In the world of hip hop, a lot can occur in a single week. That's why we update our playlists regularly to keep you in the loop. So much goes on that we even felt the need to divide the week's hottest releases into two playlists. While "FIRE EMOJI" consists of our favourites out of the week's most popular tracks, "On The Come Up" is for those who want to keep an ear to the streets and know which artists are up next.
December music releases used to be reserved for only the biggest artists who could capitalize on the holiday market. Now that streaming has taken over, this model has been largely thrown away and we're getting new heat up to the final day of the year. Roddy Ricch dropped his highly-anticipated debut album, Please Excuse Me For Being Anti-Social, on Atlantic Records. The Compton rapper has acquired many fans through his inventive flows and melodic sensibilities. He also attracted a lot of attention from appearing on Nipsey Hussle's "Racks In The Middle", which was one of 2019's hottest songs (#2 in our opinion). On his new album, Roddy proves that he can hold down the fort on his own. Although he enlists a bunch of great guests like Lil Durk, Meek Mill and Ty Dolla $ign, two of our favourite cuts off the project were solo endeavours. "The Box" and "Boom Boom Room" both made it onto our "Fire Emoji" playlist. Despite Roddy's success, this is still his debut, so we felt it was fair to include him in our "On The Come Up" playlist too.
Two other big releases this week were XXXTENTACION's Bad Vibes Forever and Fat Joe's Family Ties, both of which may be the artists' final albums. The Lil Wayne-assisted song on X's posthumous project, "School Shooters", was selected for "Fire Emoji". We also took a collaboration off Family Ties that features some legends: "Lord Above" with Eminem and Mary J. Blige.
In the singles department, we have a collaboration between Flatbush Zombies and Tech N9ne ("Monica"), and one between Rich The Kid and Quavo ("That's Tuff").
Pick your playlist and let us know your favourite discoveries.