It may be because I’m getting better at my job, but 2025 already feels like a particularly exciting year in rap. There have been excellent albums by MIKE, OsamaSon, Pink Siifu, Edward Skeletrix, and plenty of others, as well as a whole raft of singles and loosies from established acts and freshly-arrived talent alike. Here are 8 songs from the past month I can’t stop spinning.
Rio Da Yung OG: “4 Minutes of Hell”
Since his release from federal prison in mid-December, Rio Da Yung OG has been on a studio bender, creating new music at a ferocious clip. His writing-and-punching-in process has been meticulously documented in YouTube vlogs and Instagram stories, putting to bed any concerns of post-incarceration sluggishness. If anything, his pen seems not just rust-free but sharper, his images more vivid and his verses a touch more structured.
On “4 Minutes of Hell,” Rio alternates between the gas and the brake, refusing to cruise over the sparse Tye Beats instrumental. They’re opening up the mall so Rio et. al. can shop in LV afterhours — do you know how much this puffer costs, because Rio didn’t ask — if you want to “whack a boss,” good luck figuring out which Escalade he’s in — he’s asking fine shit “what’s her wrist size” on the first link, which isn’t tricking because Rio has so much money. “Bro cooking a big yellow bird and we sipping Barney / We the ones pulled on Sesame Street, killed the party,” Rio raps halfway through. It’s a nonstop carousel of sealed pints and spent shells and rubber banded bills, with encounters with the feds and the cops sprinkled through like salt on ice.
At the song’s very end, he throws off, “I don’t know how to show my pain, I feel jolly / Tell the drink man ‘Pull up,’ and talk a seal out him,” the sort of nonchalant admission he previously buried in between punchlines as an aside. Here, that same trauma becomes a clarifying lens, a coda that reframes the hookless mania of the preceding verse as something akin to anxiety, as if watching a shot clock tick down with every syllable.
Lil Hawa: “Clock It”
Lil Hawa was already buzzing before Lil Uzi Vert shouted her out on last fall’s Eternal Atake 2, but the A-list cosign has certainly boosted her profile. On the young rapper’s debut mixtape 1ST LADY TREY, she largely sticks to the so-called Philly drill template spearheaded by Skrilla (who also pops through for a verse) — ominous, haunting vocal pads reverberate as drums crack and erupt like gunfire. These are the sort of atmospherics that can elevate even a bad rapper, but when Hawa slithers all around the pocket, bemoaning hater bitches and broke losers, it’s mesmerizing.
A$AP Ant: “Don Carlo (Off The Grid)”
A$AP Ant spent 2024 in hibernation, only occasionally surfacing on Instagram to promote a new Marino Infantry drop. The video for “Don Carlo (Off The Grid)” opens on an ovoid cabin in the woods, as if Ant has spent the past 12 months glamping in an oversize egg and now we, the humble listeners, have coaxed him out of retirement for one last job. That’s a pretty satisfying posture for Ant’s mafia raps, which seem to pull the elegant grit of 90’s East Coast hip-hop into the now without devolving into nostalgia. I’d still anticipate a couple harder-knocking tracks on his forthcoming Less Is More mixtape, but for now I’m perfectly happy spinning this suave single back a few more times.
Lisha G: “Not F*cked Up”
2024 was a pretty great year for Lisha G, whose Trini Viv-produced album Groovy Steppin Sh*t a charming synthesis of SoundCloud psychedelia and bossed-up stunt raps, was one of the year’s runaway highlights. Her latest single finds her reconnecting with producer Nerdcoke for a wavy little ditty: “bitch I get the money / I’m not fucked up.” There’s a squeaky little metronome of a synth in the back of this beat, sort of like a loose windshield wiper except addictive instead of annoying, and it’s nice to hear Lisha on an instrumental that kicks her stop-start flow into a higher gear. It’s also pretty funny to hear her roll her eyes at thirsty men — “Lisha not a freak / Lisha not a gnat!”
1oneam: “Penthouse”
If Milwaukee artist 1oneam said he recorded all of his music while sleepwalking, I would be half-inclined to believe him based on his sonic palette alone. He has a penchant for enveloping instrumentals, as if you’re hearing his music in the heart of a sensory deprivation tank, floating in the dark. Where another rapper might be content to let their producers carry them, 1oneam’s songs generally carve out poppy melodies, his fluid bars coasting and cresting from measure to measure. His vocals remind me of long ago days in public school choir — he enunciates, rather than mumbling, and rarely slides between notes, small details of his approach that help his final tracks to come through clear and poised.
Jorjiana: “Elevator Spaghetti”
You might have seen Jorjiana’s On The Radar performance on your timeline over the past 3 months, a perfect storm of mumble raps, OT7 Quanny type beats, and double-take aesthetics (“she raps like this but she’s a white girl?!”). 10 years ago, I imagine she would have been a minor figure in the underground, only known to her fans and a handful of uninterested rap diehards. Nowadays, even smaller artists can have their songs broadcast to a much wider audience, and so you can wind up with the worst of both worlds — large-scale scrutiny with few of the attendant benefits.
Her latest single “Elevator Spaghetti” side steps the kneejerk reactions to “ILBB2” — her bars are crisply enunciated over a lounge music instrumental that could segue into an Astrud Gilberto album without a blink. This places Jorjiana’s lackadaisical flow front and center, the way she waltzes and trots around the pocket of the instrumental — when she raps a run-on sentence like, “Put the cheese in my hands ’cause I don’t like cake, and I ain’t just sweet but my smile great,” or “I’m bubbly as hell but I don’t drink pop, got ’em thinking I’m a problem when the cops watchin” in a dizzying burst, it’s electric. Still, the most memorable couplet has to be, “I’m out in New York in the North Face / It get cold in the winter I need a fat bae.” If everybody is destined to get their 15 minutes (and not a second more), Jorjiana’s making the most of her time in the limelight.
Bossman Dlow feat. French Montana: “Mo Chicken”
I really just wanted to include this video because of the CGI chicken wings. I need to see Bossman Dlow on tour this spring so bad.
Fivio Foreign: “PLAQUEBOYMAX”
A lot has happened in the six weeks since we declared Plaqueboymax hip-hop’s must-watch streamer. Over the past month, his In The Booth series has welcomed Cash Cobain, Central Cee, Wiz Khalifa, and Xaviersobased; there was a weekend of IRL songwars competition, featuring Kura, Akon’s son jahvor, and streamer/Carti-glazer Dabo; and if that wasn’t enough, Max’s stream helped springboard TikTok hits and blunt etiquette discourse far beyond the young content creator’s orbit.
On the last note: When Cash Cobain came through with 41 and Bay Swag, Lil Tjay and Fivio Foreign ended up on-stream as well. The pair lit a blunt; Max asked them to smoke outside, since it was a non-smoking AirBNB. This went over roughly as well as you would expect, with Fivio pettily blowing smoke in Max’s face before getting kicked out. Furious at the slight, Fivio retreated to the studio before releasing “PLAQUEBOYMAX.”
Ostensibly a diss and not a theme song, this track has one of the best pluggnb instrumentals to hit the internet in recent memory, and in another world, where Fivio bothered to pen a second verse, or maybe had Tjay throw 8 bars on, I could genuinely see this song achieving critical mass, a meme turned momentous by sheer force of attention that lands somewhere between “Toosie Slide” and “Harlem Shake.” As many jokes as Fivio Foreign’s spelling mistakes might engender, he can be uncannily savvy: I’ve been thinking about him trolling Kai Cenat into playing his song to 150,000 plus viewers all month. And the song itself is silly but fun, sort of the platonic ideal for a 34-year-old man dissing a 21-year-old.
Max seems to have taken all of this in stride, playfully throwing his own verse on the song — apologies to big Fivie, but “hoe stupid, she Fivio Foreign,” still leaves me in stitches.
