Ab-Soul Restored Our Faith in Top Dawg
Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE) has been the premier hip hop label for the better part of the last 10 years. What is so impressive about that is they have been able to uphold that connotation while only signing FOURTEEN artists in their entire 18 years of existence. Obviously, they have five (now four) main, headlining artists, SZA, Schoolboy Q, Jay Rock, Ab-Soul and formerly Kendrick Lamar, who have been doing the majority of the heavy lifting since the early 2010s.
With Kendrick leaving, Top Dawg had a lot to prove. Isaiah Rashad’s The House is Burning was one of the best albums from 2021, but not a major Top Dawg release. SZA’s SOS released on December 9 earlier this year and was also a great album, but not in the hip hop genre. We had no idea how Top Dawg would fare without their number one rapper, but the end of 2022 showed a glimmer of hope. That hope was named Ab-Soul.
One of the key artists on TDE is the Los Angeles native, Ab-Soul. Of the Black Hippy crew formed in Top Dawg, Ab-Soul has always been the most obscure of the group. He’s always had a large vocabulary and focused heavily on his wordplay, and that is how he set himself apart from the others. Despite being a bit less accessible than the other Black Hippy members, he managed to gain popularity and stay just as relevant as the rest, releasing albums in 2011, 2012, 2014 and 2016, but after that, silence.
We didn’t hear anything from Ab-Soul from 2016 until 2020, when we got the “Dangerookipawaa Freestyle” (which was amazing). This got people excited, we were all hoping to be getting a new Ab-Soul record in the near future, but we didn’t. Then, in 2022, the silence was broken. He announced that he was going to have a new album, and soon enough the first single “Hollandaise” dropped in April. More and more singles came throughout the year until finally, Herbert was announced to be releasing on December 16, 2022, and fans were ready. The time came and the album was released, and Ab-Soul delivered. It was long, extremely well produced, deep, and had multiple bangers. We will be posting a review of Herbert with our full thoughts sometime down the line, but just know that it is a full embodiment of Top Dawg Entertainment and it proved that they are still the premier hip hop label.