2 Great New Experimental Hip-Hop Albums
Jazzy art rap, resistance poetry, and the Kunze Kode
I don’t go to dinner parties, but if I did and someone asked me about my profession, I’d probably say I’m a music and culture journalist.
“Oh, interesting. What kind of music are you writing about?”
A fair follow-up question, but one that’s hard for me to answer.
Because I wouldn’t want to bore my conversational partner, I’d risk sounding very generic in my reply, like:
“Well, all kinds of music. Really, my taste is very broad.”
Which is not true of course. My taste is, in fact, very narrow. Not to sound like a snob, but I actually dislike most popular music.
What I do like is a set of artists and records across genres, styles and eras, which sometimes feels quite hard to pinpoint, even for myself.
The great
referred to the type of music I like in a recent comment as “Kunze koded”, which made me laugh.Most music writers have one or multiple genres of expertise. They’re really into classical music and opera, or they mainly write about jazz and heavy metal. They might be electronic-leaning millennial poptimists who grew up on college rock and pop punk, or Soundcloud rap evangelists turned post-hyperpop aficionados.
These days, I’m trying my best to resist being labeled like that.
So what kind of music would be Kunze koded?
I admit that I generally prefer experimental (‘challenging’) over mainstream (‘accessible’) music. At this point in my life, I am not too interested in the records widely considered the best or the most popular – the so-called canon. Instead, I gravitate towards the obscure, weird records that usually don’t sell too well and that might feel a little strange, just a little off.
In terms of genre, I don’t dislike any type of music out of principle. But there are some genres that I’ve been listening to for a very long time, and though they don’t necessarily have much to do with each other, I feel a deeper connection to the underlying scenes and cultures.
Looking at the articles I published here over the last two and a half years, the cornerstones of the Kunze Kode become palpable:
Ambient has been my #1 listening genre for the past decade. It regularly intersects with experimental electronic music and its ambient-leaning subsets (such as ambient or dub techno), electroacoustic composition and jazz. I listen to a lot of very different styles of ambient music, but I draw the line at dull wellness soundscapes and other possibly AI-generated fluff.
I’ve deeply loved jazz since my youth. Fittingly, these days I have a day job as a commissioning editor for the site Everything Jazz, so most of my genre-specific writing ends up over there. I do write about the weirder ends here though – esoteric free jazz, deep ECM catalogue, loft jazz reissues, stuff like that.
There’s also a bit of rock in my listening diet; not the traditional kind, but noise, improv and post-rock – say, contemporary bands like Able Noise or Earthball, who seem to reference my all-time favorites such as Sonic Youth or Tortoise. I’m also well-versed in 1970s krautrock, industrial and art rock, music that I first got to know through my parents’ record collection.
Speaking of art rock, there’s a contemporary lane of music I love that we might just call art pop. I’m referring to a bunch of artists like Mabe Fratti, ML Buch or Marina Herlop, who craft sophisticated, avant-garde pop songs with influences from jazz, classical and experimental music, in the lineage and tradition of all-time greats like Kate Bush, Björk or Laurie Anderson.
Lastly, there’s hip-hop. I’ve identified strongly with that culture for the longest time. I’ve almost exclusively reported on hip-hop for the first decade of my career. I will also say that I’ve stopped caring about mainstream rap a good decade ago, but I’ll still passionately discuss billy woods or Nappy Nina records with fellow indie rap enthusiasts here on Substack – most likely Joseph of
and .
(Yes, I was that Jansport backpack-wearing middle-class kid raving about the latest white label import 12-inches and illbient compilations in the mid-90s.)
Hip-hop has taught me to always keep digging and stay naturally curious about all kinds of different music. Dissecting Madlib’s mixtapes or J Dilla’s productions, I discovered music from West Africa and Brazil, from Southeast Asia and Scandinavia; from dark industrial to proto-punk, from deep dub to blissed-out boogie.
Today I have two recommendations from hip-hop’s experimental fringes for you – two very different new albums that were both just released yesterday. I hope you like them as much as I do.
Peace,
Stephan
Open Mike Eagle – Neighborhood Gods Unlimited (Auto Reverse, 2025)
Originally hailing from Chicago, Open Mike Eagle became a driving force in the second generation of Project Blowed, an artistic community born from Los Angeles’ jazz and spoken word poetry bohème. He’s the type of MC that clearly views rap as an artform and openly admits being influenced by They Might Be Giants.
I always liked his music, though I wasn’t an actual fan. The turning point in my reception was his album a tape called component system with the auto reverse in 2022. That album proved that Mike had really evolved past his battle MC identity. He was now a mature artist capable of writing great songs. As he’d already passed his 40th birthday at this point, I’d call him a late bloomer, and at 44 years of age, I now rate him one of the strongest lyricists in the world of alternative rap.
Case in point, his newest full-length, Neighborhood Gods Unlimited, will definitely be one of my go-to rap albums of the summer. The production feels more soulful and laid-back than before, but it also still carries just enough grit and grime; half of the album was produced by Child Actor, a reliable purveyor of psychedelic post-lo-fi soundscapes for most of my favorite rappers, while the rest comes from other scene mainstays such as Kenny Segal or August Fanon.
Lyrically, Mike drops loads of relatable bars in a complex but effortless, extremely melodic flow that clearly harks back to the Project Blowed lineage. With 14 short tracks that rarely reach the three-minute mark, the album’s general vibe is one of melancholic introspection, but injected with light, intelligent humour and a magnetic kind of playfulness. His laconic storytelling skills are reflected in hilarious song titles such as “me and Aquil stealing stuff from work” and “wide leg michael jordan generation x jeans”.
This is indie rap of such high replay value that its relative success on Bandcamp – where it’s been sitting at #1 of the hip-hop charts since release – isn’t too surprising to me.
DJ Haram – Beside Myself (Hyperdub, 2025)
“Her beats don’t sound like anything else”, billy woods has said about DJ Haram. “Sometimes they’re atonal, abrasive, hard. She really pours over it, and works so deep. She massages her beats, like dough.”
The producer, lyricist and vocalist has been an active recording artist for a good decade, has produced for artists like woods and Elucid, who form the brilliant indie rap duo Armand Hammer, and collaborated with the spoken word poet and noise musician Moor Mother as 700 Bliss. Still, this is DJ Haram’s official solo debut album, arriving via established UK experimental electronic label Hyperdub.
Haram, who describes herself as a “multidisciplinary propagandist” creating “anti-lifestyle immersive sonics”, was raised in northern New Jersey. Immersed in the Tri-State area’s club scene, she gravitated towards DJing and electronic music production. Politicized in student organizations and social justice movements, she became a part of the DIY noise and improv scenes in Philadelphia, where she lived for a while, and New York City, where she lives now.
The Arab-American’s music is still shaped by Jersey club and Baltimore house, but there’s also a lot of traditional Middle Eastern instrumentation and a palpable noise edge. Both Armand Hammer and Moor Mother are present on Beside Myself, which nods to hip-hop more clearly than most of her previous work, referencing distorted Soundcloud rap and grimy post-boombap aesthetics.
Most of this music wouldn’t work in any club setting I can imagine. There are a few tracks that open-minded DJs might be able to play out – the heavy, rough warehouse beats of “Loneliness Epidemic” for example –, but most of the record feels like headphone material. Though that’s not to say any of it sounds calm, or quiet, or slow. Quite the contrary: Arabic percussion meets fuzzed-out guitars, while dashes of violin and trumpet are poured over deep sub-bass and massive 808 walls.
While the prevalent vibe is one of collaboration and community, the last third of the record zeroes in on DJ Haram as a solo artist. It’s also the strongest part of the record, moving into the darkest corners of her creative mind, from the frantic neo-jungle of “Sahel” to the fierce poetry of “Distress Tolerance”, from the dark ambience of “Who Needs Enemies When These Are Your Allies” to the rolling darbuka drums and Middle Eastern melodies of “Deep Breath (An Ending)”.
The most immediately gratifying song on Beside Myself is “Fishnets”, a snotty club rap tune with vocalists Bbymutha and sha ray that reminded
of “the kind of dustily swaggering beats that RZA used to reserve for peak Ghostface”. (I assume he’s – quite aptly – alluding to tracks like “Cherchez LaGhost”1).In interviews, DJ Haram resists fetishization and tokenization, and strongly opposes superficial narratives that think of dancing to “Middle Eastern type beats” as some form of political resistance. Her noisy, conflicting music might not be able to change much about the factual horrors of rising authoritarianism and late stage capitalism either. Still it does what any daring art should do, channeling her own frustration and helplessness into a cathartic expression of empathy and humanness.
That’s not even a RZA beat though. See comments.
Cherchez LaGhost is A TUNE!!!! I was probably more thinking Shakey Dog. But both more than work!
Can't wait to give these albums a listen!