Joell Ortiz "Signature" (Album Stream)

On "Signature," Joell Ortiz's raw lyrical prowess converges with L’Orange's creative brilliance, resulting in an album that is truly a musically collaborative masterpiece. Together, they infuse each track with a renewed artistic vision, meticulously reconstructed and reimagined. The result is a mesmerizing tapestry of sound that invites you to experience Joell Ortiz in a wholly novel and captivating way. Drawing inspiration from Ortiz's influential legacy, L'Orange crafts beats that exude an undeniable vintage charm, while also pushing the boundaries of sonic exploration. The attention to detail infuses the music with an intoxicating intensity, creating a striking fusion of classic hip-hop vibes and haunting undertones a sonic landscape that pays homage to Ortiz's unparalleled talent while showcasing a new dimension of artistic expression. Listen to Joell Ortiz's Signature below...

L'Orange "The World Is Still Chaos, But I Feel Better" (Album Stream)

Released on Mello Music Group, The World Is Still Chaos, But I Feel Better is a testament to the power of self knowledge and incremental progress, of the way tiny steps can give structure to life and help navigate the unknown. For more than a decade now, L’Orange has dazzled listeners with his alchemic blends of old and new, found sounds and the deeply personal. Given how seamlessly he synthesizes his source materials, the end product can sound as if it came straight from the ether, fully formed. But on The World Is Still Chaos, he aims to demystify that work, if only for himself. “I wanted to confront my own creative process and day-to-day wellbeing managing mental illness in a healthy way for the first time,” L’Orange says. “I'm trying to consider how to draw from my life experiences when my life experiences aren't rooted in depression. It’s about continuing to struggle with balance while transitioning to being inspired by an external world.” The World Is Still Chaos is held together, above all, by a sense of playfulness. Over the course of his career, L’Orange has used his remarkable abilities to create a sort of delirium in his work, a haze that envelops the listener and seals him or her off in a universe of the producer’s construction. With The World Is Still Chaos, But I Feel Better, he inverts this, imposing order on the world bit by bit. It’s about “feeling OK,” L’Orange says––“not perfect.” Striving for marginal, day-over-day victories––over the external world, over your past, over yourself––is the kind of actionable, measurable, deeply personal approach that can make a seemingly impossible era feel all the more approachable. It doesn’t hurt that L’Orange delivers the argument in such an irresistibly head-nodding package. - via Mello Music.

Marlowe "Marlowe II" (Album Stream)

L'Orange & Solemn Brigham are Marlowe. Marlowe is a collaborative alt-rap project from North Carolina-based hip-hop producer L'Orange and rapper Solemn Brigham. Their unique blend of quick-fire vocals and dusty breakbeats is most well-known on tracks such as "Lost Arts" and "Tales From The East." The project came together in 2018 with the intent of marrying Brigham's lyrics concerning social commentary, police brutality, and poverty with L'Orange's thudding beats and crackling vinyl samples to achieve a new, refreshing take on hip-hop in modern times. Marlowe 2 seeks to continue that legacy. Dig into Marlowe's latest LP released via Mello Music Group below...

L'Orange & Jeremiah Jae "Complicate Your Life With Violence"

Complicate Your Life with Violence answers eternal questions with an assassin’s bluntness: when do you fight and when do you flee, what does sanity look like in a sick world, how does one retain valor among the corrupt, and why does the union of one producer and one MC always yield the best music? The complex anti-heroes at the center of this blood hailstorm are Jeremiah Jae and L’Orange -- the Chicago fracture rap demigod and the sampledelic North Carolina cubist. Sequels are usually fated to be repetitive: a ceaseless treadmill of repeated jokes and concepts. So for their sophomore effort on Mello Music Group, Jae and L’Orange went full True Detective, transporting their existential outlaws into an entirely novel universe. Their debut, The Night Took Us In Like Family was a seedy shadowland that subverted the tropes of film noir. It was hailed by Pitchfork as a “seamless pairing,” while Okayplayer raved about its ability to conjure dark and treacherous vibes. The pair are backed by brilliant turns from the most enigmatic geniuses of the modern underground: Chester Watson, Billy Woods, Zeroh and Lojii. The end result is something that fits few analogies: a record that exists in the warped dust of history but feels innately relevant to the schizophrenia of modern existence. It’s Jeremiah Jae and L’Orange on a great escape, finding no concrete answers but asking all the right questions -- a masterpiece that can be interpreted in a dozen different ways, glimpsed through a gun smoke haze, hard boiled but blood simple. Check it out below...

Marlowe "Marlowe" (Album Stream)

L'Orange & Solemn Brigham's Marlowe is a triumph of ambition, a rap bricolage blending prohibition and civil rights-era samples with Asian psychedelic rock flourishes. Solemn Brigham controls the microphone like a general who can’t help but be right. His flow is a blitzkrieg. It’s an Olympian sprint, gliding over snares and kick-drums like hurdles. He’s a showman seeking revolution—resolute in his desire to strike equilibrium between awareness and entertainment. Solemn applies the fictional protagonist’s search for the truth towards different ends. His crimes are existential yet specific, rooted in the injustices of the past and the attempt to redress them in the present. He’s an artist perennially seeking something to fight for, channeling energy from the music of the civic rights era, stealing timeless rhythms and inflection from classic funk and soul. Over the course of 17 tracks, Solemn hurls sharp darts at counterfeits trying to crack his religion, the onslaught of time, and prevaricating rappers—all while paying homage to those who paved the road for him. He bounces off the beats like a trampoline placed in a speakeasy, doubling up on the vocals, burrowing into dense cryptic tangles of slang and then stretching them out with melodic ease. With dazzling cinematic mise en scene, L’Orange crafts a world that sounds like an old-time medicine show dropped into 90s Brooklyn, with Solemn summoning the holy spirit of Big L. Cymbals crash, drums pound, fuzzy guitars ride out, a bronze rain of horns cascade. This is gorgeous celestial dust, high-powered fuel with every syllable meticulously ordained. Dig into Marlowe via Mello Music Group...

L'Orange "The Ordinary Man" (Album Stream)

“All art is magic,” Raymond Chandler once wrote. But not all magic is art. Sometimes, it’s a matter of trite card tricks, petty illusions, and fast twitch graft. But when the legerdemain of the unreal combines with the tangible and heartfelt, it can lift a veil that allows you to see the esoteric beauty and profound mystery of life. On his third album, L’Orange builds upon his previous catalogue’s cinematic film noir and cabaret jazz fixations, but adds a thematic focus, whimsy, and feverish urgency. It arrives after a tumultuous two-year saga in which a series of tumors grew in L’Orange’s right ear, which eventually led to almost total deafness on that side. Surgeries left him off-balance and dizzy. A natural fear gripped him, causing self-doubt about whether he’d regain the totality of his gift. But as it does quite often, turmoil spurred the producer to create his most poignant body of work. The Ordinary Man chronicles the narrative of a magician who discovered late in life that his peers weren’t actually pulling rabbits from hats. Crestfallen and disillusioned, he digs deeper to push his own show into uncharted territory, demonstrating ostensibly impossible feats for crowds too terrified to ask for the reveal. As the audience gradually realizes that his practice of the dark arts isn’t fraudulent, people from all around the world flock to him. Unfortunately, this loyalty to what he was rather than what he did becomes patronizing and dull—engendering a bitterness and disenchantment that leads him to finally disappear in front of millions of stunned onlookers. If Harry Houdini was a hip-hop head this is what he’d bump. - Mello. Enjoy the LP below...

Beneficence "Basement Chemistry" (Album Stream)

Brick City veteran and Ill Adrenaline Records co-founder Beneficence unleashes his 6th solo LP "Basement Chemistry". Armed with the true sounds of the golden era Benef drops rejuvenated flows and shares mics with hip-hop's elite lyricists. The lineup includes Inspectah Deck (of Wu-Tang Clan), Masta Ace, MC Eiht, El Da Sensei, AG (of D.I.T.C), Dres (of Black Sheep), The Legion, Chubb Rock, MindsOne, and Estee Nack (of Tragic Allies). Production handled by DJ Spinna, Da Beatminerz, 12 Finger Dan, Confidence, L'Orange, Presto, KON Sci, Jazz Spastiks, and many more. Obscure samples, intricate cuts, and official boom bap sound! Stream Beneficence's latest LP below!

L'Orange & Kool Keith "Time? Astonishing!" (Album Stream)

If there’s a secret to time travel, Kool Keith owns the patent. Even a flying DeLorean seems too conventional for the Bronx legend. He’d more logically orbit throughout the galaxy in a gleaming chrome spaceship, teaching the stars and aliens new forms of originality. He is too weird to live, too rare to die, too uniquely ultra-magnetic to be accurately mimicked. Time? Astonishing! is the latest dimensional warp from hip-hop’s premiere astral traveler. His union with MMG producer L’ Orange finds him exploring uncharted terrain: choppy volcanic rock planets, ice glacier moons, new surgical procedures, and fresh rappers to toss into the ether. The scalpel remains eternally sharp. The themes aren’t dissimilar from his past opuses as Dr. Octagon and Black Elvis. But L’ Orange’s production appropriately coaxes the most appealingly baffling gonzo vision from Keith since his days collaborating with Dan The Automator. Welcome to the new world, even more sinister and suspenseful than the last one. We live in astonishing times: abstract, absurd, and indelibly Kool. The album is about a man in the early 20th century who is a bored explorer and finds technology to go into the future - but he does so without any sense of adventure. He travels through time as if he is traveling to Tuscaloosa. He is then hospitalized as insane and then goes into suspended animation (a metaphor for his subconscious while sedated in the hospital). The adventure begins only after the album is finished, the record is all the thoughts and introspection before things really begin. - MMG

Jeremiah Jae & L'Orange "The Night Took Us In Like Family"

"Enter those bloody alleys blocked off with yellow tape and chalk outlines. Secret backrooms riddled with sly crooks and blunt smoke. Slink into the underworld, the seedy shadowland owned by Jeremiah Jae and L’Orange on their noir-inspired opus, "The Night Took Us In Like Family." L’Orange’s carefully severed cinematic clips hold the frame steady. The Windy City-raised Jae muscles the narrative forward—the hitman creeping. Beats bend sinister with imagery aiming for the temples. Jae invokes dark clouds, crowns of thorns and LSD eyes. Bars written in dirt. Samples are disembodied and ethereal. It’s like a grand jury indictment doubling as a Greek chorus. A song title like “Ice Obsidian” says it all. This is frozen lava, black and white celluloid, the spoils won by sinners. Watch your back rap. Guest stars include New York poison dart-thrower, Homeboy Sandman and Blackalicious’ Gift of Gab. The chapters flesh out the story: The Conspicuous Man skulks into “God Complex,” “The Damning,” “Revenge and Escape.” Jae and L’ Orange build their world as a catacomb and find a way to escape just as the walls feel like they’re closing in. It fades out as “A Macabre Instrumental” plays. The funeral is closed casket. The memories aren’t easily disposed." Dig in below...

L'Orange "The Orchid Days" (Album Stream)

"A man fell in love. Then the world was destroyed by an ever-growing nothing in the sky." - L'Orange. Through previous outputs, we’ve come to know L’Orange as a painter who only paints in dark shades, mixing in samples from a bygone era. The Orchid Days echoes with the harbingers of inevitable change. Love is not only a theme in this record, it might just be the pattern. The Orchid Days seems to be L’Orange’s most revealing effort yet. “Eventually” will hypnotize you with feelings unrequited, “A Spring Like You,” will hold you with a longing for things as they were in another life long-forgotten. “The Orchard” will numb you with its falling beauty, and you’ll know that she’s worked you over, and you won’t even care anymore. And all this is just the first of many courses that The Orchid Days puts forth. With each successive listen, notes of terror, wonder, paradise, oblivion sing in the shadows." Let me say "Need You" with Blu is one of the best tracks of the year!