Stream of the Crop: 8 New Albums for Heavy Rotation 10/28

Let’s all take a very deep breath. This week, there’s no Frank Ocean, no Leonard Cohen, no Danny Brown or Young Thug; the legacy artists and hit wizards have taken a week off and, as a result, we can focus on records that might ordinarily have gone unnoticed. This feels good.

More specifically, this means we can focus on Tkay Maidza, the Zimbabwean-Australian artist whose debut album, Tkay, dropped yesterday. She’ll be compared to M.I.A. and, hell, there are worse comparisons out there. But Maidza has an tendency towards dancefloor pop that Maya Arulpragasam has shunned of late, and Tkay is all the more enticing for it. “Follow Me”‘s shameless echoes of 90s R&B, for example, should be seductive enough to position the track on every pop playlist before the end of the year. ​​But it’s “Carry On,” a collab with Killer Mike, that has every iteration of Maidza: a solid flow that jumps from righteously bratty to righteously furious, a unique​​ approach to glitch-rhytmic production​, and a straight-ahead, chantable chorus.

Listen to Tkay and the rest of this week’s most notable releases below.

Tove Lo – Lady Wood

Meek Mill – DC4

Honeyblood – Babes Never Die

Tkay Maidza – Tkay

Toy – Clear Shot

Ulcerate – Shrines of Paralysis

Jeezy – Trap or Die 3

Carla dal Forno – You Know What It’s Like

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