I wouldn't say I'm a Metro Boomin skeptic, but I've never really been able to identify his sound or some unique musical signatures that I get excited about like some of his contemporaries like Mike Will, Zaytoven, or London On Da Track. Add in the fact that he often has co-producers, and I start to wonder, is this a guy who's just a lot better at branding than the other guys who've made a hundred tracks for big Atlanta rappers? But We Don't Trust You holds together really nicely, I like it a lot more than Metro's solo albums or the Across The Spider-Verse soundtrack, and it's a cut above Future's last few projects. There's a sense sometimes that Atlanta trap is this sort of creatively inbred scene that's only influenced by itself, so things like the clips of Prodigy and 2Pac's voices and the "Everlasting Bass" sample on "Like That" really help connect We Don't Trust You to a broader street rap lineage, I think that's pretty cool. I really like the second half of the album, especially the stretch from "Runnin Outta Time" to "Everyday Hustle." This post took longer than usual because March was really stacked with new releases, I listened to over 50 new albums and EPs released last month, about twice what I listen to some months, just trying to make sure I didn't miss the best stuff. Here's the 2024 albums Spotify playlist I update with everything I listen to. 

Ariana Grande's work with Max Martin and Ilya has always been hit and miss for me, while I think of Tommy Brown and Victoria Monet as her core creative team that she's done a lot of her best work with. So I was pleasantly surprised that Martin and Ilya really killed it on Eternal Sunshine, there's still that big polished Swedish pop thing, but a little more of the soft R&B romance and melancholy that suits Grande's voice best is in the mix. I particularly love "Bye," I hope that one's a single eventually. 

I love country music and I love several Beyonce albums, so I was very intrigued by "Texas Hold 'Em" and "16 Carriages" and curious to hear the rest of Cowboy Carter. And it was pretty exciting to wake up and put on the album and see that Baltimore country singer Brittney Spencer, who I'd recently interviewed, appears on Beyonce's great cover of "Blackbird." Cowboy Carter is by far Beyonce's longest album, and it feels like she made several versions of the album and just threw them all on here, which makes an impressive but somewhat exhausting listen. I don't think all of it works -- one of the most popular songs is "Ya Ya" and I don't enjoy that one at all, or the opener "American Requiiem." And I think covering "Jolene" with updated lyrics was just a bad idea poorly executed (ironically Cam, who had a good "Jolene" answer song a few years back, has several writing credits on Cowboy Carter). But a lot of it does work, even the Miley Cyrus duet "II Most Wanted" that I had very low expectations for. Some of my favorites are "Protector," "II Hands II Heaven," and "Amen."

I feel like it took a long time for me to really appreciate Schoolboy Q and get on his wavelength, and by the time I did, I really enjoyed CrasH Talk, which a lot of people regard as one of his weakest albums. Blue Lips has been far better received, I wanna go back and really reevaluate his records at some point, see how they hold up relative to each other. The run from "Blueslides" to "Foux" is really full of great verses and awesome production, and the rest is also pretty good. 

Top Dawg Entertainment's output has slowed down so much in recent years that it's a mild shock for them to release two albums in the same month, let alone two as good as these ScHoolboy Q and SiR albums. I was a fan of SiR before he signed to TDE, and I was particularly bummed when he went from dropping projects every year to releasing barely anything for almost five years. And then one of Heavy's advance singles "No Evil" was just kind of a drag, don't know why he chose to sing that one in such an over-the-top way. But the rest of the album is really solid and "No Evil" is an outlier that works alright in the context of the album. "Six Whole Days" has such a cool arrangement, all its textures and rhythmic shifts. 

In 2018, Philadelphia rapper Tierra Whack released Whack World, a uniquely impressive collection of fifteen 60-second songs that seemed to blow away almost everybody that heard it. And while I've had a nice thick playlist to listen to with all the EPs and singles she's released over the last 6 years, I've been impatient to hear Tierra Whack put together a proper full-length album. World Wide Whack isn't the world-conquering Supa Dupa Fly-level coming out party I'd dreamed of, which probably wasn't a fair expectation anyway, but it's a cool little record, with an intimate, emotional side to it. Lots of quiet, delicately melodious production, and the songs that hit the hardest tend to be the ones where Whack sings more than raps like "Moovies" and "Two Night." 

I love what Flo Milli's done from the beginning of her career, the over-the-top bratty shit-talking bravado, but I like that she's tapped into this sexy melodic thing with her chart breakthough "Never Lose Me." And Fine Ho, Stay does a good job of balancing both of those approaches, "Edible" and "Lay Up" are great softer tracks and then "Clap Sum" and "Tell Me What You Want" go hard. I really like "Neva" with Monaleo, she and Flo Milli are always a good combination, they could do a whole project together. 

The frequent comparisons Tyla gets to Rihanna give her big shoes to fill, but Tyla's debut album feels a little more confident about what it wants to be than Music of the Sun was, whether or not it remains an album with just one big hit. Mostly it works because a lot of the tracks are produced by the same people who made "Water," so after months of hearing that song every day, it goes down really easy to hear more of the same. But I don't want to underestimate how good it is just because it's very pleasant, "Breathe Me" and "Priorities" are very well written songs. 

Kacey Musgraves has two stone classic albums, Same Trailer Different Park and Golden Hour, that felt like stone classics from the very first listen. None of her other albums are bad, but they don't have that immediate undeniable magic, so when you put them on, it's like okay, this is just a regular album, not a masterpiece. I feel like there's also a lot of therapy and astrology stuff in Musgraves's songs now that makes her a less compelling, less incisive lyricist than she was in the past, I dunno, maybe it's my hangup. There are some great songs on Deeper well, though, I love "Too Good To Be True" and "Moving Out," and "Anime Eyes" is a great example of Musgraves's underrated sense of humor. 

My wife and I watched the first few seasons of "Grown-ish" before we got bored of it, and she always got irritated every time she saw Trevor Jackson's goofy rat tail. So it didn't surprise me when the least likable actor from the show makes extremely corny "toxic" R&B. Some YouTube clips of Trevor Jackson singing have been regularly mocked on Twitter over the last few months, including his really stupid remix of Tyla's "Water," and one of multiple songs where he makes a "glad like the trash bag" pun. Neither of those is on Heads Up, but it's still pretty garbage. 

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