So much rap music comes out all the time, and especially with frequent surprise releases, it can be hard to keep track of it all. So, as a way to help keep up with all of it, here’s a roundup of the 5 rap albums from July 2025 that stood out to us most. We also probably still missed or haven’t spent enough time with some great July rap albums that aren’t on this list, and we’ve got a list of honorable mentions with more albums at the bottom of this post. What were some of your favorites of last month? Let us know, and read on for the list (unranked, in no particular order).
Clipse – Let God Sort Em Out (Roc Nation)
Pusha T, Malice, and longtime producer Pharrell’s first Clipse album in 15+ years is a course corrective, a return to form, and a maturation all at once.
If you thought Clipse had run its course by the end of the 2000s, you probably weren’t alone. After releasing two of the decade’s best rap albums with 2002’s Lord Willin’ and 2006’s Hell Hath No Fury, the Virginia Beach duo were met with mixed reviews and declining sales for 2009’s Til the Casket Drops, which was also their first album that wasn’t entirely produced by The Neptunes. The duo split the following year, with Pusha T signing to G.O.O.D. Music label as a solo artist and his brother Malice changing his name to No Malice after finding religion and pursuing Christian rap. The more Pusha T’s solo career ramped up and No Malice stayed out of secular rap, the more Clipse seemed like a relic of a bygone era.
Longevity seemed like it wasn’t in the cards for Clipse, but Pusha T found it with his solo career. His run of solo albums (and standout features on massive Kanye West songs) made him as much or even more of a force throughout the 2010s and early 2020s as Clipse was in the 2000s, and he integrated himself into rap’s next generations without ever really deviating from the unflinching coke rap style he honed with Clipse. That was never clearer than on 2018’s Kanye-produced Daytona, an album of hard beats and rapping that sounded straight out of the early 2000s and was also widely recognized as one of the best albums of 2018. Its aughts-era spirit might’ve had you revisiting those old Clipse records and wishing for a reunion, and a year later we got one: a Clipse guest appearance on Kanye’s 2019 album Jesus Is King.
The Clipse reunion didn’t stop there. When live music returned after lockdown, Clipse played their first show in 12 years at the 2022 edition of Neptunes member Pharrell Williams’ Something in the Water festival, and Pharrell split production duties with Kanye on Pusha T’s solo album It’s Almost Dry that same year. More reunion shows followed, and then Pusha T and No Malice got to work on a new Clipse album, entirely produced by Pharrell. The album, titled Let God Sort Em Out, is here now and it piggybacks on the momentum of Push’s solo career. It also adds a much more triumphant chapter to Clipse’s story than the one they left off with. Similar to Daytona, it captures the spirit of aughts-era Clipse and it also sounds like some of the most urgent rap music of 2025.
So much about Let God Sort Em Out sounds like the Clipse you know and love, from Pharrell’s trunk-rattling beats to the chemistry of Pusha T and Malice’s combined shit talk and street tales. They bring in two of the most important rappers to emerge in the years since Clipse broke up–Pusha T’s “Nosestalgia” collaborator Kendrick Lamar and Pharell acolyte Tyler, the Creator–as well as another rap veteran who’s been on a tear lately (Nas), a much newer coke rap torch-carrier (Stove God Cooks), and longtime collaborator Ab-Liva. Every guest raps with a level of intention that suggests they care as much about a great Clipse comeback as Pusha T, Malice, and Pharrell do. Kendrick brings some of the album’s hottest heat of all on “Chains & Whips” with a verse that follows his recent onslaught of Drake disses and links him up with one of Drake’s other most notable haters. Choice lyric: “Therapy showed me how to open up/It also showed me I don’t give a fuck,” presumably a reference to how quickly Kendrick shifted from the mental health awareness of 2022’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers to being a professional hater in the GNX era. (Drake isn’t actually mentioned by name on the song, but Pusha T told GQ that Kendrick’s verse caused Clipse to split with Def Jam because the label’s parent company UMG disliked the optics of having two of Drake’s biggest haters on one track.)
Let God Sort Em Out has clear echoes of the past, but Pusha T and Malice aren’t living in it. They’ve grown and matured and dealt with new crossroads of life, and that’s evident from the very first song, “The Birds Don’t Sing,” a gospel-rap song featuring John Legend and the Voices of Fire choir that deals with Push and Malice’s mother and father both dying between November 2021 and March 2022. It’s a tragic note to open on, and it also grabs you right away, letting you know off the bat that this is a more reflective, world-weary version of Clipse than we’ve ever heard before. It’s also on that song that Malice raps what appears to be a quote from his father encouraging him to return to being the rapper that Clipse fans remember: “You owe it to the world, let your mess become your message.” The Malice we get on Let God Sort Em Out is neither a full return to form, nor is it the No Malice who publicly disavowed the music he made with Clipse. It’s a Malice with the wisdom to find a balance between who he is in Clipse and who he is in his personal life. Hearing him once again go bar for bar with his brother, this is more than a reunion. This is a version of Clipse that found and mastered the art of longevity that almost escaped them.
Tyler, the Creator – Don’t Tap the Glass (Columbia)
The stakes feel lower for Tyler’s new 10-song, 28.5-minute project, but the songs sound huge.
After (at least) three consecutive vast concept albums, Tyler tempered expectations by tweeting that Don’t Tap the Glass “aint no concept nothing,” and we soon found out that the album only has 10 songs, a 28.5 minute runtime, and almost no guest appearances (all of which are currently uncredited on streaming services). 2021’s Call Me If You Get Lost was a concept album modeled after a rap mixtape, but Don’t Tap the Glass is the most a Tyler project has felt like a mixtape since the early Odd Future tapes. Even Bastard had more of an album-oriented narrative arc than this.
Tyler’s own wording suggested fans might be disappointed (“yall better get them expectations and hopes down”), but personally I find Don’t Tap the Glass to be a refreshing change, a nice palate cleanser, and most importantly, very fun. Tyler also accompanied the album’s release with a statement about how some people don’t dance in public anymore because they’re afraid of being filmed and turned into a meme, and Don’t Tap may not have a thematic concept but it does have a clear purpose: to get people to dance. “This album was not made for sitting still,” Tyler wrote. “Dancing driving running any type of movement is recommended to maybe understand the spirit of it. Only at full volume.”
Entirely produced by Tyler, who continues to be one of his generation’s most interesting producers on top of being a beloved rapper and singer, the beats absolutely sound designed to get you moving, whether it’s the nostalgia-inducing synth-funk of “Sugar On My Tongue,” “Ring Ring Ring,” and the Daisy World/Madison McFerrin-sung “Don’t You Worry Baby,” or the straight-up rave beats on “I’ll Take Care of You.” Thanks to songs like those, the long history of songs that mix hip hop and dance music just got a little longer.
On those latter two tracks, Tyler’s own voice barely appears at all, but another thing that stands out about this album is how much fun Tyler sounds like he’s having when he’s rapping. The album comes on the heels of Tyler reminding the world how hard he can rap with his verse on the new Clipse album, and some of the moments that Tyler seemed most inspired at his MSG show were the times he was rapping his ass off, like with “Who Dat Boy,” the Call Me If You Get Lost songs, and the extended a cappella rendition of “Thought I Was Dead.” (Not to mention he gave a long shoutout to Clipse and their influence on CMIYGL in particular.) On Don’t Tap the Glass, we hear Tyler really rapping in a way he mostly avoided on CHROMAKOPIA. On the Busta Rhymes-sampling “Big Poe,” “Stop Playing With Me,” and “Don’t Tap That Glass / Tweakin’,” we get some of Tyler’s hardest beats and some of his hardest bars at once. The latter also has his best beat switch in recent memory.
At times, Don’t Tap the Glass can feel like Tyler’s GNX, a followup to a cinematic opus that finds a superstar rapper at their hardest and rawest, with little second guessing or overthinking. Even Tyler’s choice to release the album in the middle of a different album’s tour suggests that there was a sense of urgency behind these songs, especially for an artist who tends to combine each album and tour cycle into distinctly different eras. And even on an album that feels a little more geared towards the mixtape heads, Tyler still can’t stay away from polished art-rap-pop gems like “Sugar On My Tongue,” “Sucka Free,” and “Ring Ring Ring”–songs that would’ve been melodic standouts on Flower Boy, IGOR, or CHROMAKOPIA.
The stakes feel lower for this project, but the songs sound as arena-sized or even stadium-sized as Tyler fans would expect. (As he raps on “Tweakin’,” “Six nights at Crypto/Shit, I should have did SoFi.”) Even the quickest and dirtiest moments sound like no other artist around, whether it’s a bright melodic song, an aggressive rap song, or a song that barely features Tyler’s own voice at all. His production, songwriting, and singing/rapping are all instantly recognizable, and all larger than life. Even when he tries to go small, he sounds huge.
Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemist – Alfredo 2 (ESGN/ALC)
Released after just one week’s warning, the sequel to Freddie Gibbs and The Alchemist’s 2020 sleeper hit ‘Alfredo’ is here.
Freddie Gibbs is at his best on his projects with just one producer, especially when that producer is either Madlib or The Alchemist. Freddie and Alchemist’s 2020 album Alfredo was our #2 album of 2020 and it remains one of the best albums by either party, so it’s exciting that five years later we get a sequel. It has a lot of the same charms as the original; The Alchemist samples an array of jazz pianos, electric guitar solos, and grainy soul samples that make for the kind of laid-back, smoky setting that Freddie sounds best in. Freddie is once again in verbose wordsmith mode, catching you off guard with blink-and-you-miss punchlines instead of worrying about easily-digestible hooks. And like the first Alfredo, guest verses are well-chosen and well-executed, this time from Anderson .Paak, Larry June, and JID.
Open Mike Eagle – Neighborhood Gods Unlimited (Auto Reverse)
The multihyphenate rapper turns a planned TV show into his most grand, cohesive solo album in five years.
In addition to being one of the most consistently great indie-rappers of the past decade-plus, Open Mike Eagle is also a podcaster, comedian, actor, and screenwriter, and he launched his own Comedy Central show The New Negroes in 2019. He actually originally imagined Neighborhood Gods Unlimited as a TV show, inspired by Get Out, Sorry to Bother You, and Boots Riley’s I’m A Virgo, but he ended up turning it into a concept album instead. Its structure has echoes of a TV show (with a theme song and commercials), and the concept is a personal one for Mike, inspired by childhood trauma that he “spent the majority of [his] life not knowing” about. Similar to 2020’s Anime, Trauma and Divorce, it’s melancholic and reflective but also clever and funny. It’s also great rap music, a post-boom bap album with vintage soul samples (“me and aquil stealing stuff from work”), jazz excursions (“contraband [the plug has bags of me],”) and too many ear-catching hooks and punchlines to count. And it’s Mike’s most grand, cohesive solo album since the aforementioned Anime, Trauma and Divorce, following a label showcase tape, the short-but-sweet Another Triumph of Ghetto Engineering, and the debut album by his group Previous Industries, whose Video Dave and Still Rift are two of the only three guests on Neighborhood Gods Unlimited. As great as all of those projects were, it’s nice to see Open Mike Eagle back in auteur mode.
ShrapKnel & Raphy – Lincoln Continental Breakfast
The underground rap duo of PremRock and Curly Castro deliver their first of three 2025 albums, each one made with a different producer from a different region.
It’s already been a big year for PremRock, whose recent solo album Did You Enjoy Your Time Here…? is one of our favorite albums of 2025 so far, and now ShrapKnel–his duo with Curly Castro–have released their first of three 2025 albums. Each one was made entirely with a different producer they met on tour, and this one was made with Raphy, a Detroit producer who’s part of Danny Brown’s Bruiser Brigade collective. Raphy’s production is eerie and disorienting, and Prem and Curly’s bars are just as ominous as the beats.
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Honorable Mentions
Apollo Brown & Brozne Nazareth – Funeral For A Dream
Benny the Butcher – Summertime Butch 2
Boldy James & Nicholas Craven – Late To My Own Funeral
Che – Rest In Bass
GELO – League of My Own
Homeboy Sandman & Sonnyjim – Soli Deo Gloria
Jim Legxacy – black british music (2025)
Kae Tempest – Self Titled
Larry June & Cardo – Until Night Comes
Raekwon – The Emperor’s New Clothes
$ilkMoney – Who Waters the Wilting Giving Tree Once the Leaves Dry Up and Fruits No Longer Bear?