Lamont's Lists

Well, we made it through 2025, with 365 wild days and what seemed like 365 million songs released along the way. The volume of new music keeps climbing every year, and I keep doing my best to listen to as much of it as possible so you don’t have to. One of the biggest trends this year was the flood of releases from legacy artists—far beyond what we saw even during the 50th anniversary year of 2023. New music arrived from Wu-Tang Clan, Diamond D, Ice Cube, Slick Rick, Ghostface Killah, Mobb Deep, Kwame (yes, that Kwame), Big Daddy Kane, and Salt-N-Pepa, just to name a few. At the same time, we got a welcome breather from the so-called Big 3, with relatively little noise coming from the camps of Kendrick, Drake, and J. Cole. If there was a dominant force in 2025, it had to be Clipse, whose reunion gave us an album for the ages, paired with a brilliant rollout and an electrifying small-venue tour. All told, it was a rewarding year of listening—with more than enough beats & rhymes to f...

Whew, 2025 was quite a year. As tumultuous as it was, it seemed more like a decade than 12 months. As usual, I’m thankful to have had tons of music to listen to—music that helped distract me from the madness. This year, without the Kendrick Lamar and Drake beef dominating the conversation like it did in 2024, there was more oxygen for a wider range of artists to shine. And sure, social media naysayers made much ado about that brief stretch when no hip-hop records were charting on the Billboard Hot 100—something that hadn’t happened since 1990—but I believe that was more a quirk of changing rules and consumption patterns than any real commentary on the music itself. The quality and diversity of releases from new voices, established stars, and veterans alike, was as impactful as ever. One trend I especially liked was the return of the single-producer album, which gave us music with sharper focus, stronger chemistry, and a more unified sound—whether it was Pharrell Williams with Clipse,...