The New Album You Need to Hear This Week
Customer Service is a weekly feature to help you cut through the digital weeds and find the music you want.
Tierra Whack, WHACK’S MUSEUM
People tend to talk about Tierra Whack in terms of her being withholding. The Philadelphia native raps sparingly, in terms of the sheer size of her catalog and the brevity of her early songs; WHACK’S MUSEUM, her overwhelmingly poised new album, occasionally makes this scarcity its subject. But where her initial buzz rested partly on inference, here the concision is a sign of mastery. Listening to WHACK’S MUSEUM often feels like watching a superb rapper run through a tightly rehearsed set near the end of her tour, the syllables snapping just so, the disdain deeply considered but no less acidic. Recommended if you like: Pasting Beanie Sigel acapellas onto the instrumentals from Mach-Hommy albums.
Further listening
student 1, truant: The slyly chameleonic Minneapolis artist moves between chasms of introspection and relentless pulse. RIYL: Imagining what Kanye West might have been making circa 2012 if he were suspended in post-808s & Heartbreak animation and was trying to shake more complex neuroses.
Chris Crack, Don’t Go In the Women’s Bathroom: People rightly give Chris Crack credit for his outre humor (as evidenced by his now-widely imitated song titles), but his latest, frenetic album is also a master class in dense, athletic rapping. RIYL: Boosie but also women.
Shaudie Man, SUMN B4 THE TAPE II: Thoughts of a Outlaw: I’m sneaking this in despite it dropping a couple weeks ago; . RIYL: Early-mid period Young Thug, the clip of Stephen A. Smith talking about the Kwame Brown-for-Pau Gasol trade.