After back-to-back albums focused on their love of horror, experimental hip-hop trio clipping. head into the cybernetic unknown on their sixth, *Dead Channel Sky*. Even as their sound has become progressively more streamlined since the lurching abstractions of their self-titled debut on indie institution Sub Pop back in 2014, co-producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes conjure pure and jagged bolts of electricity across these 20 tracks, borrowing equally from the mechanical menace of early house and techno and the kitchen-sink IDM of Squarepusher and Aphex Twin. As with clipping.’s previous records, *Dead Channel Sky* is a highly collaborative affair: Wilco guitarist Nels Cline contributes scorched licks to the inside-out instrumental “Malleus” while indie hip-hop legend Aesop Rock lends his distinctive pipes to “Welcome Home Warrior.” But the speed-demon dexterity that is Daveed Diggs’ rapping skills remain as clipping.’s mainframe; he acrobatically hops across the album’s ones-and-zeroes eruptions like a computer virus avoiding detection, guiding listeners through *Dead Channel Sky*’s corroded landscape with ease.
NorthSideBenji wasn’t mincing words when he named his third record. The Brampton, Ontario, trap&B sensation has always been upfront about the fact that your problems don’t just magically disappear once you gain access to the VIP room, but *Misery Loves Company* finds him in an especially introspective mood, dispensing self-analytical soliloquies about success and excess that flow as freely as the album’s aqueous productions. “Don’t you think shit was easier ’fore this money came through?” he asks on “Running Game,” as piano chords rain down around him like a light drizzle. But if the album doesn’t shy away from mining NorthSideBenji’s miseries—whether he’s seeking chemical cures for his mental health (“Lost My Mind”) or reckoning with his drug-dealing past (“A Life to Die For”)—he keeps good company: “A1” is a tranquil, tropical-trap track brightened by UK rapper Nafe Smallz’s playful flow, while Alabama MC NoCap seizes the spotlight on the smooth yet swaggering “Save Me.”
Destroy Lonely’s *ᐸ/3³* arrived with little fanfare. The rapper and singer debuted the album just days after announcing its arrival, and it was released just over a year after its predecessor, 2024’s *LOVE LASTS FOREVER*. This no-frills approach matches the era in which Destroy Lonely’s Broken Hearts series was established. *ᐸ/3³* marks the third release in his celebrated mixtape collection, following the first two (titled *ᐸ/3* and *ᐸ/3²*) in 2020. To keep in theme with the earlier drops, the MC reunited with some of his earliest collaborators, like Bugz Ronin, Cxdy, and Cade. Though he’s working with some of the artists he relied on during his formative years, *ᐸ/3³* also advances some of the styles he’s been flirting with on recent releases. “show u how” reimagines industrial music as a technicolor fever dream, while “kansas” unfurls as a distorted, delirious waltz.
Ash Gutierrez has covered an enormous amount of ground stylistically as glaive, all before reaching the age of 20. His third album, *Y’all*, continues this sense of constant adventurousness while also refining the glitchy, tangy, and emotionally bruised hyperpop sound that he first gained notice for back in his SoundCloud days. First single “Appalachia” sounds ripped from the glory days of bloghouse, not unlike contemporaries Jane Remover and Frost Children. Warm saxophones reminiscent of sophisti-pop legends The Blue Nile surprisingly pop up on “Bluebirds,” while Gutierrez heads deep into straight-up trance territory with the ascendant, glorious fromage of “We Don’t Leave the House.” There are moments of striking tenderness on *Y’all*—witness the tangled guitar balladry of “i love you and it sounds stupid”—but cuts like the lurching “Modafinil” and the micro-IDM of “Vendi Vidi Vici” drive home Gutierrez’s impressive skill of melding pop smarts with intricately eggheaded electronic baubles.