Count it this week and you get several albums that would each be the lead story on a normal Friday. New Music Friday August 21 is stacked in a way August usually is not, and the stacking is not accidental. Labels have been holding product since the summer logjam, and the calendar in front of them, Denzel Curry and Kenneth Blume's second joint record on the same day as Rapsody's sixteen-track Roc Nation album on the same day as Jorja Smith's return, is what happens when everybody decides at once that the wait is over.

Play This One First: Denzel Curry, Kenneth Blume - ii

Denzel Curry, Kenneth Blume is the billing on ii, out on Loma Vista, and the name change is doing some work. The producer who made UNLOCKED with Curry in 2020 was Kenny Beats then, a brand as much as a person, all YouTube sessions and drum kits and a certain kind of internet presence. He is Kenneth Blume on this cover. Six years and a great deal of touring later, the partnership comes back as two people rather than a rapper and a beatmaker with a bit.

Nine tracks. "Evil Grin" with JPEGMAFIA, "Crown" with Westside Gunn, and "The Difference" with Yebba, which was the first thing anybody heard from it. Blume described the record in terms that are unusually unglamorous for an announcement: "I hear the growth and the fight in equal parts."

UNLOCKED was a lark that turned into a classic almost by accident, seventeen minutes of loop-chopping and yelling that worked because nobody was trying to make anything permanent. ii is a sequel to a lark, which is the hardest sequel there is, and the early evidence says they solved it by refusing to reproduce the conditions. It is slower. There is space in it. Curry has spent the years since building himself into one of the two or three most technically serious rappers alive, and Blume has spent them learning restraint. Whether that is an improvement or a loss is the actual argument this record starts, and we will be arguing about it for a month.

Rapsody - God Gotta Afro & Gold Hoops

God Gotta Afro & Gold Hoops arrives with sixteen tracks, released through Rapsody's own We Each Other imprint under exclusive license to Roc Nation. We wrote about "Apple Juice" when it landed as a D'Angelo homage, and the question then was whether one gorgeous single was a mood or a thesis. Sixteen tracks is a thesis.

The Rapsody new album is also the clearest ownership story on this Friday's slate, and we say that as people who write about ownership constantly. Her imprint, her masters, Roc Nation on distribution and license rather than acquisition. That structure is why the album can be sixteen tracks and why it can sound like it does. Nobody was in the room asking for a radio record.

Jorja Smith - What Are The Odds

What Are The Odds comes out on FAMM, her own label, and it is the first Jorja Smith project in a while that sounds like it was made by someone who has decided what she is. Wizkid turns up on "Alive." "This City" is built on a rework of Devlin's 2010 "London City," with Devlin on it, which is a specific and slightly strange piece of English rap history to reach for and exactly the kind of choice that makes a record feel like a place instead of a genre.

Smith has been treated for years as a voice waiting for the right context, which is a compliment that curdles if you hear it long enough. The Jorja Smith What Are The Odds rollout, with "I Lied, You Lied" leading it, reads like an artist done waiting for context and prepared to build one.

Skilla Baby - The Price of Fame

Detroit has been exporting rappers at an absurd clip for five years, and Skilla Baby has been the one working hardest without quite getting the ceiling the city's best have gotten. The Price of Fame, out on Geffen, is a swing at that ceiling, with Nas on it, Chris Brown on it, and Bryson Tiller on "Face Card." The album trailer co-starred 50 Cent, which tells you how the campaign is positioned.

He framed it to XXL without any of the usual grandiosity: "The Price of Fame is an album for the average man." Whether Skilla Baby's The Price of Fame delivers on that or gets buried under its own guest list is the risk of the format. Feature-heavy major-label albums from regional artists have a long history of sanding off the thing that made the artist worth signing. He is a good enough writer to survive it. We will see if the record lets him.

R&B has a quiet Friday, which is not a complaint

The new R&B album releases this week are smaller in scale and better in odds. Eric Bellinger drops a self-titled record, ten tracks, through Tamla and his own Evolve Music Group under exclusive license to Capitol CMG. A self-titled album this deep into a career is usually a statement about identity rather than commerce, and Bellinger has earned the right to make one. He has written for nearly everybody and been under-credited for most of it. The Eric Bellinger self-titled album is the sound of a songwriter deciding to be the artist for a minute.

Sam Smith's Hazel Eyes arrives the same day on Capitol. We covered "When He's Gone" when it previewed the album back on August 7, and it sits at the edge of our beat rather than the center of it, but the soul architecture underneath a Sam Smith record has always been closer to this publication than the pop framing suggests.

What we are actually listening for

Last week's roundup covered Trippie Redd, Fridayy and the Badu and Alchemist collaboration, and the week before that was a similar pile. That is three consecutive Fridays where the volume of hip hop album releases has outrun anybody's ability to hear it all, which is the exact condition that makes playlist algorithms look useful and makes them dangerous. When six albums arrive at midnight, the machine picks two, and the four it skips are gone by Tuesday.

Our order, in the order we mean it. ii first, because two artists at the top of their craft trying to beat a record they made by accident is the most interesting proposition of the day. God Gotta Afro & Gold Hoops second, and give it the full sixteen, because Rapsody albums do not reveal themselves on shuffle. Jorja Smith third if you want the record you will still be playing in November. Skilla Baby or Eric Bellinger fourth.

One note on housekeeping, since the announcements have been running together. Cordae and Anderson .Paak confirmed their joint album this week and it is not tomorrow. Heavy Is the Crown is October 23. Do not go looking for it at midnight.