CANCELLED: MadeinTYO & Unotheactivist, BigBabyGucci [garage]

Yokohama, the December 2021 debut collaborative mixtape for Atlanta emcees MadeinTYO and UnoTheActivist, sees two SoundCloud graduates coming together for a relatively unlikely yet fun pairing. The 16-track project’s name and cover art pay homage to Japanese culture – MadeinTYO lived in Tokyo for six years. TYO’s energetic style meshes surprisingly well with Uno’s whispery, shifty rhyming patterns over a batch of beats primarily owing to the infusion of hyperpop-esque, fast-paced melodies (“Talk to Me Nice,” “Margiela Man”) into rap as well as the plugg music subgenre’s 2021 resurgence (“Mexikodro”). North Carolina’s BigBabyGucci opens. —2401090