The category “Southern rap” has its allusive properties — a regional aesthetic that spans from Gulf Coast Texas to Miami Beach, from sinuous live-band funk to 808-driven macro-bass, from battle-flow intricacy to hooks-first shout-alongs. But few entries in this regional pantheon feel like the South South of a cross-Mason-Dixon imagination, the one torn between deep old times and an ongoing re-Reconstruction era drive towards a liberatory future, than the debut from Atlanta’s Goodie Mob. It’s not just in the examinations of Black disenfranchisement and the coping mechanisms that come with it, individually and collectively (“Thought Process”), or the immersion in the region’s particular history with the drug trade and its tolls (phrase-coiner “Dirty South”), or the title cut’s comfort and sense of home and belonging evoked through family meals. It’s in the voices — Cee-Lo’s humming warmth, T-Mo wavering between tension and catharsis, Big Gipp’s measured yet emotional precision, Khujo growling unpredictable emphases — that build a powerful ensemble depiction of being young Black Southern men. Early-phase Organized Noize provide a deep landscape to settle yourself into, too — nuanced when it needs to be in its efforts to retool ’70s-rooted funk and R&B into headnod hip-hop, but also right-to-the-gut when they need to instill a sense of stoned yet deep-focus defiance (thrumming with guitar doodles and submersed keyboards on “Goodie Bag”) or embattled, justified anxiety (has a simple piano hook ever riffed off stress quite like “Cell Therapy” did?). At its heart, Soul Food is built around a more profane and frustrated collection of lyrical insights than your typical gospel album, but concerned enough with the prospects of what salvation means to keep company with one.

– Nate Patrin