Month: July 2020

TMZ reports that five people have been arrested in connection with Pop Smoke’s murder.

This story is being updated.

TikTok’s days may be numbered, but the app is still being utilized for some good (it’s not only lip-syncing teens, ya know). As the debate around facemasks continues, a couple of new educational posts by Bill Nye in which he schools anti-maskers on preventing the spread of COVID-19 are making the social media rounds. Now we’re going to get this disclaimer out of the way immediately: Bill Nye is not a scientist. He’s a mechanical engineer. But he is “The Science Guy” and, at this point, has hired legit scientists to help him vet his episodes.

He’s also got a massive platform to reach people who might otherwise refuse masks. And in these TikToks he does a good job breaking down the science of the face mask in his trademark zany style. The series is called “Consider the Following” and it’s accompanied by the kind of quick edits that make TikTok so addicting.

“So the reason we want you to wear a mask is to protect you, sure. But the main reason we want you to wear a mask is to protect me from you, and the particles from your respiratory system from getting into my respiratory system,” says Bill, while demonstrating how both cloth and N95 masks make it harder to blow out a candle because of their ability to block airflow.

In another post, Bill Nye draws a comparison to the science of facemasks, and their ability to block the movement of air, to that of a scarf, explaining that the basic science is the same. So while Bill Nye may not be a scientist and he’s definitely not an epidemiologist, he is a science educator. Meaning that we’ll take his word over your conspiracy-obsessed Facebook uncle any day.

While a culture war rages over wearing facemasks in America, study after study seems to indicate that the masks will, in fact, help us in preventing the spread of COVID. A study published in Health Affairs compared the COVID-19 growth rate in 15 different states before and after the states issued mask mandates and found that the mandates slowed daily growth rate of the virus quite significantly. Another study that examined 198 countries also found that those with the cultural norms or policies of wearing face masks exhibited lower death rates in relation to COVID-19.

Over the course of his career, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker has earned himself recognition as an experimental musician. As seen through his recent record The Slow Rush, he’s known for his expansive synths, chilling production, and heavily-reverbed vocals. Because of his affinity for adding an electric edge to his music, it’s not often Parker is seen with an acoustic guitar in hand. But Parker decided to break the mold and give his fans an acoustic performance of one of his recent tracks.

Armed solely with an acoustic guitar and his vocals, which usually are not at the forefront of his music, Parker performed a rendition of “On Track.” The acoustic version awards his fans the opportunity to see the core of his songwriting and how simple melodies can still maintain the integrity of a heavily-layered song.

Parker’s decision to perform “On Track” acoustically also highlights the song’s lyrics, which hold a particular meaning in a time when much of the world is still affected by a pandemic. “I know it’s been a slow year, nothin’ much to show here / I didn’t really go for it, so not a lot to show for it,” he sings.

Watch Parker perform an acoustic rendition of “On Track” above.

The Slow Rush is out now via Modular. Get it here.

Yeah, I’m sorry. This is going to start with a Hamilton reference. I’ve been thinking a lot about Aaron Burr since I saw the hip-hop musical for the first time last week. Partly because Leslie Odom Jr. is a legend that I was mostly unaware of. But also because there’s a view of Burr as a cautionary tale who is mocked for his, “Wait for it, wait for it” and his “talk less, smile more, don’t let them know what you’re against or what you’re for” guiding principals. In the context of the play, Burr contrasts the more idealistic and sometimes imprudent Alexander Hamilton. In 2020, however, maybe we need people to be a cross between the two. People who shirk the assumed responsibility to blast out underdeveloped and underinformed thoughts at every opportunity. People who aren’t cripplingly calculating. People who are guided by their principals and process and not the sound of the crowd.

When I asked Patriot Act host Hasan Minhaj about what he thought about Kanye West’s increasingly vocal presidential aspirations he did not have a snarky or sizzling hot take. Whereas I drained my outrage bar, offering an opinion at the first sight of Kanye’s tweet and his Forbes interview, Minhaj kindly explained that he wanted to “connect the dots” first. He’s going to explore the angles to figure out if this is worth getting worked up over or if it’s another hollow distraction from the real stories that are more deserving of our attention. I’m playing checkers and he’s playing chess, you see, but damn am I eager to learn — motivated by hoarseness and exhaustion if nothing else.

As we continued talking, it became clear that Minhaj’s discipline and appreciation for nuance serve as more than a response to our collective ready, fire, aim mentality. It’s also a ceaseless force that powers The Patriot Act and something that helps to keep the host and the show ever-relevant in a crowded field during a vital time. In other words, “how to account for his rise to the top? Man, the man is non stop!” Again, sorry. That musical really gets into your circuits.

I was just reading the Kanye Forbes interview. I don’t know if you got a chance to check that out.

I didn’t get a chance to read all of it. How is it looking?

It’s bad. It seems like he’s pretty serious. Let’s see: he says vaccines are the mark of the beast.

Oh, boy.

He says we’ve got to stop making God angry. Also, Kanye f*cks with Trump, in part, because he likes the saxophone in the Trump hotels. Which honestly changes everything. I didn’t know that there was a saxophone in the lobby.

It changes your complete perception of the hotel chain?

Yeah, I’ve got to rethink everything now. But no, honestly, this [the reaction] speaks a lot to what you were saying in the second to last episode [of Patriot Act‘s most recent cycle] — the democracy episode. Specifically with our attitude toward third parties. The response makes it seem like we all work for Biden now. Like, “What are you doing?! You’re going to screw this up!”

Yeah. What I loved was where we played that archival clip of the two opponents being normal human beings with each other in states with Ranked Choice Voting and being like, “Hey, you can put this person as your first choice or me as your first choice, or them as your second choice and me as your second choice.” Coalition governments are these things that are common in other parts of the world, but we have this two-party winner take all system that is fueled by negative partisanship.

I’d never really given much thought to it. Now I want to dig in a little bit deeper and figure if it makes sense to me. What do you think about Kanye’s candidacy?

Well, I mean, the thing that I’m still trying to decipher is what is the motive and is he serious? All we have is this Forbes interview. And so that’s the big thing that I’m trying to take away over these next couple of days. “Is this serious? Is a new album dropping?” We’ve heard the series of conspiracy theories, and so honestly, what I’m trying to do, man, is collect the information to see how valid this thing is before I dive in with the hot take.

Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s not out yet, but we did an episode of The People’s Party with Talib Kweli talking with Common, and I know they talked about it a little bit. I’m curious to see what they have to say on that as well.

Yeah, because they also know him personally, right?

Right, exactly.

Yeah. And I don’t know if you felt this in covering everything that you cover right now, especially you guys as a publication… sometimes just definitively connecting all the dots. A lot of times, we get baited into providing an immediate comment or a take or a position on something as we are still collecting the dots and information. And that’s the one thing that I’ve tried to, again, avoid as much as possible on the show. It’s just, “Hey, what are the big thematic questions that we’re trying to answer here?”

And I think what you were talking about when we were doing the elections episode… The feeling everybody had in the writer’s room was how are these our two choices? And I go, “That’s great. I love that.” And we always have these big questions that lead every story. The last episode of this cycle was, “Why are taxes so hard?” Because there are countries around the world that have prefilled tax forms. They literally send it to you like a postcard, you know?

It is definitely a problem, that kind of snap reaction. I’m as guilty of it as anybody else. It’s so guttural. We see something, say something, and move on to the next thing. And it just feels like, especially over these last few years, that it’s destroying us. Apart from doing what you are doing — trying to change things just by action and trying to take that beat and have a deeper conversation — how do we [as a society] change that?

I try not to prescribe. I just try to speak for what my personal responsibility is. For me, I know that I represent a show and the staff and so many people who work for me. The thing that I am always cognizant of is every time we put out one of these episodes, it’s being seen in 190 countries, and just major shout outs to our news team, our fact-checking team, our writing team, and our legal team for always making sure that we’re coming correct. That way, we don’t have to make a correction and I’m not just speaking through absolute hyperbole and what I’m saying is completely wrong. That’s always been my thing where these things exist on the Netflix platform ostensibly forever. So when people go back and watch the Affirmative Action episode or the Indian Elections episode, I want them to be able to say, “Yeah, that still holds, and he’s not just diving in with his hot take on what the current climate is in the culture war.”

How does the mindset of, “I need to speak with all of these people in mind” change your comedy processing machine?

There are two major things that I have to be cognizant of. The first is whenever I go into the writer’s room or the pitch meetings… I saw Jon do this with the 9:15 AM meetings at The Daily Show. He would really lead with, “Okay, this is what I’m trying to say,” and then work backward with the showrunner, the news team, and the writers to say, “Okay, this is where you’re right and we can back this take into a larger story,” or, “Hasan, that is completely wrong. Please do not say that on the show.”

And I think that’s what’s invaluable about having a group of people that help you execute a vision or an idea. But it starts with, “Hey, I’ve been feeling this.” I felt this way going into this cycle of episodes for quarantine edition. We had gotten past the public health crisis. We knew to, “Hey, wash your hands for 20 seconds, sing happy birthday twice, wear a mask,” that whole thing. But the thing that was brewing, that was in the air was, “Hey, how are people going to pay rent? And what happens if I cannot pay rent?” And the rent relief and rent and eviction moratorium, that discussion that’s happening right now. That [episode] was something that came from that initial conversation that I had in the writer’s room. I was like, “Hey, we’re all just holed up at home. Unemployment is on the rise. If people can’t pay their bills, most importantly their rent, what’s going to happen?” And news and the writers were able to pick up on that and go, “No, there’s a great story here about the rent and the eviction crisis about to happen.”

Is that process different when it’s something like the reaction episode you did around George Floyd? Obviously, that topic is something that’s been brewing for a long, long time, so I’m sure you’ve thought about it a bit. I’m sure your staff has too. But it’s powerful.

That was more of a, to give you the basketball analogy, “Just give him the ball and isolate on the wing. Let him work and do what he’s going to do,” because so much of that is coming from just my personal perspective and how I felt. Take an episode that we did earlier in the year called The Broken Policing System. Ironically enough, we used Minneapolis as a case study — warrior training, we talk about qualified immunity, things that were being discussed, but that weren’t at the center of the national conversation. That very much was an analysis piece on the broken policing system in America as a whole, right? This [other] piece specifically was about the conversations that were being had in my community in regards to police brutality, in regards to the protests and the riots that were happening across the country. It was a lot more social commentary, but again, it still had that Patriot Act touch where we talked about the civil rights legislation of 1964, 1965, which allowed my parents to come over here in the ’80s for me to be able to tell this story. It still was a lot of my personal take and perspective, but there still was that news and data analysis that paints the picture.

Do you think that the comedy community and just the entirety of our culture, really, is too consumed by what Trump does and says? And how do you avoid leaning into that sometimes on the show and staying with the bigger picture stuff? Because I think it’s important, but I imagine it’s hard.

Yeah, it’s extremely difficult and all media institutions are reckoning with this right now. Do you ignore the president of the United States? That is the fundamental question, right? And so the thing that I wanted to do or try to avoid through the show is, I don’t want this to be ESPN First Take but for politics where I just go directly to camera and I am cathartically expressing my disdain or emotion at the current state of affairs.

What I really wanted to do is I said, “Look, do you want to just be shouting at the camera or do you want to, to the best of your ability, lean into your strengths as a storyteller and tell a story?” And I think our Coronavirus Supply Chain episode was a storytelling example of, “Yes, we all have heard the story of ‘America is made in China.’ What you don’t know is, we made that deal a long time ago and it’s affecting our supply chain when it comes to PPE, but also meat,” and then tell the story of meat supply chains and the way the media covered Trump’s signing of the executive order to quote-unquote, “keep meat-packing plants open” and how they responded. To me, that is a very interesting way of storytelling through the clips, through the tears, to the pull quotes, and closing the argument with my take. And that, to me, feels more meaningful because I think even three or four months from now, you can go back and watch that episode and see the value of it in terms of its media analysis and the way we collected and put together the story.

The shift away from the protests to the statues feels very helpful to those in power. And yet it’s being aided and abetted, I think, by news organizations large and small. People on Twitter are obviously still posting about protests, not as much as they were, but how does the narrative get changed? Because it does feel like the deck is stacked a little bit.

The two big questions that I’ve been reckoning with and I’ve been trying to closely monitor… I don’t have the answer to it yet, but I feel it, and this is, again, an example of what I would bring into the writer’s room: trying to figure out who’s in charge and who do we trust. We have seen because of the proliferation of social media and people being able to put out information on Twitter, it’s decentralized. Anybody anywhere for the most part around the world can put stuff out. The information has been decentralized. In some ways that’s really good and in other ways that’s really bad because there is no one place to go for it.

That theme also runs true with leadership. Don’t you feel this right now where, yeah, I thought I live in the United States of America, but there’s really these 50 different semi-dystopian states that are all figuring out their own rules themselves. It’s why I had that take on our digital exclusive where I go, “We don’t need governors or a president. We need a commissioner because apparently Adam Silver has been able to manage 30 teams better than our president has been able to manage 50 states.” But it’s that idea of, who’s in charge? Who is calling the shots here? And I think we’re also seeing that in the face of massive social and political upheaval that’s happening right now.

And the second is, I think everybody’s feeling this right now: who do we trust? I don’t know. Even the way we started this conversation, you were telling me about the Kanye Forbes interview. And I remembered this morning… I didn’t even get a chance to fully look at it, but I was like, “Man, if I want to get really nitty-gritty and for me to really understand this, I’ll probably have to hear the audio or see the video of it.” Because I don’t know if you feel this way, but I need a level of nuance and detail now, and so much of what I’m consuming lacks that. That’s really what I feel. Those two questions have really defined 2020 for me. We were supposed to do the White House Correspondent’s Dinner this year, but those were going to be the big thematic questions that I was going to try to figure out, even in the Correspondent’s Dinner speech of, “Who is in charge and who do we trust?” I feel like our entire country is grappling with those two fundamental questions.

Every episode of ‘The Patriot Act’ is available on Netflix.

This year, Kanye West celebrated the Fourth Of July in a different way than most people: He announced he was running for president. That decision was met with some backlash, even more so following Kanye’s recent Forbes interview, in which he made some controversial statements about his beliefs and political platform.

Shorty after Kanye’s announcement, Elon Musk, who was photographed with Kanye days earlier, had the rapper’s back, tweeting, “You have my full support!” Musk’s words carried some weight, as the tweet has over 350,000 likes as of this post. However, following the Forbes interview, Musk appears to have reconsidered his endorsement.

In response to a tweet mentioning the anti-vaccine and anti-abortion comments Kanye made in the interview, Musk (in a now-deleted tweet) seemed to at least question his opinion of West and the rapper’s viability as a presidential candidate, writing, “We may have more differences of opinion than I anticipated.”

In the interview, Kanye expressed his skepticism about vaccines, saying, “It’s so many of our children that are being vaccinated and paralyzed… So when they say the way we’re going to fix COVID is with a vaccine, I’m extremely cautious. That’s the mark of the beast. They want to put chips inside of us, they want to do all kinds of things, to make it where we can’t cross the gates of Heaven.”

Speaking about abortion, he said, “I am pro-life because I’m following the word of the Bible,” and insisted that Planned Parenthood does “the Devil’s work.” Naturally, the organization was not happy about what Kanye said.

Major League Soccer kicked off its MLS Is Back tournament on Wednesday night with Orlando defeating Inter Miami, 2-1. While the festivities are set to continue over the coming days and weeks, there was a major bump in the road on Monday when FC Dallas had to pull out due to a number of COVID-19 cases that popped up once the team arrived in Orlando.

Unfortunately, Dallas isn’t the only team that got put in this position due to the novel coronavirus spreading throughout its ranks. Nashville SC, one of the two expansion sides the league added for the 2020 campaign, will see its tournament conclude before it even begins, according to The Athletic.

The news was confirmed by Steven Goff of the Washington Post.

Nashville having to pull out isn’t particularly stunning, as MLS commissioner Don Garber previously said a decision would be made after nine cases of COVID-19 were identified among those who were with the squad for the tournament. The team’s first match of the tournament was supposed to occur on Wednesday but had already been canceled. With two teams dropping out, multiple reports indicate that MLS will adjust the way groups are constructed for the remainder of the tournament.

As Stejskal noted in his tweet above, there is no word on how the league’s plan to have some sort of a regular season following the conclusion of its bubble league would be impacted due to Dallas and Nashville’s inability to compete.

Despite being one of the staunchest flag-wavers for his hometown, Long Beach rapper Vince Staples is adamant that the best rappers in hip-hop hail from elsewhere. However, when he expressed this opinion while commenting on T.I.’s Verzuz challenge for 50 Cent, he inadvertently sparked a debate that had him fielding fan frustrations when some folks — mostly New Yorkers — disagreed.

According to Vince, “Atlanta got the best rappers ever and it’s not even close.” He tweeted this in response to fans writing off T.I. in a hits battle with 50 Cent, an occurrence to which he took some issue. “Y’all just be talking to fit in,” he wrote. “T.I. got a plethora of bangers.” However, once he’d made his Atlanta declaration, some fans enthusiastically disagreed.

“They don’t rap in Atlanta they make up dances,” wrote one fan. Vince replied: “The originators of hip hop was dancing around New York City in leather outfits.” This is true. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five; please look them up.

As evidence of his claim, Vince pointed out his view that “Young Dro got more wordplay than a lot of n****s from everywhere and he not even brought up as a top Atlanta rapper.” When asked to list his own top ten, he offered “Lauryn Hill, Andre, Scarface, E40, Snoop, Kurupt, Missy Elliot, Blu, Kanye, and Young Thug” as examples of some of his favorites.

When this sparked another minor backlash thanks to the inclusion of Young Thug — whose off-kilter delivery has always made him a subject of controversy, especially up north where all the beats sound like train tracks — Vince had to defend his pick by pointing out how the goalposts of lyricism move from case to case, mostly to suit those New Yorkers’ need to be at the center of the conversation.

“Can y’all define lyrical because y’all change it for every argument,” he asked. “Thug got obvious wordplay but y’all say he don’t count because he lacks ‘content’ but y’all didn’t say that for Ghostface or ODB.” He also pointed out why the backlash struck him as silly, because, “Y’all be treating personal preference like it’s the law of the land we gotta stop that.”

He spent a few more hours joking around with fans, including jibing a few by calling them white supremacists, until he realized that “the hip hop pages reposting me.” He got off a couple more jokes before logging off but this morning, delivered the coup de grace, in his typical sarcastic fashion: “I GOT HACCED!”

Check out Vince’s hilarious fan interactions above.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

There are a lot of questions about what video games are going to look like as we enter the next generation of gaming. There’s an expectation that the debut of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X will feature a huge technological jump, which at this stage feels necessary even if video games are in an incredible place right now. Games like God of War and Control push consoles so hard that if you play them on original release systems you can hear them struggle. Control, in particular, was infamous for poor performance on earlier consoles, not because of a lack of optimization but because the console just couldn’t keep up with the technology.

When games push boundaries like this it usually comes with a hefty price tag. Making video games has never been more expensive and making AAA titles, in particular, can get very pricey. While most game development companies don’t release the actual cost of making games these days, a number of titles from Rockstar Games, the developer of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, are rumored to cost $100 million just to develop the title, let along advertise it and bring it to market.

Despite this, the cost of buying a major release has remained fairly stable for 15 years. The last time we saw the standard cost increase was the jump from the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era of consoles to the PS3/360/Wii, increasing the typical price from $50 to $60 with occasional exceptions.

We still know little about the next generation of consoles, starting with what those systems will cost and the price of the AAA titles that run on them. But we do know that NBA 2K21 is expected to cost $70, something we learned recently when the developer announced both a curent-gen and next-gen cover and the differences between the titles. NBA 2K is arguably the biggest sports game in the world right now, and the break into the $70 barrier is one that could signal the new expected cost of next-gen console releases.

Of course, anyone that’s looked at 2K in the last few years might wonder if the price means something else about the game’s economic marketplace. It’s no secret that 2K releases are built around microtransactions within their virtual currency system. If players want to level up their created player quicker, they can purchase “virtual currency” with real-life money. These microtransactions have become an industry-wide norm advanced by numerous sports titles and games from other genres.

FIFA and Madden NFL from EA put major amounts of time and effort into their ultimate team modes where you can spend actual money on cards of players to help you create the best virtual team. It’s caused many to wonder what the future of sports games is going to be. Will microtransactions continue to dominate the titles, freezing the countless in-game items bought with real money in a title that only has a shelf life of a single year?

The NBA 2K franchise has taken a lot of criticism in the last few years for its embrace of microtransactions, and it would be nice if a $70 price tag would serve as a way to lessen the prominence these have in the series. Considering it’s their entire business model, that seems unlikely, but we can take that same logic and apply it to the rest of the video game industry. I suspect if you told most gamers they had the choice between a $70 game with no (or fewer) microtransactions or paid DLC and a $60 game with those extra costs hidden and likely looming, they might be more inclined to accept the higher cost upfront and avoid surprises.

Regardless, it’s very possible that we’re heading toward a generation of consoles where $70 is the new video games price point. But with that price we could see better products with less hidden hassles and gripes from gamers. Think about how much time and effort developers will be able to put into their games if they can spend less time worrying about how to create a system that will make players buy fake currency and more on making their game the best it can be.

And if the price eliminates the crunch we see that’s harmful to both the end result and those making the game? Even better.

Of course, $70 might be the breaking point for many gamers who will wait until long after the initial release to get games on sale or take to the secondary market, although many already do this, waiting to see if games pan out as they are hyped or if it takes years to see their potential met. And even with a new threshold for AAA price points, you can still expect indie games or lower budget titles to fall below that mark. What may, indeed, happen is a return to the 80s/90s where game costs are more sporadic due to the wide difference between titles, including their development timelines and budgets. This isn’t even taking into account that we might see physical copies cost more than digital copies with consoles like the PlayStation 5 featuring a digital only option.

Of course, any step away from physical media has its own problems. Let’s say the possible cost difference means you’re more comfortable with a digital-only console. Now your ability to participate in that vibrant resell market is non-existent, meaning each game purchase is a final one (even if it the game is disappointing) and not something where you can buy new copies and then sell them back when you’re done to cut your overall investment.

It would not be unprecedented if one of Microsoft or Sony offers a buyback option with digital copies — this is something Steam offers for PC gamers, but Steam only allows you to sell a game back if you haven’t played a certain amount of hours. Still, there’s nothing to indicate that that’s on the horizon.

In terms of gaming culture on the whole, the elevated price point for games and/or systems poses the risk you see with any non-essential/hobby that significantly raises the bar of entry. You can argue that the reason games have managed to stick in the $50-$60 price range for so long is because it was sort of the perfect middle ground. $60 is just pricey enough to get a decent return on a purchase but also inexpensive enough to not price out a part-time retail worker going through college. The jump of $10 isn’t earth-shattering, but with so much acceptance of the status quo, this feels like a shock to the system, especially as the world navigates a pandemic that’s left many jobless.

Video games are incredible because they are a medium that can be about anyone and anything. It’s an escape that is just scratching the surface when it comes to living up to that potential and the potential of a more broad coalition of gamers that are breaking down the barriers that have previously been associated with that term. Any unintentional move to make gaming less accessible or harder to fully embrace runs the risk of doing damage to the future of the industry on the whole, especially at a time when gaming has revealed itself as a tool for connection and an interesting time killer for people who had left it behind or never really gotten into it before. Of course, there are still those $20 indie titles, free to play options, retro options, and bargain deals, all still a way in. But anyone who’s ever played a game knows the industry (and interest in it) is largely driven by the power and pop culture allure of the AAA releases. That’s where the money is and that’s what hooks a lot of new gamers.

We get it: Games provide more bang for your buck in terms of entertainment value than competing entertainment options. They cost more than ever to make and market against each other and those other options. Developers are frequently trying to find ways to meet those costs. But what we learned in the last generation of consoles is that while microtransactions are the answer for developers, they’ve become the enemy of gamers. Like a $70 price point with no real tangible get for gamers, they’re a shortsighted fix that runs the risk of undoing gains in interest and the flood of excitement that comes with a new console generation. As with anything, the norm is the norm for a reason, so hopefully, the industry considers all angles when shattering it.

The best new hip-hop albums coming out this week include projects from Casey Veggies, Che Noir, Juice WRLD, Rockie Fresh, Sahbabii, and Unotheactivist. Obviously, the highlight of the week is the posthumous album from the late Chicago rapper, but with Casey Veggies and Rockie Fresh reuniting for the first time in seven years and Sahbabii releasing the much-buzzed-about Barnacles, there’s plenty of other projects to get excited about. Meanwhile, Boldy James and Earl Sweatshirt are releasing long-awaited deluxe versions of their well-received recent projects, The Price Of Tea In China and Feet Of Clay, giving fans reason to revisit some old faves as well.

Here are all the best new hip-hop albums coming out this week.

Casey Veggies And Rockie Fresh — Fresh Veggies 2

I am of the opinion that the best work within the collective discographies of LA’s Casey Veggies and Chicago’s Rockie Fresh is their original 2013 collaborative project. That isn’t to say that Organic or 2019’s Destination aren’t great projects in their own right — but this duo always brought more out of each other, adding a fascinating new dimension and totaling to more than the sum of the two. There are plenty of planned features, including Iamsu, Wale, and more, but the focus here is on the unique chemistry between these two imitable MCs.

Che Noir & Apollo Brown — As God Intended

Every so often when writing this column, I forget about or just outright miss a project that leaves me kicking myself. One of those projects is Buffalo rapper Che Noir’s Juno, which you should be able to tell is extremely my sh*t. 38-Spesh — whose name you may recognize from the tracklists of those other Buffalo flag-wavers, Griselda Records, produced giving Che some very “Gangstarr in ’91”-style backdrops for her rugged, versatile rhymes. This time around, she’s linked up with Detroit beatmaker Apollo Brown, which is somehow even more perfect.

Juice WRLD — Legends Never Die

Long live Juice. The burgeoning superstar couldn’t seem to miss for the last three years, giving the world monstrous hits like “Lucid Dreams,” “Bandit,” “Robbery,” and “Hear Me Calling.” Before his death, he started receiving huge cosigns and even managed to capture the attention of the notoriously youth-averse Eminem. Unfortunately, 2020 has been a year with entirely too many posthumous releases. Given Juice’s bonkers work ethic, this one was likely much closer to completion and his artistic vision than any others save Mac Miller’s Circles. Bring a tissue.

Sahbabii — Barnacles

After the success of his 2016 single “Pull Up Wit Ah Stick,” it seemed that Sahbabii just didn’t get the same attention for his last handful of releases but he smartly released Barnacles on Tuesday, giving himself more time for folks to catch on. Catch on it has; the album received a high-profile cosign from none other than Vince Staples and fans have been quoting its absurdist punchlines on Twitter for days. Maybe Sahbabii hasn’t quite become the superstar it appeared he would in 2016, but he’s still putting out high-quality audio surrealism that’s worth checking out.

UnotheActivist — 8

Billed as Uno’s debut studio album, 8 has generated some buzz on the Atlanta underground scene and has been in the works for around three years. After undergoing a label-mandated name change, Uno says he chose “8” because he wanted the legacy of the project to be infinite. It’s off to a decent start, with an 18-song tracklist that gives him plenty of room to make his case and a couple of high-profile features from Calboy and Ty Dolla Sign. Fans expecting an appearance from Uno’s cousin Playboi Carti may be disappointed, but Uno’s got enough of Carti’s mad scientist creativity to make up for it.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Grammy Award-winning singer James Blake released his stunning fourth record Assume Form just last year, but the singer is already setting his sights on the future. Following his first track of 2020, “You’re Too Precious,” Blake returns with a lofty number, “Are You Even Real?”

With his latest single, Blake continues to experiment with sound and reaches beyond the confines of electro-pop. “Are You Even Real?” begins slow, evoking a dreamlike state with cascading keys and enveloping harmonies. A pounding, leisurely beat eventually arrives as Blake delivers his lyrics with bewilderment. “I spend the day / Dreaming of connection / Just to feel / How you feel, you feel, you feel,” he swoons.

Prior to sharing his first singles, Blake stayed engaged with fans while in quarantine. The singer hosted several livestreams where he stripped down much of his music to captivating piano arrangements accompanied by his soaring vocals. During his livestreams, the singer put his own spin on several of his favorite songs. Blake covered Billie Eilish’s “When The Party’s Over” and Radiohead’s “No Surprises.” More recently, Blake gave a tender rendition of Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” and Frank Ocean’s “Godspeed” for a benefit livestream where he matched donations raised by fans.

Listen to “Are You Even Real?” above.