(10 Summers/BMG)
The fourth album from Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us producer features cloying love songs, odes to Mom and thanks to God

When Jesus told his followers to have “faith the size of a mustard seed” he was partly thinking ahead to the career of LA hitmaker Dijon Isaiah McFarlane, whose 2014 debut album predicted 10 Summers of chart domination. But rare is the rap producer who can stay hot for more than a few seasons. For two years Mustard’s signature sound – a minimal concoction of 808 handclaps, booming bass and Dorito-crunch snares – filled the charts with club-rap-R&B crossovers ( Tinashe ’s 2 On, Jeremih’s Don’t Tell ’Em). But by 2016’s Cold Summer his era was all but over.

Yet the prophecy came true – Not Like Us, the killer blow in Kendrick Lamar’s ugly beef with Drake , became Mustard’s first-ever US No 1 in May. Sadly, it’s the kind of club-rap ripper that’s in short supply on his fourth album, an occasionally biographical tale of childhood nostalgia, middle-age melancholy and returning to the church – albeit voiced by 20 guests, from longtime rap foil Ty Dolla $ign to soul royalty Charlie Wilson.

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(10k Projects/Capitol)
The US rapper’s subject matter is lightweight and this debut album only lasts 23 minutes, but funny, snotty lines abound and the music is often viscerally exciting

Ice Spice is a divisive figure in the world of rap. There are people who think her rise over the last two years is representative of all that’s wrong with rap: witness the wailing and gnashing of teeth that greeted her inclusion in Complex’s list of the 50 best New York rappers, albeit at No 50. Equally, there are people who posit her as something of a saviour figure, “a new rap star in a genre that sorely needs one”, as one recent US profile put it, citing statistics that point to “a steady decline in [rap]’s consumption”. Said figures suggested rap and R&B’s share of the US market had declined by 1.5% between 2022 and 2023, but it was still by far the biggest genre in America – no need to man the lifeboats just yet. But you can’t argue with the fact that Ice Spice (born Isis Gaston) is rap’s biggest breakout star in recent memory: feted by Taylor Swift and responsible for four US platinum singles in just over six months.

The weird thing is that the naysayers and boosters alike have reached their conclusions for exactly the same reasons. There is Ice Spice’s relentless pop focus. “Let’s talk drill / Who bigger than she?” she brags on her debut album’s Gimmie a Light, but her take on the subgenre rids it of grit and menace. Admittedly her current single, a collaboration with Central Cee called Did It First, features plenty of gunfire in time with the hard Jersey club beat, but the filtered vocal samples behind it are melancholy, even poignant. The synth line on the amazingly titled Think U the Shit (Fart) carries with it a memory of electro-infused 80s pop-R&B. When the backing tracks tend to the ominous – as on Phatt Butt or Plenty Sun – something about Ice Spice’s snotty humour lends their mood the air of a cartoon or video game.

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The British music industry’s award for outstanding albums features eight debuts, from the likes of Nia Archives and Barry Can’t Swim, as the prize fails to find a sponsor

Charli xcx has crowned the so-called summer of Brat – the name of her sixth album album, whose lurid green aesthetic has even reached the US presidential race – with a nomination for this year’s Mercury prize. It is the Hertfordshire musician’s second nod, following one in 2020 for her lockdown album, How I’m Feeling Now.

She is one of four musicians nominated this year to have been previously recognised by the UK music industry’s flagship prize for albums by British and Irish artists, alongside Trinidad-born, London-raised rapper Berwyn , for his debut album Who Am I (following a nod for his mixtape Demotape/Vega in 2021); Leeds songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae , for her fourth album, the psychedelic opus Black Rainbows ; and London rapper Ghetts , for his fourth album On Purpose, With Purpose .

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This week, Chanté Joseph meets Rapman, the writer and director of Supacell, one of the most watched shows on Netflix, to discuss what it takes to make a hit series, how he’s redefining the superhero genre and what he plans to do next

Archive: TikTok (audiosavioursuk), X (thebrosgeekout), Shiro’s Story Part 2 (Link Up TV) Blue Story (Paramount Pictures), Supacell (Netflix), BBC Sport

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Two defendants sought recusal of Ural Glanville over meeting judge held with state witness and prosecutors

The judge overseeing the long-running racketeering and gang prosecution against Young Thug and others has been removed from the case after two defendants sought his recusal, citing a meeting the judge held with prosecutors and a state witness.

Fulton county superior court chief judge Ural Glanville had put the case in Atlanta on hold two weeks ago to give another judge a chance to review the defendants’ motions for recusal. Judge Rachel Krause on Monday granted those motions and ordered the clerk of court to assign the case to a different judge.

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Finsbury Park, London
With some regrettable absences and a premature close, the weekend is redeemed by explosive sets and starry surprise guests such as Central Cee

This year’s Wireless festival is instantly mired in controversy – a decision to finish Sunday’s outing two-and-a-half hours early, allowing fans to catch the European Championship final, sours the mood of the weekend. The disappointment is justified as the adjusted timeline feels convenient. Scheduled Sunday acts Digga D and Tyla were long expected to cancel due to their respective legal difficulties and injury, yet their absences are only confirmed on Friday, with no replacement acts announced. Friday also brings cancellations for Flo Milli and Veeze, pulling apart a promisingly stacked lineup.

Still, the army of Barbz who swarm Finsbury Park clad in pink skirts, bows and baby tees get everything they want from Friday headliner Nicki Minaj, whose fourth Wireless appearance brings the full, maximalist, world-building production of the Pink Friday 2 world tour . She runs the full course of her discography, from fulfilment anthem Moment 4 Life to that iconic Monster verse, and Minaj’s dramatics, rhapsodic delivery and visuals of assembly-line porcelain cyborg doppelgangers make for a playful and genuinely fun headline show.

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From Sabrina Carpenter to Kendrick Lamar, Guardian writers pick out the songs that will be soundtracking their barbecues for the summer

• Check out a Spotify playlist of the choices

No offense to the Lana del Rey and boygenius girls, but when it comes to music, I have a limited tolerance for languid, sad or woozy; during the heat of summer especially, it’s uppers only. Few do that better than Charli xcx, a premier practitioner of loud, high-BPM music, who captured the zeitgeist in June with her album brat . And no song embodies the album’s insouciant, candid, neon-green bold ethos – or the fuck-it heedlessness, headlong nights and chaotic mood swings of summer – better than album closer 365. The mutable track, essentially a version of album opener 360 on stimulants that blasts into full club mode over three minutes, wields the figure of the party girl as an enviable, imitable main character experience. It’s a glorious celebration of hedonism, of cresting a wave of reckless energy, whether or not you “do a little key, have a little line”. (This song has given me lucid dreams of doing coke.) Everything is a disaster, so why not aspire to pure, oblivion-chasing fun? I will be bumpin’ that all summer long. Adrian Horton

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This look at the hip-hop legends spares no effort in telling their tale exactly as it was, from substance abuse to their darkest hours. It’s intelligent, nuanced TV – even if it could be more open about Russell Simmons

Whether it’s a documentary or a biopic, the over-involvement of a subject can transform treasure into trash. Members of Queen turned themselves into blandly unimpeachable heroes by producing Bohemian Rhapsody – as did Ice Cube and Dr Dre by helping create 2015’s Straight Outta Compton. Meanwhile, projects such as Metallica: Some Kind of Monster and Anton Corbijn’s stylised Joy Division film Control didn’t give their subjects producer credits – subsequently crafting fascinating, complex portraits of the artists.

So a few moments into the Run-DMC documentary Kings From Queens, there is an unintentional jump scare when the words “executive producers Joseph ‘Rev Run’ Simmons and Darryl ‘DMC’ McDaniels” appear on screen. Thankfully, as we hear from the many talking heads who appear over the course of three hours, Run-DMC connected with people because of their commitment to honesty; even when telling their own stories, the surviving members of the group admit inadequacies, insecurities, substance abuse and how some of their greatest successes happened in spite of them. Perhaps more shocking than DMC’s candour around his alcoholism and thoughts of killing himself is that he admits to being a nerd who loves nothing more than the Canadian singer Sarah McLachlan and Spider-Man comics. Rather than psyching himself up to perform with hypermasculine posturing, the sweet-natured rapper asks: “What would Peter Parker do?”

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(Shady/Aftermath/Interscope)
The return of the rapper’s nihilistic alter ego makes his 12th album feel like a confused, conflicted attempt to recreate his 00s success – his flow is perfect as ever, but he can no longer provoke true outrage

The Death of Slim Shady is an album filled with memorable lines. Some are memorable because they display their author’s nonpareil skill as a rapper: they whiz past in a perfectly enunciated, rhythmically precise gust of homophones, references and wordplay. Some because their scabrous, nihilistic wit induces precisely the reaction their author presumably intends: a kind of horrified bark of laughter despite yourself, followed by a surge of guilt so overwhelming that you don’t want to highlight the line in question, lest you be damned by association. And some are memorable because they land with a dull, shrug-inducing thud, the unmistakable sound of an artist trying too hard to shock. The most telling line may come on Lucifer, which, with its Dr Dre-produced, bouzouki-sampling beat, has a strong claim to be the album’s strongest track. “But Marshall,” offers Eminem , addressing himself, as is so often his wont, “it’s like you came from 2000, stepped out a portal.”

It’s a lyric that seems to strike at The Death of Slim Shady’s raison d’etre. Eminem has cut a curious figure over the last decade. He’s still reliably chalking up incredible sales figures – every album he’s released has gone platinum in the US; his 2020 single Godzilla shifted something close to 10m worldwide – while apparently struggling to find a place for himself in a musical landscape that’s altered dramatically since his early 00s heyday. Is he the grumpy keeper of traditional hip-hop values discarded in an era of mumble rappers and Auto-Tune, as suggested by the indignant verbal assaults he launched at a younger generation of artists on 2018’s Kamikaze? Is he a noticeably different character to the twentysomething nihilist who sold 25m copies of The Marshall Mathers LP, deploying his splenetic lyrical approach against the “alt-right”, as a string of freestyles and guest appearances released in 2017 implied? Or is he simply the huffy middle-aged reactionary that his more foresighted detractors might have predicted he would become, decrying millennial snowflakes and wokeism like a Daily Mail columnist?

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