Reviewing a new Future album in 2022 is like taking a trip back to the Stone Age and into the present at the same time. Future's views of the world remain stone-age, borne of an era in which ignorance was the highest good in the rap game and any self-knowledge was drowned in armoured self-affirmation and a handful of benzos. Currently, the consistently all caps »I NEVER LIKED YOU« remains because Future is still the blueprint for new rap. Together with Young Thug, Future has fathered thousands of illegitimate sons and his sense of melody and melancholy is still what dominates the game, even if the great innovation of the 2010s has clearly lost its momentum.

It's interesting to see how Pusha T copes with the inevitable midlife crisis; on »It's Almost Dry« he concentrates entirely on the groundbreaking era that has long since ceased to define his daily life. Content-wise, of course, this has already been perfectly memefied. However, It's Almost Dry is still a strong 40-something work mainly because of Pusha T's almost constant use of samples of Kanye West and Pharrell Williams, including a surprising DJ Shadow reminiscence.

Production-wise, »Aethiopes« by Billy Woods is absolutely sensational. Known primarily as a Ka collaborator, Preservation flips here from moody ass RZA soul to Art Ensemble Of Chicago-esque free jazz sessions. Remarkably unpredictable instrumentals that would make for a pretty insane album on their own, but completely blow you away when combined with Billy Woods' fellow zero-def juxisms.

Vince Staples' beat selection on »Ramona Park Broke My Heart« is very subtle in contrast to Billy Woods & Preservation's Aethiopes. Currently, Vince Staples' wish list quite clearly consists of keeping Quik and Mustard as landmarks and reducing their West Coast funk by another 50%. This gives Staples' raps a lot of weight, a decision that is only logical since he is one of the five best storytellers in rap at the moment.

Arseholes would write about Alabaster DePlume that his music is so unassailable that he should actually mind-produce the next three Bonobo albums (LOL, sorry, did it again!). But hey, try making pretty perfect weirdopop, pretty perfect jazz and pretty perfect beat sketches without appearing strung out in any way. »GOLD« is perhaps the definitive Alabaster DePlume album and still a touch too weird and free-spirited to end up in the next Audi spot.

As a music journalist, you constantly arrive at those points that demonstrate your pop-cultural detachment with maximum brutality, after which you frantically shed your own boomerishness with pseudo-euphoric reviews for the next big thing. Claire Rousay, also acknowledged here as a solo artist, has made a hypermodern pop album with More Eaze: like the Tiktok version of a 808 and Heartbreaks produced by SOPHIE. And I … simply end up feeling as old as the hills.

Tom Boogizm made an album last year that I, at least, saved as an instant classic after just one listen. Since then, endless amounts of new material from Rat Heart have been released through Robbing Lobsters From Mobsters or with Sockethead and Michael J Blood, in madlib mania and frequency. Boogizm now switches from tape to vinyl for the second time as Rat Heart Ensemble, and A Blues must have a special place on it. More stringy than before, in large parts hardly percussive, Tom Boogizm gets even closer to fragile private press pop, floats through interludes and, as always, intuitively does everything better than everyone else.

Also routinely better than the rest: releases on YOUTH, Andrew Lyster's label on which Fumu has now released a full-length album following singles and a CD-only collection. »Enter The Anima« scoops up every microgenre of the last five years, tears Kelman Duran's ambient Dembow to pieces, touches drill via Warp, and uses industrial as a distraction manoeuvre to achieve instinctive funkiness despite all the screwed-up rhythm.

Actually, I really shouldn’t be talking about Equiknoxx releases out of fear of hyperbole and ridiculous bias, but holy shit, the riddim factory Gavsborg and Time Cow, appearing here as Gav & Jord, comply so well with the plea from their early promoter Jon K to put only their most abstruse ideas into action on »Writing Ov Tomato«. As good as the last song-oriented Equiknoxx album was, this is the long-awaited sequel to the first two albums on DDS. Next level, I repeat myself.

Batu, too, has long been unassailable as a Timedance curator and highly selective producer, and the step to album format in the case of »Opal« is a correspondingly well-considered one. With just over half an hour of playing time and 11 tracks, Opal is formally not an album for the hall, rather Batu's harsh sound design flows into a lucid sequencing in which the drum and song-like contributions set the accents, but do not determine the narrative. Best Objekt album since the last Objekt album.

S.O.N.S. has meanwhile discarded the artificial scarcity strategy of his first releases and in doing so allows for a more comprehensive appreciation of »The Escape«, which is also brilliantly arranged. According to the press release, this is once again music for an imaginary film. But the way the repetitive genius of Pan Sonic meets Carl Craig Arpeggi, Amen Breaks infest harmony-addicted deep house and skipping burialisms leverage classic electro make it really quite a nice piece of work.

Speaking of classic electro: Dopplereffekt still do it best in the post-Drexciya era. Of course, »Neurotelepathy« doesn't quite reach the level of Gesamtkunstwerk, but the good old Detroit 808 formula remains the pizza margherita of electronic music.

After so much noise, B.C. Slumber’s »Slumber Assistant« mainly ends up competing with the narcoleptic effect of podcasts and does well. Difficult to judge such an openly functional album according to conventional criteria, but you can definitely look for lamer slumber-inducing aids.

After so much pretentious shit, now the full dadcore cosiness. The new Kurt Vile album is called »(watch my moves)«, contains as always the most unpretentious song writing and Kurt Vile – as already observed by P4K – in his current Lou Reed-like brashness simply seems like the Dalai-Lama version of Bruce Springsteen. I don't know how you get to be so completely yourself, but when I grow up, I wanna be like Kurt Vile.