@Maddilynn Payne

Discover new music from artists we think you'll like. Refreshed every Friday.

Moneybagg Yo’s come-up was anything but quick. The South Memphis MC’s mixtapes date back to 2012, and by the time he’d released his first proper album, 2018’s RESET, he had two separate well-acclaimed mixtape series under his belt (Heartless and Federal). As his star began to rise, though—and his feature price with it—Bagg did something wholly unnecessary in the scope of contemporary hip-hop hitmaking: He continued to improve as a rapper. His reputation as a street-certified truthsayer, along with the relationships he’d cultivate to help spread his message, was long solidified by the time of A Gangsta’s Pain, but that album took Bagg’s presence to another level. And he had no one to thank but himself. Bagg had sharpened his bars and delivery with each release prior, and as he told Apple Music, he relished the time lockdown gave him to master song composition. “I sat down and thought about everything and I made the biggest songs of my career—of my life—in the pandemic,” he said. For Bagg’s efforts, we got arena-ready collaborations like his and Future’s “Hard for the Next,” fun and inventive flows like one he uses on “Shottas,” and a clever addiction/relationship metaphor that reintroduced one of the greatest samples in hip-hop to his generation with “Wockesha.” With A Gangsta’s Pain—and its Reloaded rerelease—Moneybagg Yo was able to stake a claim in rap stardom that won’t soon be dislodged. In conversation with Apple Music ahead of the album’s release, the MC was humble about his process. “I'm giving them everything they love about Moneybagg Yo,” he said. As it turns out, there’s a lot to love.

“Hey Siri, play the Evening Commute playlist.”

“Hey Siri, play the Quality Time playlist.”

“I feel like a song is so much more special when you can visualize and picture it, even smell and taste all of the stuff that the songwriter's going through,” Olivia Rodrigo told Apple Music days before the release of SOUR, her full-length debut. It feels safe to say that no single this year was quite as transportive or transcendent as “drivers license,” the breakup song that became a viral, closely studied sensation the moment Rodrigo quietly released it in January. Since then, it’s been The Year of Olivia in a lot of ways, the 18-year-old singer-songwriter (also an experienced actor and star of Disney+’s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series) making her presence felt across pop culture, from the success of SOUR to an audience at the White House to the sound of the song's now legendary bridge bringing a barroom of tough guys to tears on Saturday Night Live. “All the feelings that I was feeling were so intense,” Rodrigo says. “I called the record SOUR because it was this really sour period of my life—I remember being so sad, and so insecure, and so angry. I felt all those things, and they're still very real, but I'm definitely not going through that as acutely as I used to. It’s nice to go back and see what I was feeling, and be like, ‘It all turned out all right. You're okay now.’”

“Hey Siri, play the Day at the Park playlist.”