I was about 17 when I first heard Sade. The xx (real heads know them as The 20), extremely poppin’ at the time, had a habit of name-dropping her in every interview they did, and after three or four instances thereof I was finally moved to give Promise a spin. It was a soothing presence in a turbulent time, an outside source of calm when all internal reserves had been biologically de-commissioned.

The most surprising thing about Back To The Basics is that it's not a comeback, per se - Rich Homie Quan feels no need to re-shape his style to fit a new rap landscape. In fact, on first listen the tape sounds a tiny bit dated - there's no one that sounds quite like Quan, and his shine a couple years back was so all-encompassing that all subsequent work can't help but be of a part with it. Ubiquity can camouflage uniqueness.

Laetitia Sadier refuses to be pigeonholed. While most famous as the voice of Stereolab (and thus, the 1990's in general), she's spent twenty-odd years exploring the full spectrum of collaborative (with Deerhunter's Bradford Cox, Common, and Tyler, The Creator) and individual (albums from 2010's The Trip onwards) creative dynamics, leaving behind a broad body of work united by a single constant: her unmistakable voice.

I haven’t listened to an indie pop album in years. There are a couple of reasons for this, mostly obvious - I haven’t been in an Urban Outfitters in a minute, the genre kinda sucks, I lack the requisite sunny disposition to really own the fandom. And yet, the temperature moves inexorably towards hot as hell and my tastes shift, feverishly and unpredictably, to match.

I sometimes wonder if Future has come to regret DS2. Released in July of 2015, the album capped off a year of meteoric ascendance for the man born Nayvadius Wilburn, a monument to the rare feat of capturing commercial and critical success in equal measure. Mixtape by mixtape, Future had erased the public’s memory of Honest, a worthwhile but ultimately panned pop-oriented effort, and replaced it with a new image - a star fallen from grace, ruled by the will of an unchecked id.