This is a week of rap endings and archives. T.I. closes a 25-year run with the album he says is his last, YoungBoy cracks open the vault for another surprise drop, and Justin Bieber rebuilds his SWAG era live from the desert. After last week’s YG, Key Glock and Tierra Whack run, here are four albums and a couple of singles worth queuing up — each with the Apple Music player and a Spotify link.
Make someone a mixtape → — this week’s Uristocrat tape: T.I., YoungBoy, Maxo Kream, Tyler and Bieber, made like it’s 1996 and you mean it.
T.I. — Kill the King
Kill the King is T.I.’s twelfth album and, he says, his last — a retirement record he announced at the 2026 Grammys and dropped on the 20th anniversary of King. That framing matters. Tip helped build trap into the default language of mainstream rap, and he’s walking away right as the sound he shaped runs everything. The 18-track guest list plays like a career in one room: Usher, Dr. Dre and Pharrell on the boards, plus 2 Chainz, Jeezy, T-Pain, Summer Walker, and YoungBoy Never Broke Again — who, fittingly, drops his own project the same Friday. Lead single “Let ’Em Know,” a Pharrell beat, was his first top 40 hit in over a decade. If this is the close, it’s a loud one.
YoungBoy Never Broke Again — ML2
ML2 — More Leaks 2 — is a surprise 20-track dump of vaulted material, the sequel to last year’s More Leaks, out on Motown. YoungBoy doesn’t release music like other stars; he floods. The volume is the strategy and the vault is the product. This isn’t the place to start if you’ve never sat with him, but for the fans who treat his catalog as a running feed, it’s another 56 minutes of exactly what they came for. He also turns up on T.I.’s album the same day, which tells you something about where the torch is being handed.
Maxo Kream — O.Y.N
Maxo Kream is one of Houston’s best living storytellers, and O.Y.N is a lean nine tracks on EMPIRE — no padding, no skits, just the dense, autobiographical rapping that’s made him a critics’ favorite without ever chasing a radio record. After 2024’s sprawling Personification, the shorter runtime is the right call. Put it on and let him talk.
Justin Bieber — SWAG LIVE FROM COACHELLA (Weekend I)
SWAG was Bieber’s lo-fi left turn — the Dijon-and-Mk.gee, hushed-R&B reinvention that split his audience, earned him a genuine critical second look, and one very public feud. This 22-track set from his Coachella headline is the proof of concept: the songs hold up stripped down and played by a band, with a pitched-down “YUKON,” the Wizkid-and-Tems “ESSENCE,” “STAY” with The Kid LAROI, and Dijon and Mk.gee turning up on “DEVOTION” and “DAISIES.” If you wrote SWAG off the first time, this is the version that might change your mind.
Singles & tracks worth pulling
Tyler, The Creator, “THAT GUY” (Spotify) — Tyler’s in rollout mode. “THAT GUY,” and its companion “SAG HARBOR,” flip a Kendrick Lamar sample from GNX over production he handled with Jack Antonoff, Sounwave and Mustard. Two minutes that read like a man clearing his throat before something bigger. We last caught him blending disco and rap on “Sugar on My Tongue.”
Joeboy, “YBTM (You Belong to Me)” — No major Afrobeats album landed this Friday, but the singles pipeline never stops. The Nigerian hitmaker keeps the Afro-pop lane warm with a clean, radio-ready love song built for rotation.
The week in context
The throughline is the rap establishment taking stock. T.I. is closing a 25-year career on his own terms, handing the mic to a guest list that spans the genre’s present and its future. YoungBoy keeps proving that in 2026, catalog and volume beat the traditional album cycle. And Bieber’s live record is a reminder that even pop’s biggest names now route their reinventions through R&B and the rap-adjacent underground. Endings, archives, and reinventions — not a blockbuster Friday, but a telling one. For more of the same, see our roundups from June 12 and June 5.
Steve Lacy feat. SZA — “is it cool?”
Steve Lacy tapped SZA for “is it cool?”, the confessional second single from his upcoming album Oh Yeah?, due July 17 via RCA. Over a hazy groove Lacy owns up to his self-sabotaging habits while SZA counters, “Being vulnerable is exhausting, babe.” The album also features Erykah Badu and Cecile Believe.
Wande Coal — King Coal
On King Coal, his first album in three years, Wande Coal leans into his legacy without losing touch with the present of Afropop. The Mo’ Hits-era pioneer stacks the tracklist with Tiwa Savage, BNXN, Ruger, and Wizkid; he told The Native he knows he’s a king, and the title is the thesis.
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