January 2025 kicked off with a major ice storm across the U.S. and Canada dumping more than a foot of snow across multiple states and provinces. And the frost isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, with meteorologists are forecasting an imminent polar vortex for next week. I’m no winter warrior, but something about the cold and the dark makes music hit differently; the same way summertime can turn a bop into an anthem, the frozen stretch from December to February feels perfect for curling up with a good album and burrowing into its recesses, escaping a bout of cabin fever by hopping into an artist’s world.
The two weeks from Christmas to New Year’s is a relatively quiet time for music. But there were still plenty of excellent albums and singles to check out released over the past month, from Lazer Dim 700’s Keepin It Cloudy and Studio Addict by Nine Vicious to Ice Spice’s Y2K! deluxe and cupid by wolfacejoeyy. But as the snow piled up and I broke out my heavy-duty puffer, there were four mixtapes in particular I found myself returning to time and again. Some are better suited for posting up by the fireplace than others (i.e., cozier), but they’re all strong outings by some of hip-hop’s brightest burgeoning talents.
Wizz Havinn: Free Wizzop
For fans of: Bossman Dlow and Gucci Mane
Tallahassee, FL, rapper Wizz Havinn is prone to subtle nostalgia, though you might not catch it on first listen. There are his more overt flips of Eazy E and Gucci Mane, but even when Free Wizzop’s sound is completely fresh, Wizz’s laidback lyrics and overarching consistency bring to mind the sprawling mixtape discographies of yesteryear — like he says on menacing mid-album standout “Fishy,” “I feel like I’m Gucci Mane in ‘06 but I’m coming different.” Flooding the streets with music hasn’t gone anywhere in the streaming era, but artists often veer too far into crowd pleasing (a song for everyone typically creates an album for no one) or tripling-down on their core sound, leading to repetitive records.
Wizz Havinn is more than capable of avoiding these obvious potholes, and so Free Wizzop is a tinted-window victory lap, threading together various strains of Southern rap from Atlanta to the Florida panhandle. There’s the lurching bounce of “Chicken Phone,” where a Cybertruck appears extraterrestrial to onlookers, and the urgently demonic “Time of the Month,” featuring Karrahbooo at her most contemptuous. And we’d be remiss not to mention the inclusion of “Leave It In Her,” a hypnotizing highlight from last summer.
Released while Wizz is serving a 90 day jail sentence, you might expect Free Wizzop to sound disjointed or unsequenced, but the rapper’s versatility prevents the seams from showing. He sounds amazing with the volume turned all the way up (refer to his previous DJ ess remixes) but Free Wizzop delivers in quieter moments too. The pensive “First Day In” eviscerates the joy from traditional “first day out” freestyles, moodily reflecting on wins so far and his stoic approach to his sentence. I’m particularly fond of “Not Yet,” where the beat is just a wisp of a sample and stuttering drums sitting low in the mix, like the inverse of a bass-boosted remix. “I got a real praying mother, that’s why God bless me,” he exhales, brushing off compliments on his success to-date. Wizz Havinn has his sights set on bigger wins ahead.
Coziness Rating: 1 pair of Marni corduroys
Lil Shine: Shine Forever
For fans of: Corey Lingo and Owl City
Lil Shine still isn’t old enough to buy a beer, but when you consider that he’s been recording music since he was 12, it’s less jarring that a rapper born in 2005 has already mastered his subgenre of choice — in this case, pluggnb, a more melodic mutation of the plugg music pioneered in the mid-2010s by producers like MexikoDro. Shine’s first brush at internet notoriety came a couple years after he started rapping; thanks to his pre-puberty tenor, the Minneapolis rapper was initially dismissed as a gimmick or a meme.
Lil Shine has come a long way since those early days, and while listeners may still be skeptical of a white rapper crooning about double cups of Wockhardt and faltering relationships, Shine Forever goes a long way toward establishing Shine as a thoughtful artist in his own right. These euphoric tracks shimmer and drip like icicles glinting in the sun, beautiful in their purity and simplicity. On the surface, these songs scan as low-calorie, light on themes and lyrical prowess, but that isn’t strictly true. Take “Enticing,” where complaints about unloving hoes and threats to send “hollow tips to his chest” are broken up by psilocybin-spurred confessionals: “I get tongue tied when I see ya.” The writing is good, but when coupled to Shine’s ecstatic Auto-Tune melodies, a line like “good drank in my tummy / bitch, she so slutty,” becomes transcendent rather than lazy.
Listen straight through and you won’t reach for the skip button, but the album’s back half is especially strong. There’s the one-two punch of “Reckless2” and “God,” the former a delirious dive into a cornucopia of pharmaceuticals, the latter a meditative aside on the young rapper’s federal indictment: “I had to ask God why they want me in that box.” Shoving his legal troubles up against his romantic exploits feels particularly teenaged — an open case with mandatory minimums would crush the average person’s libido under sheer stress — but it has the effect of neutering the fear of any potential sentence, allowing Shine to rap on his own terms as opposed to focusing on his circumstances. And so the reassurances of “G.Y.B” (“Know I got your back through it all, I’m not taking sides”) and “One Chance/In2Dis” (“Know I love you so I blocked all my hoes”) are believable, comforting. Who has time to worry about the Jakes when you’re trying to get high and get laid?
But if you only listen to a single Lil Shine song, make it “Date Night.” He’s way too cool on the hook — “these straight blue strips, no set trip, I love all types of money” — but it’s the second verse, building off a muted bridge, that truly soars. “You sipping that fake drank / How that fake drank taste?!” Shine bawls, at once incredulous and appalled, but still smirking just a little.
Coziness Rating: 4 snowglobes full of lean
Lil 2 Dow: 21 Gun Salute, Vol. 2
For fans of: Soulja Slim and Nilufer Yanya
Baltimore artist Lil 2 Dow sounds like he’s never raised his voice in his life. His rapping is practically incidental, unscrolling in a gentle murmur, but that shouldn’t be misconstrued as careless. 21 Gun Salute, Vol. 2 deliberately pivots between downtempo dirges and more upbeat tracks that crib from New Orleans and the DMV alike, finding depth in the chasm between the spoils of hustling and the myriad consequences these extralegal activities can entail. So the easygoing bounce of “How You Love Dat,” rife with firearm flexes and neighborly devotion (“I did it for the hood”), quickly yields to the cloistered melancholy of “The Whole Thing,” alternately paranoid (“They hit the door you gotta flush that shit”) and wistful. On that song, 2 Dow places himself in a lineage with Jeezy, Lil Wayne, and Lil Meech, which neatly encapsulates his rap persona: not just the dealer or the sipper, but also an heir to an established dynasty, in this case the A$AP Ant-founded rap label Marino Infantry. Ant pops through on “Jammin” alongside A$AP Twelvyy, a spikier sequel to 2023’s velvety “The Ankle Lock,” though neither can quite steal the spotlight from their host, who grumbles, “don’t be talking reckless on my trap phone.”
Of particular note is how Lil 2 Dow and executive producer Zeke Mishanec weave together disparate samples, from 1970s R&B collective The Moments to British singer-songwriter Nilüfer Yanya. These samples are deployed in disparate fashion: on “Bangin Needles,” a chopped soul fragment sits front and center in the mix, while on “China White,” the beat tilts in and out of earshot, as if listening with your head underwater. The ebb and flow dials up the impact of 2 Dow’s bars as he dismisses the “phony” and uncouth “jabronis” around him.
Or take the moody shuffle of “Quetiapine,” named for the active ingredient in antipsychotic medication. The wins that 2 Dow has tallied up so far on Vol. 2 seem to fall apart in the face of loss: family members struggling with addiction, friends who were institutionalized and came back not quite the same. Yet even in this morass, Lil 2 Dow holds his head high. “My auntie, she a junkie, still from Wakanda,” he intones on the hook, casually injecting the song with vulnerability and dignity. You imagine that another rapper might lean on this moment, either attempting to humanize drug users or establish a supervillain persona, so nihilistic that money matters more than family. For Lil 2 Dow, this sort of complexity is blase, and so 21 Gun Salute, Vol. 2 finds depth without preaching and swagger without stunting. In a world of artists obsessed with looking cool, Lil 2 Dow is a rare outlier: a rapper so cool, you can hear it when he whispers.
Coziness Rating: 2-seater Benz with the heat blasting on full
