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30. Sexyy Red, “Fake Jammin”
29. zayALLCAPS, “Boy (V)”
28. Lisha G, “Whatcha Got”
27. J.P., “Come and see”
26. BabyChiefDoit, “Too Slow" (feat. STAR BANDZ)
25. Kura, “jjjjound”
24. Bc tae, “Booking”
23. Nino Paid, “12AM in LA”
22. Bktherula, “CRAYON”
21. Wizz Havinn, “4 AM at Coffee Zone” (feat. Luh Tyler, Bossman Dlow, Loe Shimmy & C Stunna)
20. Lil Uzi Vert, “Blow Da Whistle [Leak]”
19. Mel V Chapo, “Pew Pew”
18. MAVI, “the giver”
17. Molly Santana, “Windows Up”
16. Playboi Carti, “2024”
15. Pretty V, “Priceless”
14. Veeze & Rylo Rodriguez, “F*cked A Fan”
13. 03 Greedo, Maxo Kream, “R.I.C.O.”
12. Kendrick Lamar, “euphoria”

For approximately 26 minutes on Friday, May 3, I was convinced that Drake had not only escaped with his life but somehow, some way, cracked open a 0.1% chance of victory against Kendrick Lamar. This was pure fantasy, as glorious and brief as Adam Sandler’s probability-defying, shit-eating grin in the final seconds of Uncut Gems. But Drake has always been able to sell us unbelievable fantasies.

I want to remember Drake as he “died” — mortally wounded, guns blazing, and finally afforded legitimate targets for his petty grievances. Rick Ross is on Ozempic! A$AP Rocky should ask his wife for permission before dissing me! Abel Tesfaye is an enormous loser and his manager is blowing all his cash on grown men! Even the missed kill shots seemed to draw blood: “Shake that ass for Drake / now shake that ass for Free;” “Kendrick just opened his mouth / someone go hand him a Grammy right now;” and seriously, why did he move to New York?

Drake had no idea what was coming. He was fighting for a win until the very end. Sorry Mrs. Graham. The die was already cast.

Born out of Paris Fashion Week recording sessions and fine-tuned over the better part of a year, LEATHER PARK (VOL 1) is the rare compilation album that seems stronger for its ad-hoc, unfocused nature. “POKER” is the alté record’s sweeping intro, but Odunsi is quick to yield the spotlight to Swiss rapper Paxslim, whose soft-spoken verse glimmers with optimism. Treading through the track’s pulsing pocket, he casually delivers the type of star-making feature liable to set labels calling. My path is alignin’ / All in perfect timing / Only going my way… Paxslim dispenses the sort of divine reassurance we all hope for, as if channeling God or the universe.

On last summer’s “Build a Boy,” Bronx rapper Baby Osama was kind enough to upgrade her man’s fits with her personal closet, but you’re out of your mind if you think she’s letting him keep her threads post-breakup. “I DONT MEAN IT” is a scathing kiss off, all AutoTune acidity over a sexy drill meets smooth jazz instrumental. But even after detailing her lover’s many shortcomings — no motion, no drip, no stroke game — she can’t quite tell him to fuck off. And he definitely shouldn’t think about moving on, even if Baby O knows things between them are already over. Sometimes the saddest six-word story is: “I’m sorry, I don’t mean it.”

Guys I think YhapoJJ might be done with all these stupid bitches. Perfect song, no notes.

Cash Cobain’s best songs this year (“fisherrr,” “rump punch,” “Dunk Contest” minus J. Cole) were melancholic and atmospheric, tunnelling into the sultrier side of sexy drill. His peak might have been the molasses-slow PARTYNEXTDOOR flip on “act bad twin!” which turns keeping it P into a pact between paramours of Shakespearean proportion. Sex raps often tilt more pornographic than playful, but here Cash, Chow Lee, and Bay Swag are more romantic than randy as an insistent Jersey club kick keeps the momentum up. Even if Chow is totally incorrigible (“Side bitches over everything” is crazy), he makes his “life of sin” feel heartfelt, not just ridiculous.

A regal orchestral loop, chopped up by Tony Seltzer’s frequent collaborator Laron, lends the proceedings on “2K24 Tour” a dramatic air of luxury — even if MIKE and Niontay are primarily preoccupied with the perfume of this exotic kush they’re crushing up. “2K24” is firmly grounded, calling opponents’ bluffs and keeping careful tabs on cash flows, but it still sounds like a major victory lap for MIKE.

The beat whirls into second gear for Niontay’s feature, picking up speed as the Brooklyn-based rapper stands ten toes in a plain tee like 2006 Gucci Mane. His verse lights up the track, but that doesn’t make MIKE’s shine any duller. If anything, Niontay’s pitter-patter flows pick up on the stop-start lurch MIKE carves out in his first verse, unrushed and unflustered, slowly burning away his problems one leaf at a time.

I wouldn’t exactly call Rob49 a versatile rapper. Case in point: the New Orleans rapper has two entirely separate songs this year, one with Skrilla and one with Cardi B, revolving around the phrase “fuck me on that money.” They’re different styles of song, aimed at two distinct demographics, but Rob approaches them in similar fashion, more focused on enunciating the vowels in “money” (or mun-yun) than coming up with a clever bar. This is pretty much his whole thing: Oftentimes, Rob can’t be bothered to rhyme (even when he apparently believes he is).

This shouldn’t work as well as it does, but it really does work. As you might have intuited by now, Rob49 mostly makes Get Money Music and Bad Bitch Anthems, the sort of songs where every line is ready to caption a photo dump. Of his various songs this year (including collabs with 03 Greedo, Monaleo, and VonOff1700), the clear winner has to be “I Swear To God,” a deceptively iced-out paean to his bombass girlfriend. Every line is about how fine his girl is (except for the line about how fine his girl’s friends are). She’s so fine you’d think she was a catfish; she’s so fine her ex-boyfriend wants to kill himself; she’s so fine “these hoes can’t do nothing with you — at all.”

Perhaps the clearest proof that Rob loves his girl? He actually rhymes in his verses. Monogamy has never sounded so cool.

When this song comes on in the car, I turn the volume to 20 and totally shred my vocal cords screaming along to seven seconds of wokeups baring the depths of his soul in untethered Autotune. Blame it on my long-buried past as a choir kid, or maybe on mirror neurons, but really, it’s that language is an inherently imprecise tool for capturing anything, but especially the abstract and ephemeral. Sometimes the truest way to express a feeling requires unwording it.

This is an incredibly beautiful trick, and it’s not wokeups only skill. “fragged aht” is a song about kill streaks (“20 kills;” “50 rounds”) but more importantly, breaking up (“It ain’t working out, wish that I ain’t plan shit”). So while the confessional mode of so-called diary plugg isn’t new to rap, his plainspoken vulnerability goes a long way toward teasing out the latent emotional depth in a song like “fragged aht” that’s delirious and delightful in equal measure.

I won’t defend OT7 Quanny’s insane ploy to butter up America’s re-elected President — every rapper political endorsement this year felt stupid as fuck besides like, Cash Cobain cosigning Jamaal Bowman — but I must admit it felt perfectly in sync with the me-first nihilism that animates the Philly rapper’s grimy street raps. And “Where Them Shooters At?” is a particularly grimy song, with SleazyWorldGo creatively stacking up the body count from one bar to the next over a Halo-coded Saintmviii beat. OT7 Quanny isn’t above this sort of nauseating violence, but here he’s invoking the killers in his entourage as a safeguard as opposed to a threat: “She feel safer over here she know that’s where them shooters at.”

The song’s best bar might be when Quanny pokes fun at his own inconsistent release schedule, “N***a I don’t even rap for real, yeah I’m just money talking / I’m the type to cancel my session cuz it’s money calling.” He’s a snippet merchant through and through, more likely to post an Instagram reel rapping in the Maybach than release a track to DSPs, but the opportunity to scream “please drop” in the comments seems part and parcel of his fan appeal. When the music sounds this good, it’s easy to convince yourself it was all worth the wait.

Y2K!, Ice Spice’s debut album, functions primarily as anti-fanservice. Nobody asked Isis Gaston to make a drill record, and her fans have been more than happy to make it known in the comment section (“How do you fuck up your career that badly”). But set aside the stylistic whiplash and the twerktastic music videos and Y2K! remains a tight, cohesive album, crushing Chicago and New York drill up against shimmering pop synths and OPIUM-soundalikes with aplomb. RIOTUSA's production elevates even her least adept rhymes, like when the desolate echo of "BB Belt" manages to make "I'm Miss Poopie but I never smell" sound almost threatening.

"Popa" also feels refreshingly mean, maybe even a tiny bit evil. Ice's flow lurches around the pocket, stretching out vowels like bubblegum as she flexes the diamonds on her "stupid wrist" and derides a man's "stupid bitch." In 2024, raps about stealing someone's boyfriend or treating men as disposable are totally blasé, but at least they come across as playful or inspired by personal desire. On "Popa," Ice Spice sounds like she would steal your man just because she wants you to feel like shit. This ultra-bitchy persona blends perfectly with the Chief Keef-indebted instrumental to present Ice Spice as the mean girl to end all mean girls, or a man-eating club demon, or just a fly-ass rapper who can get whatever and whoever she wants. Bitches can't see me for nothin' like Sia / Grrrah!

Fawk, fawk. It's hard to think of a rapper more quintessentially 2024 than Lazer Dim 700. He records almost all of his music on the Bandlab app using iPhone earbuds and seems preternaturally tapped into the algorithm. His typical sound involves fried 808s which he raps over at breakneck pace with a flow that recalls Young Nudy suffering a smoker's cough. He has his own neologisms, like "li twan" (lil twin) and "FineShyt" (baddie). Yeat "fucked with his energy" so much he tapped him for adlibs on his latest album.

His style is divisive, attracting the usual complaints that "new rappers are ass" and "hiphop is dead," but Lazer Dim 700 actually can rap. Nowhere is that open secret more apparent than on "Laced max," the nu-jerk fruit of a particularly entertaining Plaqueboymax stream ("I'm tapped in with that Twitch, this ain't Myspace"). Lazer might not be prone to deep observations or knotty rhyme schemes, but his sheer flair is hard to overstate, miraculously finding new ways to say My clothes fit better my hoes better my tattoos better, etc.

Lazer's charm is really all in the details: his philosophical musings on loyalty and staying strapped, and the hilariously self-deprecating intro, "I thought fineshyt wanted me, but she wanted Max." The YouTube-provided "hoodtrap xaviersobased emotional jerk type beat" has just enough space to make sure Lazer's lyrics stay front and center as he puffs on Florida zaza and bemoans lame women pretending they aren't freaky. "I hear sirens, look above; I see nun but rain," he sighs halfway through, as if he's bored of being one of his generation's most exciting fresh talents. But the defining line of "Laced max" has to be the very first: "When we get done, they gon' play this back." Millions and millions of plays later, it feels safe to say Lazer Dim 700 called his shot.