AOTY #6: Your Old Droog - Dump YOD: Krutoy Edition [2020]

Welcome to my Album of the Year highlights! I’ll give you a little run down with a brief history to start, show you the tracklist (with the tracks in bold being my favorites) with all of the featured guests (if any), give you some descriptors that might make you more inclined to check it out, and I’ll provide links to stream/buy the project down at the bottom. Enjoy!

How many artists can say that they have gotten better and better with each album? Maybe I don’t consider to be Transporation a part of this lineage, but starting all the way back from his Self-Titled, on to PACKS, then my #4 Album of 2019 It Wasn’t Even Close, finishing with Jewelry (which just barely missed that Top 10 Albums for 2019) bringing his Jewish roots into his image, we’ve gotten a steady climb in impact. Now with Dump YOD: Krutoy Edition we’ve gotten an entire compendium of references and stories about the effect of his Eastern Europe’s heritage, directly building upon his ethnic and cultural focus he’s been infusing into his music for the past two years. Drawing much of his vocabulary and sample-choices from Soviet-era Russia and Ukraine, Droog has built an incredible interesting time capsule into the life of an immigrant who loves hip-hop, a person from another world looking to start a new life in New York, and he goes about that with a talent for rapping that is very close to unmatched in todays game. His wordplay, flows, voice, word-choice, and, most important to the theme, his heavily-utilized Russian rapping skills, gives him a unique place in the game where the man has no weakness, a superhero of an emcee with a utility belt of skills that ensures everything he touches is gold. I could go on, from the excellently foreign and engaging sample-base to the incredible use of features, but this is an album that you won’t know what to expect until you hear it. Congratulations to one of underground hip-hops most boundary-pushing artists for this amazing achievement, and I will see you all next week for my #5 Album of 2020.

Tracklist

1. Dump YOD Intro

2. Kazakstan

3. Ukraine

4. New Religion (Feat. Tha God Fahim & Mach-Hommy)

5. Matryoshka

6. Odessa (Feat. billy woods)

7. Malchishka Krutoy

8. Babushka III

9. Uzbekistan (Feat. Phonte & Mach-Hommy)

10. Pravda (Feat. Mach-Hommy, El-P, Tha God Fahim, & Black Thought)

11. Kyrgystan

12. Dump YOD Outro

One of the coolest parts of this album rollout was the amazing faux-propaganda material he put out as teasers and supporting artwork for the project. This one here, by Emily Catherine, is a repurposed image of Lenin from over 100 years ago,.

Recommended if you like:

top-tier punchlines, Nas, rough and wise voices, Talib Kweli, unique sample base, billy woods, Eastern European instrumentals, Black Thought, ground-level lyrics from real voices, Conway the Machine, 90’s-era lyricism and flows, Mach-Hommy

Here are my original writings on Dump YOD: Krutoy Edition:

Weekly Fix #49 ('20)

↓ Listen to Dump YOD: Krutoy Edition ↓

Spotify/YouTube/Apple Music