It’s time to update the playlists with another dose of the finest new music. If you’re a regular visitor to this blog you’ll be very familiar with the first half a dozen picks as some of my favourite artists just happen to be releasing new music at the same time.
Subscribe to the playlist HERE with versions for all the major platforms, from Qobuz to Apple.
1. B Dolan – Soil / Fifty Five
Rapper, Poet and Activist B. Dolan has been a regular on these pages for at least sixteen years but he’s back with his fifth album, but the first on his new label, Glaring Typo.
‘Fight Naked’ may be his finest work to date. The singles ‘Boys To Men’. ‘Fight Naked’ and ‘Advice to Young Writers’ preceded its release but the rest of the album is, if anything, even better. ‘The Bends’ was apparently written while tripped out on a hotel floor and crafts Dolan’s superb voice and intricate heartfelt lyrics to an insistent building beat. The song touches on the death of Dolan’s father, a subject he returns to in detail on the incredibly personal but moving, ‘Fifty Five’. Understandably it’s not a song he plays live but he did perform it at his last UK gig in 2024 and you could hear a pin drop as a crowd got goosebumps enmasse (even possibly the Minecraft characters where it was being simulcast). It beautifully tells his fathers story and how tragically both his dad and grandfather died at age 54.
Dolan has introduced me to several of my favourite artists, either as guest slots or in the case of Mithago Craze, as mesmerising support on one tour and they take over a whole track’ ‘What is Unviled’. However the album is well and truly stolen by a ‘rap veteran’ who last released a record in 2014 and who I had somehow never heard of!
On album opener ‘Soil’, Dolan and guest rapper Curly Castro follow each other, upping the lyrical prowess and delivery with every bar until a quote from writer Octavia Butler intones that “To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool”. It’s not hard to spot who that might reference but it heralds the arrival of Skipp Coon and a voice that has to be heard to be believed. A stunning boom and the lyrics go up a notch until a killer repeated line of ‘until you hate the rich, you can never love the poor’ ends the track. It’s a tour de force.
While the world patiently awaits a new album from Skipp – we can but hope… coming one day on Glaring Typo – but in the meantime I can’t recommend his 2014 LP ‘Miles Garvey’ highly enough. The jaw dropping ‘Assata Taught Me (Page 181)’ about the former Black panther Assata Shakur is a good place to start (weirdly the only video online has turkish writing all over it).
2. Wheelchair Sports Camp “EAT MEAT!”
Wheelchair Sports Camp is certainly not your average hip-hop act. Hailing from Denver, CO, fronted by Kalyn Rose Heffernan – a wheelchair using, profanely queer and tiny rapper, with a very distinctly high-pitched sense of humor. Backed by her gimp Greggy on drums, the band combines fantastic beats with an absolutely face shredding live show. They were also introduced to me by B.Dolan – after they supported him on a US tour, and the incredible ‘Yess I’m a Mess’ was one of my favourite tracks of 2021.
“In an attempt to unlearn my perfectionism and finish the damn album, I picked up the drums for the first time since middle school and wrote EAT MEAT! with Greggy on guitar. It was the most fun we’ve had and it instantly felt good enough for the first time maybe ever? We were on to something, … if every dude can play mediocre guitar, why can’t I play shitty drums?“ says Heffernan, “It freed me from having to be the best rapper and out-bar every rapper in the bar. Come to find out I’ve been overcompensating my whole life, because I am genetically imperfecta. Osteogenesis imperfecta is the name of my brittle bones disease and I’m realizing more and more how my body has been the center of attention since birth. Described in dehumanizing, demoralizing, and very unbecoming ways, it’s no wonder I’ve always felt like I had to be the best. This album is a collection of songs from the past decade and finished because we simplified: oh imperfecta.”
3. KABEAUSHÉ – UNTITLED 1981
Last month saw the return of KABEAUSHÉ with his third album KABEAUSHÉ PRESENTS: IGGY SWAGGERING UNGRATEFUL INCESSANT LITTLE PEEEAAAAAAA. The album is “bursting with imagination, an absolute riot of off-the-chain vocals, pirouetting keyboard stabs, shronky brass and staccato strings, dancing on the head of a funky pin“.
I finally saw Kabeaushe play live last year, after the original concert had been delayed for a year… It was well worth the wait. The energy and inventiveness he brings to live performance has to be experienced (although sadly the UK is not on the list on his 2026 European tour). I would share a video but I never got around to putting it on Instagram (I’ll try and do so soon) but he howled, sweated, danced, marched and got down and dirty in the middle of a crowd who couldn’t stop grinning and dancing the whole night. Hands down my favourite gig of 2025.
4. Joshua Idehen
There are few things in life that fill me with happiness more than the breakout success of Joshua Idehen, the ultimate anti-overnight star after creating two decades worth of acclaimed and ridiculously brilliant poetry and music… that never quite blew up. However, since teaming up with musician and producer Ludvig Parment and relocating to Stockholm the stars seemed to have aligned, with the Twitter thread turned anthem ‘Mum Does The Washing’ as his north star. He’s got a sold out show at Koko coming up and he couldn’t deserve it more.
‘Everything Everywhere All At Once‘ is a stunning exploration of the sliding doors moments of our lives, contemplating all the universes that exist within his daughter. The new album isn’t – in my opinion – better than his previous work with LV, Benin City, Hugh, and more. It merely continues the greatness.
5. Dead Pioneers
‘Bad Indian’ is the tune that brought Dead Pioneers to prominence, combining anger, politics and a cracking sense of humour to a brilliantly catchy propulsive tune.
I was lucky enough to catch them live at the Underworld in Camden earlier in the month and their mix of punk and spoken word is even more powerful live.
‘The Caucasity’ was a particular highlight, delivering a message about white privilege and stereotypes of indigenous people while straddling the line between fury and making you crack up.
Their new album ‘Wagon Burner’ will be out in June and both ‘Nazi teeth’ and ‘No Kings’ which were previewed at Underworld show they’re not letting up.
6. Waterbaby
No 6, and we finally reach someone I haven’t banged on about for years!
Waterbaby hails from Stockholm so perhaps I have Joshua Idehen to thank for bringing her to my attention. Her debut full-length, Memory Be a Blade, is out on Sub Pop. Her follow-up to 2023 EP Foam is “darker, richer, and more personal than ever. She wanted her lyrics to dig deeper and evolve her writing forward, something she accomplishes stunningly across the eight-track project”.
She plays The Lower Third in London on April the 15th.
7. Baby Keem
Baby Keem has 20.1 monthly streams on Spotify so I’m not revealing an emerging artist but his return after almost five years is something to celebrate. ‘No Blame’ is one particualrly personal song about the difficulties his mother and by consequence he went through. He’s spoken about how difficult it was to process and to make… “I’m speaking from the perspective of 9 year old me that 22 year old me is going through”.
‘Good Flirts’ on the other hand is a wonderfully seductive fun pop groove with Keem, Momo Boyd and Kendrick Lammaar oozing chemistry and joy.
