Shatter the Standards

• NEW Album Review: EQUILIBRIVM II by Anitta | Shatter the Standards
The Rio singer writes protection as household equipment, coarse salt and amulets and Ogum’s shield, across seventeen songs of samba, coco and reggae.

• Album Review: NEVER SAY DIE by PFG | Shatter the Standards
J. Cole went home to Fayetteville to produce PFG’s NEVER SAY DIE, and the Sheltuh rapper fills his minimal, bass-heavy beats with the hardest, most lived-in street rap of Cole’s producing life.

• Album Review: Sock It 2 My Pocket by Rome Streetz | Shatter the Standards
On his way out of Griselda’s orbit and onto Nas’s Mass Appeal, the Queens rapper keeps the loops cold and the drums lean. Rome Streetz raps like every bar is already owed to him.

• Album Review: Finessin Distribution Deals by Fox BD | Shatter the Standards
With his second project of the year, Fox BD reps West Memphis and Bouldercrest at once and sells two-minute songs about kidnappings, lean proposals, and the locked-up half of his family.

• Album Review: The Ends, Never Ends by Joe James | Shatter the Standards
Thirteen homes before secondary school, homeless at sixteen, years of silence with his mum. The Essex rapper’s debut turns all of it into the most complete piece of British rap memoir in years.

• Album Review: Pretty Girlz Run the World by Loe Shimmy | Shatter the Standards
The South Florida rapper dedicates an album to women and grades them like merchandise.

• Album Review: THIS CANNOT BE SOLD by KB | Shatter the Standards
On THIS CANNOT BE SOLD, KB fences off his marriage, his kids, and his doubt, and his writing has never been better.

• Album Review: Highway 79 by Ne-Yo | Shatter the Standards
On his first country-inspired record, cut in Nashville twenty years after his debut, Ne-Yo writes the plainest songs of his career and lets the R&B voice do the rest.

• Album Review: Set In Stone by Rick Ross | Shatter the Standards
Five years after his last solo album, the kingpin fantasy is now a Miami institution. Set In Stone moves at yacht speed and stops at the funeral home as often as the jeweler.

• Album Review: Who Coppin by Larry June | Shatter the Standards
A decade removed from trap phones, the San Francisco player preaches compound interest and finally explains who all the advice was for.

• Album Review: My Reckless Abandon by Bella Kay | Shatter the Standards
On her debut album, the 20-year-old behind 2025’s viral “The Sick” writes about crushes, sex, food, and family with a candor most songwriters never reach.

• Album Review: Dem Goats by Juicy J & Project Pat | Shatter the Standards
After thirty years of trading verses on each other’s tapes, Juicy J and Project Pat finally make a full album together, a blunt-drum instruction manual for surviving the feds’ camera age.

• Album Review: Eusexua by FKA twigs | Shatter the Standards
Sex-beats and playful melodies: The British model and pop enigma FKA twigs experiments with club sounds on ‘Eusexua’—her new album—to heal her soul from abuse.