five new joints for the hottest week ever

drag-on - fireman

"i don't really wanna hurt nobody... i just wanna live my life" most of the drag-on album is this year's trina-style 'what can i get away with rhyming over' mental pop experiment, except it's way more awkward than diamond princess. there's an incredibly endearing wrongness that makes it special. "fireman" is clunky like some really old mobile, but it is sunny disco bounce with a probably super-famous sample that i can't place and therefore brilliant. at the end it breaks down to just the bassline and drag-on repeating "i'm your fire maaan". what the fuck!

jae millz - no no no

i know this one! it's dawn penn! yeah it's the classic "no no no" beat dipset-ized (if only this actually was a dipset song!) for 03 with dawn at the end of every eight bars. jae millz is some nyc freestyle champ who is probably too earnest for a beat this nice. there's also a ghostface version where he just rhymes straight over the original. it will be the hottest beat of september when everyone will do a version! ironically this song will sound terrible by then.

roscoe - smooth sailin

toffee brown is totally right, this is the record which had to be made (to save west coast rap). it is so good that dj rectangle could base an entire mixtape around it. maybe he will!

mary j blige - ooh

sometimes i like it when i think some song has a really nice bridge but it turns out to be the chorus! because bridges are great and choruses would do better to learn from them. mary's new sound is thankfully pretty much like her early nineties sound. she can actually convince me it might be worth aspiring to old soul records instead of it being an exercise in awfulness. also, just like mary, spizzazzz is not immune to going all roy ayers herbish in hot weather!

teedra moses ft jadakiss - you'll never find (a better woman)

when you hear this you kind of have to accept that "why don't we fall in love" deserves to be remade over and over again, because it invites the same glittery fur-coat adjectives. it opens with pretty strings and the most tentative kick drum scratch sample ever, surely a metaphor for the uncertainty in teedra's heart! (there should be a list of great kick drum scratch samples, it is my favourite r'n'b allusion to real hiphop!) then there's this amazing super-opulent fake guitar sound in the chorus that probably makes it even better than the amerie tune. in fact, maybe for pure painful twisted stomach realness it is closest to monica's "so gone" - i'm not sure how much i enjoy either song but they are both brutally effective.