All of which is to say that if you were looking for chart-topping hits this year, you might’ve been disappointed, but if you were looking for good hip-hop music, 2025 was one of the best years to be a ...

Technically, Up My Standards is a mixtape, but it sounds more like one long radio freestyle. The only moments where Philly’s Shadstackzz isn’t rapping at full force are when the beats switch from one ...

Richmond rapper Fly Anakin lands at No. 3 on Pitchfork’s Best Rap Songs of 2025 alongside Big Kahuna OG and Silkmoney. The ...

Good music and a good drink often go hand in hand, but do we ever really stop to appreciate the pairing? We do now, because 2025 has been a banner year for rap music, but it’s also quietly been an ...

This month YouTube’s most successful stationary mic platform On The Radar Radio savvily diversified. While the channel started with more boilerplate interview and trending news coverage, the channel’s ...

The Best New Hip-Hop This Week includes albums, videos, and songs from Jack Harlow, Doja Cat, and Wale. First things first: Jack Harlow and Doja Cat make a cute couple in the video for Jack’s new ...

The best rap beats are nerdy as hell. Every drum placement, every melody, every chopped-up sample sends me down a YouTube rabbit hole trying to piece together the way a producer contorts and dissects ...

You know how the cliché goes: rappers want to be basketball players, and basketball players want to be rappers. This has been a truism since the '90s, when rap really started taking off as a ...

In 1894, “The Little Lost Child” went “platinum” off sheet music sales in what might be considered the first successful music video marketing campaign. Innovations in aurafarming have taken things to ...

Week in and week out, there are plenty of brand-new rap songs, no matter the time of year. It can be really difficult to stay aware of what's out and also what's hot, so XXL decided to make things ...