Cavalier: Different Type Time

The New Orleans MC took six years to create the best rap album of 2024

Look, I still love hip-hop and listen to my fair share of rap, but I’m too interested in other music to care about what 16-year olds are bumping these days.

I don’t like the idea of ‘grown man rap’ either, because it’s often just an excuse to make boring throwback boom-bap that sounds helplessly stuck in a long-bygone era.

Then again, not many new rap releases speak to me. I don’t find them sonically interesting, and their subject matter exhausts me.

2024 was a particularly bad year for hip-hop. This year, even some of the artists I generally like disappointed me.

I found myself going back to a record that didn’t come from one of my established hip-hop heroes.

Instead, it came from a Brooklyn-born, New Orleans-based MC named Cavalier, whose name didn’t really ring a bell with me when his album dropped back in March.