In this segment, we showcase the most notable albums out each week. Here are the albums out on January 3, 2025:
Boldy James & RichGains, Murder During Drug Traffic
Over the past few years, Boldy James has been on such a prolific collaborative streak that you might have missed his 2023 team-up with RichGains, one half of the production duo Blended Babies. (It’s well worth a listen.) Today, the pair have followed up Indiana Jones with a new album called Murder During Drug Traffic. RichGains once again conjures a psychedelic haze that perfectly matches the rapper’s bleary yet compelling as-ever delivery, and it’s also great post-holiday music. The record really picks up steam after the highlight ‘Janky’, at which point a number of guests start rolling in, including Double Dee, Jonathan Chapman, Street Lord Juan, Detroit King Tape, and Cassie Jo Craig.
Lil Baby, WHAM
Lil Baby is back with a new album called WHAM – an acronym for Who Hard As Me, as the album cover makes clear. Most notably, the follow-up to 2022’s It’s Only Me includes Young Thug’s first verse since being freed from jail last fall. (“I don’t even believe I was locked up, for real,” Thug raps on the track, which also features Future.) Other than that, the record really presents itself as the first blockbuster rap album of 2025, and it does go pretty hard. GloRilla, 21 Savage, Travis Scott, Rod Wave, and Rylo Rodriguez make guest appearances, too, while production comes from Wheezy, Southside, London On Da Track, and Krazy Mob, among others.
Ian Wellman, Can You Hear the Street Lights Glow
Los Angeles artist Ian Wellman deploys a combination of distorted tape loops, field recordings, and other experimental textures as a form of storytelling. His latest, recorded between November 2023 – August 2024 and mastered by Lawrence English, is appropriately icy and foreboding, and its title hints at the narrative within. In the Bandcamp bio, Wellman offers a description of the specific environment he set out to capture: “I moved to Pasadena during the fall last year. One of the first new sounds I noticed were the mercury-vapor street lights that filled the air as the sun went down every evening. Under the sidewalks, exhaust vents hummed along to the song of crickets and the rumble of traffic. Being away from the inner city, more individual details in the soundscape emerged.”
New Mexican Stargazers, patient floral arrangement
New Mexican Stargazers’ prolific output continues with patient floral arrangement, another hypnagogic release from the vaporwave-inspired Philadelphia outfit. Stretching over 90 minutes, the record opens with ‘floating lantern parameter’, which starts with hollowed-out percussion and slowly builds a beautifully soothing soundscape. “it slowly overtook the front of my house, almost like a reminder of things i needed to accomplish but never had enough energy to do,” its Bandcamp description reads. “in fact, if i was living alone, there is no telling how long it would have continued to grow for. i had taken some pictures of the beautiful, yet intrusive display of residential flora, and it was the only the very next day that it had been removed. out of my life, finally allowing for light to enter my room once more.”
Other albums out today:
Kilometre Club, overnight; charaxes, Proof of Life; Richard Sallis, Felix.