A film about Northwest hip-hop from

#GUAPSEASON

Ready to go viral, #GUAPSEASON is a hashtag-ready 2017 full-length from SneakGuapo featuring 12 trap-heavy tracks that explore our personal, intimate desires for power, our paranoia and our posturing for position. I’ve recently taken up running and this record has been my go-to all week. I get Sneak’s fights with insecurity and depression and his sense of striving, of pushing through, of putting a smile on your confidence even when it feels fake. Songs like “Hot Boy” and “Goals” come on just as I’m facing a big hill and I want to turn around and go home and hang up my shoes, and they help me to push through to the next hill. (And there are so many physical, mental and emotional hills to overcome in this city…) The production from tblunty on “Live” is sublime and full of surprises, as are the guest verses courtesy of Cam The Mac, Lil Dre, Badluq James and others.

Did we get it wrong? It happens. Send us an email and let's get it corrected right away!

A film about Northwest hip-hop from

High & Mighty

The Stranger picked High & Mighty as the very best album of 2013, saying that:

Released on the very last day of October, High & Mighty has three things that make it the top record of the year. First, the production on this album is just solid. From the first track (the darkling “Crime Waves”) to the last (the brilliantly twisted “Sounds Like the Outro”), the music keeps the listener engaged and pleased. High & Mighty does not have a single weak or lazy beat. Second, it has a unified sound that corresponds with reason three: Nacho Picasso’s rap mode. His rhymes pulsate just above the subliminal, often spiral into the surreal and pornographic, are often packed with references to deep and dark parts of popular culture, and imagine a nocturnal 206—a 206 that never sleeps but is also not really awake, existing in the twilight of the two states. High & Mighty is a record Seattle can be proud of.

Seattle hip-hop blog 206UP also picked this record as one of the “Top 10 Albums of 2013,” saying that:

Nacho Picasso branches out sonically on High & Mighty, which makes for his best release since 2011’s For The Glory. Nowhere to be found on H&M are common collaborators Blue Sky Black Death, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the atmosphere is lighter. Here we have out-of-Towners Swish and Swiff D providing gothic, trap-inspired soundscapes, in addition to local heavyweights Vitamin D and Jake One on more densely composed beats.

And of course Nacho, possessor of the most recognizable voice in Seattle right now, is in rare form, laying out his bleak philosophy on life on “Crime Waves”, making (ahem) fowl assertions on the opposite sex on “Duck Tales”, and laying out the skeletons in his closet on the emotionally bare “Alpha Jerk”. In 2012, it was often difficult to see the forest for the trees in Nacho Picasso and BSBD’s collabs: too many clouds shrouding the deeper layers of the rapper’s complex psyche. High & Mighty, though, is a step through the looking glass, lyrically and beat-wise, and it results in a much more intricate picture.

Did we get it wrong? It happens. Send us an email and let's get it corrected right away!