Super Empty's Best Of 2024, Pt. 2 (EPs)
Six short-form offerings (hip-hop/R&B and adjacent) that packed a memorable, outsize punch.

Editor's Note: This is one part of a three-part series on the best NC hip-hop/R&B of 2024. The others are Best Albums and Best Songs.
Annual "Best Of" lists seem like a fitting occasion to reflect on the concept of time, but even more so when they arrive more than a month late (like this one has). But what is "late," anyway? At this blog, at this moment, we prefer to dodge the concept entirely. Yes, all of this music did arrive in a particular year (2024), and you are reading about it at a particular time (right now) — beyond that, what else matters?
Thankfully for the time-averse, or time-rejecting, the enriching contents of the North Carolina EPs covered here (six at length, plus five more that were deserving of mention) defy expiration date. Peruse them now, next month, or next year — they'll still be waiting for you, still with meaning and emotional depth to offer, no matter how much cultural mores, world affairs, or the price of Netflix has changed in between. From youthful frivolity to romantic torment, these are artistic capsules constructed to stand the test of time.
Jump to: Mez | Biking With Francis | Phonte | Lxnny | Moses Sumney | LesTheGenius
Loading - Mez
There was never much doubt about whether, after years mostly spent behind the camera or in the liner notes for other artists' songs and videos, the next major release from Raleigh-raised rapper/director/designer Mez would be any good. A better question might have been whether it would come out at all. Of course, the specific nature of his extracurricular activities — music videos for J. Cole, guest verses for compilations and movie soundtracks and R&B up-and-comers alike — never seriously pointed at a permanent abandonment of music or album-making, but such are the things one begins to wonder about an artist whose last album (in this case, 2014's Long Live The King), predated the existence of Apple Music.
While the title Loading could be imagined as a knowing wink at the layoff, its core meaning almost certainly draws from the autodidact nature of its sci-fi and tech-obsessed creator, a bit of self-mythologizing about a sponge-like, polymathic creative who in his mid-thirties is still coming into being. On those grounds, the long-awaited EP doesn't disappoint, its seven tracks testifying to not just the breadth of Mez's abilities but the meticulous depths of his craftsmanship. Continuing a trend from earlier releases, the songs on Loading play every bit like the work of the former Engineering major who made them — every warped or splintered vocal effect feels intentional, and scarcely does a single syllable seem to land out of place. And despite the potentially obscuring effect of its wide-reaching scope, Loading isn't without a signature sound. As capable as Mez sounds on the sultry "Hotspot" or riding the infectious nostalgia of "Around The World," it's the haunted, discordant moments — like "Call On," "Devil Is A Judge," and project standout "Bat Phone" — that show the clever, chameleonic songwriter at his world-creating best.
Second Opinion:
Years ago I asked Mez if someone was to ask him what his sound was, how he would describe it, and he said it would be like a "spaceship on a farm." Although Mez is my brother who’ve I’ve known for a minute now, I’m still as much as a fan as anyone else and was super excited when he dropped Loading. What I appreciate is he gives his perspective on relationships, the state of the culture, spirituality, love and self-image in a way that's captivating and easily digested, but with artistic depth and meaning that you can appreciate from listening multiple times. One of the perks you get from being able to produce and write so well is that you’re able to execute your visions thoroughly. Mez has done that once again. - Bobby James; rapper, Raleigh, NC
SEE ALSO: Our Song of the Week feature on "Call On," Mez's first single of last year, and our Q&A with Mez and Dash Lewis.
Sunroof - Biking With Francis
If ever two things have been true about art, it's that the line between creative inspiration and outright reproduction can be razor thin, and that the side a piece of art falls on is less often incontrovertible fact than matter of intangible opinion. To that end, one could understand if some listeners heard the trilogy-concluding EP from Charlotte alt-rap upstarts Biking With Francis, Sunroof, and found it to be on the wrong end of that binary. This is, to put it mildly, music with an obvious and overt debt to Tyler, The Creator and the larger Odd Future diaspora that emerged alongside him (The Internet and Steve Lacy in particular) — from schizophrenia-inducing vocal manipulations like the helium-high choruses and pitched-down rejoinders on "Cowgirl," to the almost count-for-count, Tyler-on-Flower-Boy cadence and delivery of Joshua Raw on "Wah Wah": "Switch to sixth gear, boy we poppin' the clutch/ More arsonist than artist how we lightin' you up, you more like taxidermy mannequins you don't got the guts." But all of this, were it the only takeaway from Sunroof, would be selling the project and its purveyors far short.
For one, in borrowing from a generational talent like Tyler specifically, the trio can hardly be blamed. To judge someone harshly on those grounds in 2024 seems not altogether different from bemoaning an album in 1976 for being "overly influenced by Stevie Wonder" — some contributions are so enormous, its hardly surprising when others are pulled into their orbit. More important is that BWF's vision, transparently derived or not, is executed well, and genuinely fun to listen to, pin-balling between the exuberance, longing and ennui that marks the stage of life when possibilities seem endless and planning for the future can always wait 'til tomorrow. In other words, this is music that's in no rush to grow up. That, too, is what makes Sunroof feel comfortingly familiar — not just to fans of Tyler, The Creator, but to anyone.
Second Opinion:
Biking With Francis has abandoned their training wheels as they gear up for their debut album. It was refreshing to see them in their sampling bag on this project, and I'm thrilled to hear what the world's best dads have in store for us moving forward. - Carson Breyer; founder/curator at Punch Buggy music blog
Pacific Time 2 - Phonte
If, before pressing play on "Run For Your Life," the opening track of his five-years-later sequel to the 2019 Pacific Time EP, your conception of Phonte Coleman was based largely on his emceeing role in the legendary underground rap group Little Brother and not much else, you might think the song was a lark. A neon blur of thrumming synths, driving drums and distant, distorted vocal lamentations that call to mind 808s & Heartbreak played at 1.5x speed (with better singing), the retro-futuristic dance track sounds as much like life on a moon colony as it does like the Durham environs where The Listening was born. But unlike the innumerable rappers of the past two decades who've blithely adopted, for a brief moment or two, a soulful electronic/dance posture for cheap career defibrillation, Coleman has been putting in the work for decades.
Building on the foundation that started with The Foreign Exchange in 2004, then blossomed even further on later FE albums and on tracks like KAYTRANADA's "One Too Many" (and 2023's "Tonight We Ride"), Pacific Time 2 comprises another well-rounded set of alluring love songs that, while centered around Phonte the neo-soul singer, can't help but also include a hint or two of the wry, observant lyricism (read: rap shit) from which he first made a name. For all its melodic underpinnings, the EP's closing words — poetic yet plainspoken, amusingly circumspect but with an emotional weight that hangs in the air for minutes afterward — are vintage, old-school Tay: "Brotherhood is effortless, on our way to Essence Fest 'cause we too old for Rolling Loud/ Please, Lord, show me how/ I'm prayin' for my boy, looking for joy under these mighty clouds." But which style is "old" anyway? For him, the two sides of the coin have always been one and the same.
Jean-Michel, Vol. 1 - Lxnny
In his "Best of 2024" hip-hop recap for Bandcamp, Phillip Mlynar called Ol' Burger Beats' excellent album, 74: Out of Time, "hip-hop as intimate, late-night jazz club music." There's a distinct whiff of the same hazy, languid texture on Lxnny's Jean-Michel, Vol. 1, but more like if you substituted a casual, living room afterparty (shoes off at the door, please) for the velvet upholstery and blue mood lighting of an upscale music venue. Jazz club audiences, for one, tend to not have the appetite for NBA player references that Lxnny's work demands (Chauncey Billups, Kenyon Martin and Emeka Okafor — twice! — are all name-dropped on just the EP's first song), not to mention car- and clothing-based yarns that, for all their charming descriptiveness, are almost certainly not true. But Rick Ross-ian, whole-cloth fabrications these are not. Like Curren$y, Sir Michael Rocks and others who've cruised the yacht rap path before him, Lxn's ambling ruminations are never more than one or two steps removed from humble reality. On "Rajon Rondo" (yes, another NBA reference), he raps: "I ain't had a nine like Rondo, or make it to the league/ I'm only one step away from seeing dreams and losing sleep." It's a momentary admission that the 'Raris and jet-setting of previous songs may not, in fact, be based on literal experience. As satisfyingly luxurious as it all sounds, one hardly cares.
Second Opinion:
Listening to J-M V.1 really makes me think about what it means to be creative and age gracefully with your craft. With Lxnny having become a father recently, and knowing that this music was probably being mastered while he was trying to master new life skills, really makes it hit home. Especially with how polished his flow has become — evidenced by tracks like “Fletcher Park,” when he finds the pocket so well. - Mikey Sharks, cofounder and 1/3 of Raleigh-based DJ collective One Speaker Radio

Sophcore - Moses Sumney
In the years following his move to Asheville in June 2018, singer/songwriter Moses Sumney was relatively quiet. He only managed to appear on the cover of Pitchfork, release a universally heralded double album (græ) and direct a followup concert film (Live From Blackalachia), act in an A24 movie (MaXXXine), and continue his years-long habit of collaborating with some of the biggest names in music. That same industriousness is present across the intoxicating, blink-and-it's-over 21 minutes of last year's Sophcore, Sumney's first major release since 2021, on which the famously genre-averse 32-year-old once again demonstrates a knack for covering a mind-bending amount of ground — repeatedly marrying things that shouldn't go together, but with Sumney at their gravitational center, gracefully do.
There's devotional pleading, verging on desperation ("Ready to ride, ready for ball and chain" and "I'd live on one lung for you") that seems nearly inconceivable from the same person who self-assuredly blusters on the opening song: "I don't be textin' them back, They wanna rerun the track/ They wanna hang on my sack, forget that." There are moments of unadorned vulgarity ("Fuck you on the train/ like I'm running trains") that nest effortlessly, somehow, alongside others of crystalline, Fabergé egg-like delicacy and refinement. How, Sway? Like that of Tyler, the Creator, any introduction to Sumney's work quickly reveals an auteur who has exactingly crafted every dimension of the world you're entering into. In the world of Sophcore, as in our real one, striking a balance between life's divergent, opposing poles is all part of the journey.
Second Opinion:
Sophcore felt right in my body upon first listen but I didn’t really, deeply listen to it until one night, after a trip to Dollywood, I took my time getting ready. Scorching hot bath, candlelight, vintage Victoria’s Secret — relaxed now, and against my galaxy projector, the tracks turn like a kaleidoscope of my full romantic history, fantasy and reality, snapping into focus and then melting into a Venutian blob, prime for poking. Six songs about infinite lovers. I imagine their souls — clay colored, blueberry hued — dancing together across space time, before coming home to rest in one body, singing.
Which is to say it’s incredibly hot, in a way my adolescent self hoped she might one day be. If Sophcore were a person she’d be the older, more experienced friend I’d always dreamed of having as a Catholic school teacher’s pet, trying to piece together what sex was with my mom’s yellowed copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, and making out with my hand against a soundtrack of Usher, Mariah, and The Goo Goo Dolls. The summer to a soundtrack of Sophcore; she gets it. - Connie Rose Coady-Matisse, author of Me & Tolkien on the Hungry River, cofounder of East Fork Pottery
Lap Around The Sun - LesTheGenius
For those with a low tolerance for earnestness, the unflinchingly sunny work of Raleigh rapper (and radio DJ/blogger) LesTheGenius may simply be a bridge too far. For just one example: on one of the videos released in support of his poignant EP from last year, Lap Around The Sun, Les and DJ Ricky Ricardo share chef duties behind the polished granite of a handsomely sized suburban kitchen island, taking on whatever complications emerge along the way (spoiler: they're still friends in the end). This is almost violently wholesome stuff, the sort of indomitable purity of spirit that turned The Grinch's whole life around. And yet, on LATS, Les's seemingly innate optimism doesn't mean the material is all rainbows. The travails of music and life in general weigh heavily on "Iceman Cometh," when the wise-beyond-his-years twentysomething provides knowing assurance to listeners, but also, one can imagine, to himself: "Just sit tight, we on/ One-track mind keep goin'/ This love won't last long/ You'll be fine, stay calm." Cerebral and considered all the way down to its formatting — the EP was released in two versions, each with a tracklist in reverse order from the other, for opposing sonic journeys — LATS was lyrically, and musically, one of the clearest bright spots from NC in 2024. Unless, of course, good cheer just isn't your thing.
Also Worth Your Time:
- Pretty Little Love - BeMyFiasco (Apple | Spotify)
- Regal Decay - Kemp Dupri (Apple | Spotify)
- Q'd Up - One Speaker Radio (Soundcloud)
- General Admission - Reuben Vincent (Apple | Spotify)
- Almost There - TiaCorine (Apple | Spotify)
- How's the lil rap thing going? - Erick Lottary (Apple | Spotify)
Finished reading and listening to it all? Thanks for stopping by, and hope you liked more than a couple of the things you found. See you in 2025, aka, later this year.
