Rap at the edges: a field guide to experimental hip-hop

There's the hip-hop that meets you halfway, and the hip-hop that makes you come to it. This is about the second kind — the abrasive, abstract, deliberately difficult wing of rap that treats noise and dissonance as instruments and the radio as somebody else's problem. If the mainstream canon is what you're after, our where-to-start guide has it. This is the deep end.

The lightning rod

You can't map this territory without starting at its most divisive point.

Death Grips' The Money Store (2012) dragged "noise rap" into the open — so polarizing it's the subject of its own deep dive. Love it or not, everything after it had more room to be ugly.

The noise architects

clipping. — the trio featuring actor and rapper Daveed Diggs — build tracks from harsh noise, field recordings and silence. Splendor & Misery (2016) is an Afrofuturist concept album about the lone survivor of a slave ship adrift in deep space, and it's as harrowing and brilliant as that sounds.

JPEGMAFIA — "Peggy" — makes maximalist chaos from glitched samples, sudden tempo shifts and a producer's ear for the deeply wrong. Veteran (2018) is the manifesto.

The abstractionists

Not all of it is loud. Some of it is just dense.

billy woods writes some of the most allusive, literary verses in any genre, set to crumbling, sample-warped production. Aethiopes (2022) is a forbidding, rewarding place to start.

Earl Sweatshirt traded teenage shock-rap for something far stranger on Some Rap Songs (2018) — woozy, looping, grief-soaked miniatures that mostly run under two minutes.

The shape-shifters

Danny Brown's Atrocity Exhibition (2016) — named for the Joy Division song, named for the J.G. Ballard novel — is a nervy, cackling descent that sounds like nothing else in his catalogue, or anyone's.

Injury Reserve's By the Time I Get to Phoenix (2021), made after the death of member Stepa J. Groggs, is a fractured, glitching record about loss that half-invented its own subgenre on the way out.

And Shabazz Palaces — led by Ishmael Butler, once of Digable Planets — got to the future first: Black Up (2011) is Afrofuturist, woozy and unbothered, a decade ahead of the curve.

Down the rabbit hole

None of this is background music, and that's the point. Start anywhere, rate as you go, and bring a strong opinion to the comments — this is a scene that's never agreed on anything, least of all what counts as a masterpiece.