“Things,” a bright and bouncy dance track, adds a new color to Oddisee’s production palette — but the song’s energy belies its lyrical content. It’s a confessional that finds the Maryland-born, Brooklyn-based rapper-producer wrestling with his status, summed up by a nod to The Notorious B.I.G.‘s “mo’ money, mo’ problems” mantra. Much of Oddisee’s career has been marked by that dilemma, and here, he likens it to a horror-film cliché: He’s unable to resist the urge to run towards the screams.

Still, Oddisee’s words have an equivocal quality to them. The third verse opens with a declaration that “we just want to matter more,” and in that moment, it becomes unclear whether “we” means underground rappers — or something else altogether. In fact, that entire section can be read as a demand for equity on multiple fronts. Perceived invisibility is, after all, a sentiment shared by any who are outcast. As the U.S.’s legislative tides turn — Oddisee explicitly engaged the possibility on March’s Alwasta EP — The Iceberg figures to stand as some of his most politically charged work. In those terms, the alternate reading of “Things” feels especially penetrating.

The Iceberg comes out Feb. 24 via Mello Music Group.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

That’s the premise of their collective, Dope Music Village — a play on the letters that represent their stomping grounds, the DMV. It’s meant to support all forms of art and bring together artists and fans alike.

“It’s like, ‘Let’s build [a platform] that not only we can stand on … but other people we like and respect can stand on with us,” says Brain Rapp, who says he came up with the name at work.

That communal effort plays strongly into the trio’s first collaborative release, You’re Welcome, a project that welcomes others into their village. They join their distinct flows — Brain Rapp rides on steady, cultivated energy; Ezko hits on strong, free-flowing lyrics and Nature Boi matches his own melodic, adaptive production — in a way where not one of them outshines the other. The eight-track release shows a wide and fluid range of moods: from restless, frustrated energy in “Venting” to appreciative affection in “Ms. Amerykah Badu.”

The collective first came together in 2015, when someone said “Dope Music Village” on a track for the first time on Ezko’s Sleep EP.

Brain Rapp and Nature Boi have known each other since they were teenagers. The 20-somethings solidified a working relationship while Nature Boi produced Brain Rapp’s 2015 release Elevator Music, and they’ve even lived together. Ezko came into the mix after Brain Rapp connected with him on Facebook, noticing the younger rapper on music blogs.

“At the end of the day, these guys are my family,” Brain Rapp says.

One song, “It’s Been Lit Ever Since,” came from a phrase Ezko once uttered. Brain Rapp and Nature Boi took it and ran with it. They had to wake Ezko up to record the song.

It’s hard to categorize the hip-hop trio, Brain Rapp says. He jokes that he looks more like a Starbucks barista than a rapper. Brain Rapp’s father is a well-known entomologist, and he studied environmental science at the University of Maryland. Nature Boi has been making music for at least a decade, but he’s a collaborator at heart, and he only recently started focusing on solo work. Ezko — whom Brain Rapp likens to Joey Bada$$ —just tries things out in a freeform way until it sticks.

Together, they don’t ride only wave of hip-hop. They play with R&B rhythms and trap beats, and their subjects flow from politics to weed-smoking.

“Now that I am [older]… I can’t escape the realness and the gravity of the world,” Brain Rapp says. “For four minutes, I would like to not live in that reality.”

The three artists are working on their own projects at the moment, but Brain Rapp hopes to keep shaping Dope Music Village — into a broader collective, perhaps, or even a record label.

But no matter what, he says the focus will remain on spotlighting their music as well as their community’s. That’s what it means to be in a village.

“There’s nobody in my mind that’s up and down 295 the same way that we are,” Brain Rapp says.

It’s hardly the first time Trel has allowed his flow to get fully melodic over a piano loop — the long-ago “Benning Road” remains a touchstone. The two-minute “Broccoli” takeout follows his SDMG 2 mixtape from the summer, and he’s been ramping up to an album on major-label Maybach Music Group, allegedly titled Global Gleetchi.

Warning: explicit lyrics

Candy’s Spike Nolan character — a minor-league baseball catcher caught up in the financial caper of Pryor’s title character — starts sporting a gold catcher’s mask on a chain at one point. J-Scienide (A.J. Davis) always liked Nolan, who is known for trash-talking a fictional New York Yankee, among other things.

Then the emcee realized something.

“Like, you know, hip-hop — everybody into gold chains and gaudy-ass jewelry and s**t. He had this gold catcher’s mask, and it just stuck,” he says. The result? “Spike Nolan,” a cavernous boom-bap track that will be featured on The Actual Heat, an EP that the MC expects to release in November. The follow-through from thought to song was instinctive, he says.

“I had a beat playing, I was messing around with some prog — like a Yes record. And I was like, ‘You know what? I got something for it.’ And we recorded it just like that,” he says.

Just don’t ask him to identify which Yes record — the exact provenance of the sample escapes him. The Spike Nolan reference still excites him, though.

“Even if you just look at the cover art [of “Spike Nolan”], and you look at that mask, it’s just like, biiiing! It’s shining, it’s just glossy. And it’s just real flashy,” he says. “And that’s how I approached the track when I was rhyming: ‘I’m just gonna talk real flashy.'”

Apollo Creed, Five Percenters and Telly Savalas are among the myriad cultural references that spill out in J-Scienide’s rush of gritty wordplay. He says the other songs on the EP will match the general vibe of “Spike Nolan.”

“Fall and the winter are my favorite times of the year. I was born in the summer, but I always liked the fall and the winter,” he says. “I want it to be an album, like, when you out on the train, on a bus, or on 95 North going to New York and it’s cold, I want you to play it. … There’s a lot of static, you can hear the pops in the records… I just really want you to feel the gristle of it. There’s nothing pretty about the album.”

“Spike Nolan” was mixed by DMV producer/rapper Kev Brown, who J-Scienide calls “big brother.” The EP will include Brown, as well as other artists with connections to the D.C. area, like Ken Starr, Grap Luva and yU, and a few that don’t, including North Carolina’s Supastition and Detroit’s Nolan the Ninja.

J-Scienide expects the record to have profile far beyond home. The single has gotten attention in the U.K. and Japan, he says. And the EP will be the first release by Official Crate Music, the label offshoot of a Baltimore record dealer. (Brown and J-Scienide are also planning a joint album for the fall; it’ll be released on Fat Beats, a label known for supporting classic boom-bap sounds.)

J-Scienide says his own songs hardly paint a full picture of his musical tastes, though. He and a friend, Ashton Wingate, co-host a show called Neverland on the new low-power, community-oriented Takoma Radio station. The description: “A mixed-element show combining audio dialogue from classic and cult films with new wave, post punk, shoegaze and soft grunge music.” It airs every other Thursday at 11 p.m. (The next one is Sept. 15.)

“Nobody at the station even knows I do hip-hop,” J-Scienide says. “They just think we’re like two black guys listening to punk. Like, they don’t even know!”

But the emcee’s discography got a boost this week with the release of the song “Fall In Love,” which announces its presence with a funky flute lick, segues into a sassy R&B vibe and features a tasteful bass breakdown at the end. Also in the mix: the DMV’s Ciscero. (Jazz/hip-hop group Badbadnotgood and producer Kaytranada reportedly handled the beat.) The track, which got a “Hottest Record In the World” designation Thursday from BBC1’s Annie Mac, also has at least one fan among from D.C.’s hip-hop luminaries:

Yo this @GoldLink Fall in Love is fuego ?. Good work champion ✊?hottest record on @AnnieMac #bbc1 #madeindc #aCreativeDC #hechoendc

— kokayi (@kokayi) August 26, 2016

Oscars — a species of fish native to South America — can be aggressive, says the songwriter and guitarist in D.C. rock band Thaylobleu. Sea creatures wade into an oscar’s territory at their own risk. “It’s pretty straight-ahead,” says Nicholson, 47. “If an oscar’s hungry, it’s gonna bite you.”

Jellyfish, by contrast, are deceptive. “At first blush, [a jellyfish] is kinda soft and squishy,” Nicholson says. “But [if] you rub up against it, it’ll sting you.”

“Oscars & Jellyfish,” the debut album from D.C. rockers Thaylobleu

Nicholson says rippers like Thaylobleu’s “Locked” fall under the “oscar” category. Seemingly gentler songs, like “Amnesiah,” float along like jellyfish, sneakily dangerous. The tracks represent two poles on Thaylobleu’s debut album — called, naturally, Oscars & Jellyfish — out this week.

The record represents a turn in Nicholson’s musical career, which blossomed in the ’90s with D.C. hip-hop group Opus Akoben. The trio did well — it fetched a major-label deal in France and got love in Europe — but Opus split up, dropping its last record in 2002. Nicholson began to reevaluate himself creatively after that. He’d always loved rock music, songwriting and arranging. But he didn’t pursue them seriously until he made a key discovery: some of his hip-hop buddies were listening to rock, too.

“Back in 2010, we all found out that, ‘Hey, I didn’t know you was listening to this, I didn’t know you was into that,'” says Nicholson. He got together with hip-hop heads William “Bill” Vaughn and The Poem-Cees’ Darrell Perry and formed a rock band, rounded out by drummer Joe Hall. (Fifth member DJ Ayce International joined later on.) He called the group Thaylobleu, after Phthalocyanine Blue BN, a deep and calming shade of blue he fell in love with while attending the Corcoran School of Art.

Thaylobleu focuses on songwriting with an emphasis on lyricism — true to Nicholson’s hip-hop background. Storytelling plays a leading role, too. “Locked” tells the true tale of a nasty encounter Nicholson had with police in 2010. Another album highlight, “Too Much” describes Nicholson’s past dalliances with rowdy women. (One lyric: “When she told me that she liked it rough/Didn’t know she meant fisticuffs.”)

“I wouldn’t appreciate where I am now if it hadn’t had been for [the bad matches],” says Nicholson, who’s married these days. “So [‘Too Much’] is about acceptance, about love, and it’s also about the girl who stabbed me in the face with a spoon.” (A true story, he says. After that incident he resolved to never take a date to Ben & Jerry’s.)

The coda on Oscars & Jellyfish, “Welcome to Anacostia” references the gradually gentrifying D.C. neighborhood in which Nicholson grew up and where he still lives and works. “I call Anacostia a village, and I’m watching it get sacked,” he says. The track delivers a message to new arrivals: “Just [be] mindful that if you live next door to a person who’s lived there 30 years and they’ve been sitting on their porch and laughing with their friends for the last 30 years,” he says, “don’t f***ing call the police on them.”

Nicholson, who spends his days working at the Anacostia Arts Center and teaching martial arts, says he doesn’t like to squander his time behind the mic. He considers it a blessing. That’s what hard-driving cut “Rose in the Briars” — definitely an oscar, not a jellyfish — is about.

Some of his neighbors in Anacostia “don’t have the privilege to be able to be on the microphone and speak their truth,” Nicholson says. “So when I say [on “Rose in the Briars”] ‘I’m the village crier, I’ll make your ears ring’… it’s about how I’m in a position where I can say something and I don’t take it lightly. There was a time that I did — when I was gigging and traveling and hip-hopping and groupies and all that stuff. And I said to myself, ‘If I ever get back to this thing again,’ after Opus broke up, ‘I’m gonna try to use it.'”

Thaylobleu plays an album release show June 16 at Velvet Lounge.

Ras Nebyu is consistent on a few things — namely spiritual enlightenment, staying woke and puffing on the finest sinsemilla. But in his new music video, the uptown D.C. rapper tries on new hats.

The visual for “No Love” shows Nebyu revisiting past relationships. But he does it from a few perspectives: that of a cool character named Malcolm, jersey-sporting Drew and the “real” Ras Nebyu in his standard Washington Slizzards gear.

At video’s end, two Nebyus unite: Defying strict instruction not to throw a party at his (parents’?) house, Nebyu hosts a rager, with Drew turning up to mend his slashed heart.

Produced by Casita Del Fresco, the silky “No Love” was a Bandwidth favorite in 2015. The video (premiered today by Revolt) precedes new music from the hip-hop artist, who debuted in 2011 with Kennedy Street Teachings and made a splash two years later with the single “Futuristic Black Man.”

Nebyu’s next single is expected out June 20. Miss Bandwidth’s December feature on the rapper? Catch up here.

The first two editions, released in 2013 and 2014, featured an abundance of artists who are circumventing traditional R&B and hip-hop today, in contrasting ways. There’s “alt-R&B” darling Kelela; unconventional string duo CHARGAUX; standout Soulection producer Sango; Lemonade collaborator and Brooklyn creative Melo-X; the ever-intriguing wanderer Willow Smith; fiery UK MC Little Simz; and literally dozens more. Vol. III — mixed and mastered by Leon Kelly and executive produced by New York doer-of-all-things, Diane “SHABAZZ” Varnie — invites the latest wave of box shatterers to percolate under one roof.

Born Cachee Livingston, Cash has made it her mission to thoughtfully create a safe space for these artists, where they’re encouraged to play around with new flows, sounds and directions. MADEINTYO — SoundCloud’s hip-hop boy wonder and Mr. Skr Skr himself — exclaims somewhat in awe at the very end of his track on Vol. III: “That s*** was amazing!” Produced by Odd Future‘s Left Brain, the dense, sample-heavy atmosphere of “LAMN” is miles away from what the rapper is accustomed to rhyming over; out in the real world, he sticks pretty closely to his tried and true producer, K Swisha. There was (and is) nothing wrong with his formula — but this venture to another place was necessary for his growth, and Cash helped make it happen.

Artists also have the opportunity to work through themselves on Love The Free Vol. III. The tape is brimming with kids who are new to the music game, and thus still endearingly rough around the edges (shouts to 18-year-old Marco McKinnis, keep grinding). There are also polished acts who’ve been on the scene for a minute in one way or another, and might still be trying to find their own way (one time for Jillian Hervey of Lion Babe, daughter of the Vanessa Williams).

And then there are moments of reintroduction, like with Xavier Omär, formerly known as SPZRKT (who we’ve shown love to before). Omär “broke up” with Christian hip-hop last year after brief flashes of success alongside Sango, and has been primed to move into a less restricted section of the industry since then. You can almost hear him evolve in real time on the second half of “Scarlett Vibe,” produced in its entirety by New York-via-London musician Hiko Momoji.

On the flip side, there are instances here of beautiful confidence. Many of the artists featured are self-assured and don’t need to experiment much, but they do embrace a new place to revel in their own abilities and take it to the next level (looking at you in particular, BOSCO and Lil Yachty). Cash is bubbly, yet poised, through every evolution, but when the Internet’s favorite human, DJ Khaled, and the most carefree black girl of them all, Solange, have special guest appearances, they’re gently nudging the DJ (who’s standing in for all of us) forward in her abilities: they relay messages of hope in the forms of both love and self-preservation.

Love The Free Vol. III is a patient journey toward personal excellence. As she’s been since Vol. I, Kitty Cash is at the front of her pack, leading the way with a steady hand and a discerning ear fixed to the streets. It will be interesting to see where the artists of this installment end up a year or so from now — but it’s even more exciting to think about what Cash herself will do next.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

For more than a decade, Oddisee has been out here grinding. Raised in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and now based in Brooklyn, he’s a beatmaker by nature and a rapper when he feels the need to be. The base of his style has been the same since day one: a light touch of jazz spread over a soul-injected, golden-era hip-hop inflected foundation. At this point, producing looks to come easy to him. Exhibits A through C: An EP, Alwasta, that dropped in March; a full-length solo effort to come this fall; and this instrumental album, The Odd Tape, out next week.

The Odd Tape is anything but. Evenly weighted from front to back, there’s never an off moment, or even a precarious one. The entire project is balanced and comfortable — and he acts like it’s a lazy day in the life of somebody who deserves one. The titles of the songs read like a weekend to-do list: Wake up, create, chill for a minute, turn up, hit the sack, ruminate.

The opening track, “Alarmed,” sounds the way most of us feel when we wake up in the morning — relieved to be alive, to see another day. Then in the final minute a dense boom bap break rolls over and yells, “OK, it’s time to get up, get out and get something.” On our hero’s schedule is eye-opener “No Sugar No Cream” (which ends with a gorgeous beat switch) and then “Live From The Drawing Board,” which manages to sound like both an explosion of ideas and a straight jam that would get played at any family reunion.

The most stunning moment happens toward the end, when two tracks of vastly different energies meet face to face. “Silver Linings” is a kick back at eventide, a simple and necessary period of reflection. Immediately after, Oddisee delivers a figurative kick to the chest with “Out At Night,” which sounds just as exciting as its title suggests — all electrifying vibrations and squealing strings and outright hype. By transitioning from perhaps the most low energy track on the album to the most high, Oddisee is showing and proving just how good he is.

He takes his time with the final track, the 6 minute and 45 second-long “Still Sleeping.” He alternates between letting the track breathe and piling all of his pieces of sound on top of one another. As he is wont to do, and does throughout The Odd Tape, he changes it up for the last couple minutes. He transforms the song from a sleepy march into a victory lap, and it sounds like completion. It sounds like we made it through, and we’ll live to fight another day.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Anderson .Paak

BJ the Chicago Kid

Nag Champa

Rare Essence

Rock Creek Social Club

The Internet

Future

Stay woke

All photos by Michael Andrade