A true staple within the community, A Hype remains one of the most consistent and prolific artists I’ve ever heard. In December of 2022, he released ‘Mike Hype’, a collaborative album with Mike Turtle on the production of every track. He expertly showcases his narrative skills, and just generally a deep love for music on ‘Mike Hype’.

The record begins with a simple 50 second ‘Mike Hype Chant’, chant, and then immediately immerses the listener into a sun-drenched, viscerally nostalgic at times, 17 track record. The first two tracks set the mood with their brief, but not fleeting, warm instrumentals overlaid with A Hype’s incredible wordplay and rhyme schemes. It’s insane how much he can say in well under 2 minutes, without sounding rushed in the slightest. From here we get two of the longer songs on the album, ‘Huge Ass Shark’ and ‘Something Missing’. These tracks, to me, feel equally as inspired by MF DOOM as they are by Griselda. They both contain such impressive storytelling, and A Hype’s near perfect delivery only makes his words hit that much harder. At this point, I almost feel like I’m in the middle of a Blu & Exile record, and that’s exactly when the entire atmosphere flips and the album takes a short turn with A Hype turning up the heat on ‘Zurg’, over an instrumental that sounds like it could’ve been on a NOVAGANG track in 2020. 

‘Zurg’ marks the start of the middle of the album for me, with the first song with a feature appearance being the next track ‘Sea (Feat Yokai &BLKMSK)’, a slick, beautiful song that I could see myself just driving around at night to. ‘Making It III’ brings back some of the griselda inspo a little bit, before ‘FUCK THE YMCA (Feat Kevin Gates)’ hears A Hype rapping with utmost coherence during a sample of ‘2 Phones’, over a beat that sounds like one of Earl Sweatshirts most unconventional instrumentals, and then turns into a 2010s dance hit. I wish I could accurately depict how incredible his lyrics are on this entire record, but to be honest you’d just have to listen for yourself and take in each song as it is, and you’ll understand why it’s so hard not to feel inspired after listening to A Hype. ‘Burger King (Feat. Yogi Bear & Pop Smoke)’, with an ‘I Left My Wallet in El Segundo’ sample, Yogi Bear sample, AND Pop Smoke interpolation, is a great example of this being the case. This song in particular feels like switching the channels on a tv but it’s hyper-specific music surfing rather than television channels. The album as a whole actually feels a lot like a sequence of abrupt scene changes in a movie, perforated with nostalgia, while still maintaining coherence and a narrative.