The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.
Summer has officially arrived, and the past four weeks have brought a bounty of new hip-hop to soundtrack your warm weather activities. From hard-hitting gutter anthems, to genre-bending party starters, here are the best hip-hop albums of June 2024.
Channel Tres — Head Rush
Channel Tres’ first album for RCA Records is a cool collection of Compton house and techno that doesn’t just invite you to shake off your inhibitions — it demands it. While it might be a bit heady and left-of-center for rap traditionalists, it’s just the latest breadcrumb in a long trail of projects combining rap and dance music sensibilities going all the way back to Jungle Brothers‘ “I’ll House You” and Queen Latifah’s “Come Into My House.” It’s a fine addition to that canon while also challenging the conventions of hip-hop and traditional Black masculinity. “Gold Daytonas” is my favorite, but the most digestible tracks are “Cactus Water” and “Need U 2 Know.”
Lupe Fiasco — Samurai
Lupe Fiasco returns with an unabashedly nerdy album — does he make any other kind — with a head-scratching concept supported by head-nodding production and some genuinely thought-provoking beats. The concept is classic Lupe overthinking, extrapolating on a vignette from an Amy Winehouse documentary to build out an entire hypothetical on the title track (“What would it be like if [Winehouse] was a battle rapper?”), and indulging in Lupe’s own love for anime and Japanese culture to unpack his own ambitions and contradictions. It’s one of his more autobiographical projects, but as always, it works on multiple levels, giving it all the replay value of a classic anime like Cowboy Bebop.
Megan Thee Stallion — Megan
Mining Meg’s tribulations of the past few years, Megan is impressive for its unflinching reflection of her personal pain and growth, as well as for returning the Houston Hottie to her roots. While her past projects got caught up in chasing pop appeal, here, she mostly sticks to the Texas trap that got her on the map, tapping Southern stalwarts like UGK and Big KRIT for lyrical support. Subjects on the album range from self-love — in more ways than one (contrast “Down Stairs DJ” with “Worthy”) — to Meg’s geeky interests (“Mamushi” dabbles in J-Rap, while “Otaku Hot Girl” samples one of her favorite anime). The high points are still the defiant challenges to her biggest detractors on “Hiss” and “Cobra.”
NxWorries — Why, Lawd?
If great things are worth waiting for, then Anderson .Paak and Knxwledge’s second project as a group is well worth the wait. Where their first masterpiece was something of a pimping handbook, its follow-up finds .Paak soul-searching through the process of divorce. He’s back on the streets and finding that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Described by some fans as a West Coast jazz rap version of Marvin Gaye’s infamous divorce album Here, My Dear (although, we’ve technically already had one of those — with the same name, no less — from Terrace Martin), Why Lawd? finds our guys lamenting not just the loss of love, but also just how hard it is out here to find a new one. Knxwledge outdoes himself, providing production that comes across as contemporarily cool in addition to being potentially timeless.