The Student Playlist

Showcasing the Best New Music, Curating the Classics

Tag Kendrick Lamar

REVIEW: Kendrick Lamar – ‘DAMN’ (Top Dawg Entertainment / Interscope / Aftermath)

Whether ‘DAMN’ will be the cultural crossover its predecessor was remains to be seen, but what is clear is that Kendrick Lamar’s fourth album is another glorious record.

REVIEW: Kendrick Lamar – ‘untitled unmastered’ (Aftermath / Interscope / Top Dawg)

by John Tindale Kendrick Lamar may already have registered himself as one of the greats before the age of 30; having released the classic good kid, m.A.A.d city in 2012, he went on to better himself with what will certainly be regarded as one of the very best records of the decade, To Pimp A Butterfly, last year, so the surprising news that we are now getting some extracts from the

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The Top 50 Albums of 2015

2015 has been our first year of operation under our new name The Student Playlist, and it’s been a year of steady expansion. There are now five of us, with a view to adding yet more talented, passionate writers in the new year as we continue in our quest to point out the best new music, rediscover old albums, both stone-cold classics and hidden treasures, and cause lively debate with

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REVIEW: Dr. Dre – ‘Compton’ (Aftermath / Interscope)

by Ed Biggs When his former colleague Ice Cube dropped the news at the end of July that Dr. Dre was imminently going to release a new album, the internet promptly lost its shit. Having done so much to sculpt the sound of hip-hop as we know it today – through N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton in 1989, which provided the genre’s Sex Pistols moment, his solo debut The Chronic in 1992,

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The 100 Greatest Albums of the 2010s… So Far

To adapt that famous misquotation attributed to Mark Twain, reports of the album’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Ever since the turn of the millennium, conventional wisdom has had it that the traditional long-player is on its way out, an arcane format out of time with the digital world that will cede inexorably to a future of singles and playlists. But while many artists have experimented with what an album

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PODCAST: March 2015 edition

Lauren James and Ed Biggs present a look back at the biggest and best albums released in March 2015 – click here to listen now! Including reviews of the following albums: Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds – Chasing Yesterday Modest Mouse – Strangers To Ourselves Laura Marling – Short Movie Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp A Butterfly The Cribs – Burning For No One The Prodigy – The Day Is

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REVIEW: Kendrick Lamar – ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’ (Aftermath / Interscope / Top Dawg)

by Ed Biggs Arguably the most anticipated, talked-about and hyped-up album of 2015, To Pimp A Butterfly has an awful lot to live up to. Following a well-received debut, 2012’s good kid, m.A.A.d city sold nearly 1.5 million copies in the US and set up Kendrick Lamar in a great lineage of rappers, the heir to Dr. Dre, 2Pac. As such, he’s now got the same weight of expectations on

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