The 20 Best Hip-Hop Albums of 2021

With its abundance of sports metaphors, The Off-Season represents J. Cole possibly at his sharpest. As its name suggests, the album finds Cole in a less-competitive stance, where his catalog up to now has found him battling through playoff match after playoff match, The Off-Season is in large part a more relaxed project. It’s a refreshing shift for Cole, and shines a light on his talents. He’s abandoned the rap-purist idea of avoiding features, doing his best R&B impression alongside Lil Baby on “Pride Is the Devil,” and boosting up-and-comers like Morray. In the lead-up to the record, Cole played a few professional basketball games in the Basketball Africa League. There’s a video of him warming up with other players on the court while a track from his album plays over the loudspeakers. If nothing else, you can’t say J. Cole didn’t give us the best rap flex of 2021? —J.I.

There’s simply no stopping Polo G. The Chicago-born rapper ended 2020 with a tweet professing his plans to reach new heights, and only a few months into this year, he proved exactly what he meant. The colossal hit “Rapstar,” from Polo’s excellent album Hall of Fame, was one of the year’s most-streamed songs — not to mention the other records it shattered — and offered a perfect encapsulation of the rapper’s pitch-perfect instincts. “That shit is fucking intuition,” he told Rolling Stone earlier this year. “‘Rapstar’ was definitely one of those moments where I just trusted my gut feeling. Everything was just telling me to do this song.” —J.I.

The British-Nigerian rapper’s fourth album seamlessly incorporates grime, hip-hop/soul, and old-school R&B (the Smokey Robinson sample in “Two Worlds Apart” goes down just as smoothly as the “Jodeci and cherry wine” she mentions in the lyrics). Simz flows hard and thinks deep, dropping brags like “Might be a brat for a bit/Fuck your blunt, man, I want my spliffs,” while humanizing her outsize confidence in moments that offer a realist take on careerism and processing personal traumas, particularly the standout “I Love You, I Hate You,” a searing message to her absentee dad that turns her anger into a power source. —J.D.

New York rapper Mike has one of the most quietly prolific catalogs in hip-hop right now. Known to drop a project every year — in addition to a number of releases under different monikers — Mike has the kind of mythos once reserved for artists like MF Doom, whom he’s often compared to. But Mike’s raps don’t carry the same weight of the late Doom’s melancholy. While his music has contended with grief and self-love, there’s a remarkably lateral trajectory to it all. His fans, over the course of nearly five years, have watched him navigate pain and maturity. With his latest, Disco!, you get the sense that he’s finally unearthing new energy from within. The album rolls over intimate production — oozing bass lines, syncopated drums, and the kind of vocal recording that feels like voice memos from a friend. The result is a record that simply asks you to pay attention. —J.I.

By now the significance of women in hip-hop is a recognized fact. Houston’s KenTheMan makes it clear on her 2021 EP, What’s My Name, where she introduces herself as “Big Ken,” a 27-year-old Gemini who isn’t afraid of what she wants. The sex-positive cut “Onnat,” finds Ken’s versatile wordplay in a dance with her penchant for seduction. The result? An embrace of a more fluid kind of energy, capable of taking charge in the present — a unique sound that only she can embody. Born Kentavia Miller, the musician got her start grinding in Houston before signing to a label earlier this year. The craftsmanship and dedication on display throughout What’s My Name suggests KenTheMan won’t be asking that question for very much longer. —J.I.

Atlanta rapper Sahbabii spent the year mourning the loss of his childhood friend and drummed up the courage to channel the experience into his debut studio album. On Do It for Demon, Sahbabii is firmly in his element, delivering his trademark wordplay and charm, but with a heaping dose of introspection. The album is as imaginative as Sahbabii’s prolific self-released projects, where he spins up new ways to describe being horny, except with the rapper’s focus on dealing with the pain and anger of a profound loss. The result is one of the year’s most surprising and affecting records. —J.I.

Maxo Kream is as real as they come. The Houston rapper has been at the forefront of his city’s rap scene for the past decade, moving as deliberately and patiently as the genre’s forefathers. With his stellar 2021 record, Weight of the World, he finally gets the recognition he deserves, but not before the titular weight of the world presents a new slate of challenges. Maxo raps with profound emotional clarity, as he unravels the trappings of what might look like success on the outside and reckons with demons that have lingered in his life, and family, for generations. It’s a rare album that finds an artist being forthright and honest about themselves. No surprise, since it’s coming from a Houston O.G. —J.I.

“Who’s the busiest loser?” Kanye asks on his 10th album. Um, go find yourself a mirror, big fella. Donda was a 27-track brain-heart-spleen-ego dump that was at points confounding, exhilarating, morally bankrupt, deadening, and dazzling. Amidst what is, even by the most generous assessment, an athletically unfocused, petulantly redundant two-hour-plus mess, there’s God-touched beauty (“Moon,” the gospel-dream drone “No Child Left Behind”), soul-scouring realness (“Jesus Lord”), and even the occasional for-the-ages moment of old-Kanye banger transcendence (the Weeknd/Lil Baby-assisted “Hurricane”). Kanye continues to process his conflicted, grieving, striving, self-canceling story in grueling real time. At its best, it’s the work of a man who refuses to let his bullshit get so boring that we can just ignore him — no matter how bad we want to, or how hard he tries. —J.D.

For an album named after a movement of aggression, Punk is remarkably soft. Sometimes Young Thug is crude when he’s delicate (“I wanna lay with you every night and we never bone”), but he’s direct about his anxieties (“I came from nothin’ but that ain’t how the world see me”). Navigating his childhood traumas, complicated relations with law enforcement, and his responsibilities as a wealthy community figure, Thug shows skill in the tender without sacrificing the fun of his oeuvre. Complete with some of the best work this year from his contemporaries J. Cole, Drake, Doja Cat, and Gunna, Punk traverses levity and darkness with tact. —M.C.

As invitingly bright and riotously overpopulated as its cover, this excessively long showcase for Young Thug’s Young Stoner Life label, hosted by Thugger and Gunna, is a maelstrom of slime-drenched ebullience. Thug and Gunna team up for the inane earworm “Ski,” Drake slips and slides through “Solid,” and Future beams in to unfurl a cosmic croak over a flute loop on “That Go!” The record is a chance to shine for scads of lesser-known artists, too, like Brooklyn barker Rowdy Rebel and the unfoonkwithable Unfoonk. If you’re a rapper who isn’t on this record, it might be time to call your agent and tell them to go back to their old job at Dunkin’ Donuts. Yet, at 23 tracks, the skips quotient is stunningly low and the energy never lets down. —J.D. 

Is it Drake’s best album? Well, no. (The line to argue Take Care versus Nothing Was the Same versus If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late starts over there, bro.) But Certified Lover Boy is still a highly enjoyable cruise on autopilot from modern pop’s most charming blob of resentment and self-pity. Expensive samples, platinum guests, bitter bars about exes and frenemies — Drake hits all the familiar notes that have made him one of the most popular artists on the planet, and then some. He also remakes Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” as a Lonely Island-worthy comedy rap hit, just to show he can. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll listen again and again. —S.V.L.