New Rap Albums

In its first quarter, 2015 has seen a very high number of critically and/or commercially successful new rap albums, with many even prematurely saying that it’s already a much stronger year for rap than the entirety of 2014. Top-tier artists such as Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Lupe Fiasco, Joey Bada$$, Action Bronson and Wale dropped long-awaited new rap albums, and elsewhere, less established rappers like Father, Ratking, Rae Sremmurd, Heems and Earl Sweatshirt gained new fans with their biggest projects to date. 

                                                                   

       

Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, initially planned as a mixtape, has probably performed the best commercially out of all new rap albums this year. At one point, each one of its 17 tracks were on the Billboard Hot 100 (along with four more tracks featuring Drake, with the 21 total breaking a record previously held by…Drizzy, obviously). An expertly uniform-sounding full length, IYRTITL proved that Drake’s intended freebies can hang with the rest of the rap game’s commercial new rap albums.

                                                                               

 Virtually the polar opposite of Drake’s album in terms of sound and content, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly was almost universally hailed by critics as near-perfect, making it 2015’s most acclaimed new rap album thus far. Itswrithing, jazz and funk influenced music makes it seem like a living, breathing organism, especially with its abrupt changes of pace and many brief interludes. Lamar is another force of nature entirely, and focusing on the intricacies of the two at the same time can prove dizzying on initial listens, but rewarding and powerful on repeat visits. By almost any stretch of the imagination, TPAB is the most intricately-constructed new rap album—both musically and lyrically—of the last three or four years, let alone the first three months of 2015.