Elucid spent nearly ten years putting out mixtapes, EPs, and collabs — including Race Music, his first teamup with billy woods as Armand Hammer — before his first solo album-qua-album. Majority self-produced with a goth-worthy overcast bleakness given claustrophobic effect, his poetic cadences rewire traditional emphases, and his alienated perception of his situation is spit breathlessly enough that listeners get the wind knocked out of them just by proximity to it. It not only sounds like those parts of NYC that gentrification forgot, but the parts of that landscape where only the maintenance workers with the most arcane duties get to see — a 20-foot graffiti burner sprawled across the subterranean machinery that keeps the city breathing.

– Nate Patrin