DJ AB’s “YNS Cypher 2025” has swaggered into existence. Not a gentle arrival, mind you, but more the auditory equivalent of a conquering legion setting up a very loud, very confident camp. This isn't background hum for a Tuesday afternoon; it’s a full-colour, high-decibel assertion from the Northern Nigerian hip-hop vanguard, a yearly planting of the YNS flag. DJ AB, the central current, is...

Sophia Mengrosso’s new album, “Unforgiven”, doesn’t so much start as it does detonate, a thirteen-song treatise on survival. Her voice, a thing clearly trained for gilded halls and velvet curtains, instead wails from within a foundry’s clang and fire. The result is a bizarre and beautiful collision, the sonic equivalent of discovering a lost Caravaggio painting lit by a flickering fluorescent tube in a...