Every week Vulture highlights the best new music. If the song is worthy of your ears and attention, you will find it here. Read our picks below, share yours in the comments, and subscribe to the Vulture Playlist for a comprehensive guide to the year’s best music.
Sean Price ft. DOOM, “Negus”
Nuclear war may be imminent, but all is not lost: We’ve been gifted a new DOOM single. Better yet, rap’s greatest villain will drop a song every week for the next 14 weeks as part of a project called The Missing Notebook Rhymes in partnership with Adult Swim. First up is “Negus,” by the late Sean Price, where he raps over a wailing, siren-like guitar riff and simplistic drum loop. He slowly enunciates his rhymes, offering threatening lyric after threatening lyric. DOOM, while only billed as featured on the song, raps the second verse (of which there are only two), doing his usual shtick of lacing together pop-culture references with brags and barbs, offering intricate rhymes in his unmistakable husky voice. Let’s hope we make it to week 14. —Ethan Sapienza (@ClickTheMovie)
Cassie ft. G-Eazy, “Love a Loser”
Cassie might be the most inconsistent singer of the last ten years. She has approximately one album to speak of, released over a decade ago, and while it produced a modern R&B gem in “Me & U,” little else ever emerged from her potential. Her next project didn’t come for another seven years, in the form of a mixtape, because what label would invest in an album budget by then? In some ways, what Cassie is doing could be admired. She creates music only when she wants to, and it’s never been uneven: Take her latest, “Love a Loser,” released for the hell of it last week. It’s an intoxicating fever dream of a song that tries to be clear-eyed in its perspective on a lover. “Is it me or is it the drugs,” she wonders about the real attraction. (Meanwhile, G-Eazy seemingly exists on this song just to throw subliminals at his ex Lana Del Rey.) To everyone else, Cassie might seem like a prop in Diddy’s world, but her increasingly underrated music career — when she chooses to remember she has one — seems to answer to no one. —Dee Lockett (@Dee_Lockett)
Destroyer, “Sky’s Grey”
Destroyer’s Dan Bejar is cursed with a sense of melody that makes even the bleakest lyrics seem like wistful memories. On “Sky’s Grey,” the genuinely pretty first single from his upcoming album, ken, he drops ominous lines like, “should have seen it coming” and “I’ve been working on the new Oliver Twist,” and, uh, “bombs in the city, plays in the sticks.” Bejar is not the most literal guy, but it doesn’t take much imagination to hear a song that exists as a means of grappling with the state of things. But even when he’s coming at problems as grand and inscrutable as the way the world is, Bejar’s got an easy swing, like an academic who really knows his shit and can explain it to anyone in an appealing way — sort of like Neil deGrasse Tyson before he overdid it and got annoying. —Sam Hockley-Smith (@shockleysmith)
Miss Eaves, “Food Porn”
If you watched Sunday’s Insecure, you already heard a song from Brooklyn rapper Miss Eaves and likely didn’t know it. One of the raunchiest cuts from her unapologetic debut album, Feminasty, “Hump Day,” soundtracked poor Issa’s masturbation disaster. That song isn’t shy about Miss Eaves’s ability to satisfy her desires her damn self — “Hand down my pants I flick the bean” — and the rest of the album shares a blunt matter-of-factness similar to the CupcakKes and Azealia Bankses of the rap game. “Food Porn” is a song that takes her sexual appetite literally, making the seemingly innocent process of cooking a meal into an erotic act: “Rolling around with tomato / My knife hits the juices flow / Lick it, tossing a salad / Put my hands in it.” It’s what Katy Perry’s “Bon Appétit” would’ve been if she didn’t have to pander to radio. —DL
Brockhampton, “Swamp”
Not too long ago, a dominant rap trend — most often espoused by DJ Khaled or people in DJ Khaled’s orbit, but really one that goes as far back as Illmatic-era Nas — was that relentlessly grinding toward a goal at the expense of mental health and sleep was not only essential, but honorable too. If you didn’t succeed, it’s because you weren’t hustling hard enough. Why sleep when you could work? I’m not implying the Brockhampton collective of rappers-producers-designers are lazy — a cursory glance at their YouTube channel immediately proves otherwise — but that they embody the youthful spirit of “laziness,” when good ideas or creative concepts spring forth from minds that have time to think about nothing for a little while every day. “Swamp,” their latest and best song, is overwhelming, funny, and creative. You’ll probably wonder if it could exist without Odd Future, and then you’ll probably feel cynical for wondering that because it’s completely beside the point. —SH-S
