There's a really amazingly wide range of ways singing and rapping can be combined and there's so much creative potential in melodic rap, but for a lot of the last decade the dominant style has been post-Kid Cudi groaning and whining. So I love hearing guys like Morray, who like Roddy Ricch has a knack for putting together really precise, sharp-elbowed flows but still pretty much singing every word. Morray only has a handful of songs on streaming services right now but they're all pretty high caliber, now that 2 of the biggest rappers in the world are from North Carolina it'd be cool to see someone else from there become a major star. Here's the 2021 singles Spotify playlist I update every month throughout the year. 

I've generally thought Jazmine Sullivan's best songs are album tracks but this might be the best single of her career, glad it's been getting some real momentum on the radio after her last project didn't get too much airplay. 

"Cash Shit" is still the gold standard of Meg/DaBaby collaborations but this one hits the same mark almost as well, I like how they each do a different variation on the hook. 

Other than "Slide," H.E.R.'s singles rarely grab me immediately, but they usually grow on me, and this one has really started to hook me in the last couple weeks, great production and such a hooky vocal melody. 

It's crazy to think that in all their decades of making hits Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis have never released a record of their own. And this single from their upcoming album sets the bar pretty high for how good a guest-filled album from them could be. 

One of the things that I think really made When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? a phenomenon was the way Billie Eilish built her buzz with some fairly quiet and creepy singles and then let the one big uptempo song, "Bad Guy," explode after the album came out. And I've been curious to see if that song would remain a unique moment in her career and whether she'd be able to have more major hits without more songs like that. And "Therefore I Am" navigates that issue pretty well by kind of showing what she can do with an uptempo song without rubber stamping "Bad Guy" into a formula. 

Kind of a low key lead single but it really hits a sweet spot with Justin Moore's voice, some of the best steel guitar I've heard on a country hit in a while too. 

Ed Sheeran doesn't really have the luxury to do anything small or out of the spotlight, and No. 6 Collaborations Project, kind of a stopgap between proper albums, was a blockbuster by any normal metric. So I was surprised that he was able to release a quiet and restrained new song, state explicitly that it's not the lead single from his next album, and actually have it kind of fly under the radar. I tend to find his ballads corny, but this is just a nice understated acoustic song with some interesting vocoder textures. 

Obviously you never know what an artist had in the pipeline when they die suddenly and tragically, but I'm surprised that there hasn't been a whole lot of Nipsey Hussle music released since his death, especially since he hadn't released a project in over a year when he passed. There's just been a little trickle of material, the DJ Khaled song and the Big Sean one and now this, whereas Pop Smoke and Juice WRLD have had probably the most successful posthumous rap albums since 2Pac and Biggie. And even this feels like they just had one verse from him and took one line and looped it for a hook, but it's a great verse, makes me wonder what a real Nipsey/Jay collaboration would've been like. 

Last month I wrote about Foushee's current R&B radio single without realizing that she also has a hit on alternative radio right now. "Deep End" is a pretty different song from "Single AF," makes me wonder if she'll keep getting promoted in both directions or will kind of pick one and stick with it.  

After the enormous success of the Imanbek remix of SAINt JHN's "Roses," I'm not surprised to another thumping dance remixes of a melodic trap song on pop radio. But this is really a garbage remix that removes almost everything I liked from my favorite Travis Scott single, and that song was pretty huge the first time so it's weird to see it come back in this form 4 years later.