Moving on a Different Type of Time

A 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.

First of all, I didn’t enjoy any of this year’s Griselda releases.

Conway and Benny surely had a few good tracks, but their albums were littered with subpar attempts at creating Noughties-style ‘bangers’. I’m not someone who wishes we’d still live in Tha Carter III era, and I am of the unpopular opinion that Hit-Boy is an overrated producer. I haven’t yet listened to Westside Gunn’s new album, as I imagine DJ Drama screaming all over it, essentially making it unlistenable for me.

Schoolboy Q’s Blue Lips could have been right up my alley, but I’ve not listened to it more than one and a half times. Maybe it truly is an experimental masterpiece that goes over my head. Or it’s really just a collection of scattershot demos Q was tired of working on and finally wanted to get out to clear his mind.

Some albums were fine but far from groundbreaking: I’m thinking Rome Streetz with Daringer, Muggs with Mooch, the new Gangrene. But while I enjoyed those records stylistically, I just didn’t find them very interesting in the long run.

I liked Beans’ recent album with Vladislav Delay. But I don’t expect Zwaard to show up on many rap critics’ year-end lists. Headz still ain’t ready.

Roc Marciano and Ka – may he rest in peace – didn’t re-invent the wheel on their 2024 albums Marciology and The Thief Next to Jesus, but they provided a much needed fix of those haunted loops and that laid-back wordplay. Those were two of my favourite rap albums of the year.

Still I found myself going back even more often to another 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.