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Hot Singles (And EPs/Albums) From Your Area

A fresh Supe Of The Day playlist is here! 📻 PLUS: The return of The Calendar.

Ryan Cocca

• 4 min read
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Sponsor Note: This week's email is once again brought to you by our show at Boom Club in Durham TOMORROW NIGHT, 5/15, headlined by none other than Pink Siifu, one of the most conceptual and boundary-pushing acts in the underground today. Special guests on the otherwise all-NC lineup include Ebz The Artist, Brydecisive, Justin Bodega, and GODRIC. If you love hip-hop, if you love music in general, if you live anywhere near Durham... you'll wanna be there. Mark your calendar, and get your tix now.

Evenings aren't ideal for sending emails, nor are Thursdays great for talking about new music (just before a wave of even newer releases arrive the next day). Alas, we find time for these things where we can, and this is the particular moment I've found. I've been in transit a lot the past couple weeks, and we don't have any new original stories this week/weekend, but I thought it would be worth sending an email anyway, for a few reasons—starting with a flurry of fresh new music that's well worth your time.

It's been a characteristically fertile spring of releases already in NC, spanning projects we were able to cover at some length in the newsletter and others we haven't yet: Sonny Miles' G2, Marc Spano's Arrival Time, two mixtapes from Ahmir (2017 and 4THELOVEOFTHEGAME), Maasho's a well spent evening, JUNE!'s tasteful grit EP, and more. In light of this, the ol' Supe Of The Day playlist has been dusted off, filled with some of my favorite releases from the past couple months, and given a simple new visual treatment for good measure.

Tap the image above to check out the Apple playlist now, featuring not only the new single "GIMMIE UP" by Charlotte trio Biking With Francis (pictured), but also:

  • "Last Place," by Marc Spano — a tailor-made-for-SE track, on which one of the most prolific and soulful boom-bap producers from NC right now (Spano) combines with a Carolina legend in Supastition. Groovy and cerebral, with feature verses that knock it out of the park, it's par for the course on Arrival Time.
  • "RED STRIPE," by PFG — your mind may go to the old "Red Stripe: Jamaican for beer!" commercials, but the tone here couldn't be different, built on the foundation of a truly menacing Conductor Gordon instrumental. The first artist signed to Nervous Reck's The Sheltuh, a lot of weight is being put behind Fayetteville's PFG, and a collab with Gordon is just the latest example.
  • "Tasteful Grit," by JUNE! — one could almost overlook the steely storytelling on this track by dint of the gentle, understated beauty of the vessel it comes in (akin to "closure" by Khalil Nasim, also on the playlist). "Tasteful Grit" is true to its name, and another reason to get into JUNE! if you haven't already.

Also... The Calendar is back!

Another update: against my better judgement, I've restored the SE calendar that I first experimented with last year. While I eventually let it go after a couple months of feeling like its usage wasn't justifying the time it took to keep current, conversations in recent months continue to circle back around the need for some central online bulletin board of happenings beyond just the haystack of the IG algorithm. So here it is—may its second incarnation be more fruitful than its first.

Plenty of good stuff already on there, from Pink Siifu show in Durham tomorrow night, to Bimbé (and Doug E. Fresh and Cyanca) in Durham and Domani/Reuben Vincent in Charlotte the next night, but it'll take a village to make this thing the best it can be. Please email me/DM me suggestions in the weeks to come, and you'll see it on there shortly thereafter.

🔗 ODDS & ENDS

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