There were a number of artists pushing boundaries with their hip-hop releases, experimenting with the artform. Every week I discovered a new artist putting out their own brand of stripped back, raw, sample based hip-hop, capturing the mid-90s East Coast vibe and transforming it in to something fresh. These names continued their stellar work and were joined by the likes of ANKHLEJOHN, Estee Nack, Raheem Supreme, Nowaah The Flood and many others.
The scene started to gain traction in the last few years with guys such as Mach-Hommy, Roc Marciano, Fly Anakin and Westside Gunn but really flourished in 2018. I think the most important music movement in 2018 was the boom bap renaissance that gained a lot of steam with rappers rejuvenating the sound with a new minimal grittiness. I’m always on the lookout for new artists and I do generally prefer underground music but up and coming artists dominated my listening even more than usual this year. The albums this year that I was eagerly anticipating often let me down but I was blown away by many releases that I didn’t know where dropping and I discovered some fantastic artists that were new to me. Instead the spotlight was shining on big releases from Migos and their ilk who are putting out a sound that has gotten stale, the production is uninspired and their rap style is getting tired.Ĭonversely, the underground was on fire in 2018 pumping out an endless barrage of great music. There were still some very solid trap releases from guys like Blac Youngsta, Rich Homie Quan and Ralo although they were mostly overlooked. From a quality standpoint the trap scene was in decline in 2017 but in 2018 the subgenre almost felt like it was dying off. Drake, Migos, Eminem, Nas, Kanye, Lil Wayne, J Cole, Travis Scott and many other big names dropped albums but very few of them interested me. It really did seem like most big names in rap had albums out in 2018 but I personally found a lot of them underwhelming.
I’ve seen a lot of people saying that 2018 is a legendary year for hip-hop and while I agree to an extent, I have different reasons for thinking so.
It truly is an exciting time in music and especially for hip-hop. To make things even more overwhelming, many artists put out multiple albums this year with a some having 3 or even 4 projects appearing in this list. The stream of new releases in 2018 was relentless with lots of established artists putting out projects as well as up and coming acts dropping quality work. In fact it was so difficult that I had extend the list from the usual 40 or 50 up to 100, and there are still a few albums I wanted to include but couldn’t quite fit in. Another year down, another best albums list to put together and this one was really difficult to narrow down.
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