2024 lineup
clipping.
The critically acclaimed West Coast-based experimental hip-hop trio, "clipping" is fronted by Tony and Grammy winning actor, rapper and writer, Daveed Diggs along with producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson. They initially rose to prominence with their debut album MIDCITY and follow up, CLPPNG. In 2016 they released their opus, SPLENDOR & MISERY, a science fiction concept album that garnered international critical acclaim, including a Hugo Award nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation. This was only the second time ever a music album was nominated for a Hugo Award, putting them up against the likes of GAME OF THRONES and BLACK MIRROR. Their follow up, THE DEEP, garnered similar attention including another Hugo Award nomination as well as influencing a Simon & Schuster published novel of the same name. Most recently the band diverted from their sci-fi storytelling and released a set of horror-based concept albums, THERE EXISTED AN ADDITION TO BLOOD and VISIONS OF BODIES BEING BURNED. Line of Best Fit's Jack Bray hailed it as "sonically intriguing" and "another successful experiment for the group and one of the eeriest examples of modern hip- hop to date."
Yaya bey
New York-bred R&B vocalist Yaya Bey conjures a comprehensive self-portrait on her new studio album, Ten Fold. Where her previous works were earnest and mindful, Yaya’s new LP is definitive, harkening back to aspects of her past while examining the future of the world that surrounds her with a stream-of-conscious intentionality. Over rapturous production from Corey Fonville of jazz group Butcher Brown, Karriem Riggins, Jay Daniel, Exaktly and Boston Chery, Yaya delivers a free-spoken masterpiece that speaks to the intricacies of persevering through a year punctuated by grief and loss, life-altering milestones and everything in between.
Nine months after releasing her powerful 2022 album Remember Your North Star, Yaya returned with Exodus the North Star, primed to evolve through the tumult. “I usually try to have this whole thematic thing when I go into albums. But this album I just made as life was happening,” she says.
Working within that kind of open-ended creative rhythm allowed Yaya to enrich the album with moments that convey all of the endeavors, emotions and experiences that inform her work in music and beyond. She’s lived life as a poet, a street medic at protests and founded a mutual aid organization called Sanaa, an art curator (PG African American Museum), and a mixed media artist herself with a residency at Brooklyn’s Mocada Museum and creating the cover art for past projects (“keisha,” “september 13th,” The Things I Can’t Take With Me EP and more). The album ties a thread between these varying facets of Yaya’s identity to present a wholehearted portrait of who she is and carves out spaces for her to speak on the world as she sees it. On Ten Fold, she meditates on her inner being, falling in love, and in equal measure, commentates on the world and community around her, critiquing political conditions, like rising costs and the near-dystopian state of mankind.
mavi
"Hailing from Charlotte, NC, young rapper MAVI is one to watch. He created his first album, Let the Sun Talk, during his freshman year at Howard University. The project was met with praise, and so at the beginning of the pandemic, the neuroscience major decided to go home to his beloved city of Charlotte to work on his next record, the sophomore effort End of the Earth. With those two critically-praised independent records under his belt, word began to spread. He got invitations to collaborate with artists like The Alchemist and Earl Sweatshirt on tracks. He opened for Jack Harlow on his most recent tour. And last year, he recorded a stirring third album, Laughing So Hard It Hurts.
Laughing So Hard It Hurts is an album about pain. The pain of losing friends and loved ones, the pain of generational trauma, and of relationships ending. Though none of this is considered new territory in hip-hop, it's what makes Mavi's latest record so special - its vulnerability. You can hear the loneliness in the songs. Through his rhymes and the beautiful, almost subdued, production, he doesn't just tell you about pain; you're feeling it with him. Mavi crams 16 songs into 32 minutes on Laughing So Hard It Hurts. It's a dense and intimate record, even a little lonely-sounding at times." - npr
Irreversible Entanglements
Irreversible Entanglements (IE) is a free-jazz quintet with an experimental punk mentality, that consists of poet/vocalist Camae Ayewa (often known as Moor Mother), bassist Luke Stewart, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, and drummer Tcheser Holmes.
It is a community band playing deeply improvised, rhythm music full of love and social commitment. IE came together spontaneously, organically, in April of 2015 at "Musicians Against Police Brutality," a day of protest sound and discussion in Brooklyn. All were artists and activists of varying degrees: Philadelphia-based Ayewa and Neuringer, and D.C.-based Stewart as veterans of the Mid-Atlantic noisehardcore-experimental scene, while Holmes and Navarro as recent New England Conservatory grads Each of the studio albums that followed — 2020's Who Sent You? and 2021's Open The Gates — developed this legend further.
In 2023, IE signed to the fabled Impulse! Records, and released its most accomplished work to date, Protect Your Light, on September 8, 2023, primarily recorded at New Jersey's historic Van Gelder Studios. It features eight examples of how IE's collaborative composition strategies and Ayewa's in-communion verses result in some of the most potent music being made in the third decade of the 21st century, music with communal light and love at its heart. Get to that love on time — don't force history to guide you.