021WrapUp #Music #MusicReview
Comments (11)
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New Comments（11）
Rosemary Minjaj
Lucky Humble KE
DONDA AOTY
Botegabaddie
CLB should be here
Namtamwa
great,thank you for keeping us informed
Sunny SY
nice
Elite_Ade
Nice
fatoba zion
ye
CherediJoshua
Great
Kanye West update
one of the great song i ever release this year
Popfressor
donda is the best
Donda[0x1f63f][0x1f63f]