NBA YoungBoy, Sauce Walka, 2KBaby and More – New Hip-Hop Projects

As Santa gears up to push the widebody sleigh from rooftop to rooftop, the rap game stuffs our stockings with a fresh crop of new project releases. This week, a Baton Rouge, La. rapper releases a special album of unreleased tracks, a Houston rhymer drops off the third installment of a popular mixtape series and a rap-crooner repping Louisville, Ky. drops a mixtape packed with familiar beats.

Despite being a busy father and a soon-to-be husband, YoungBoy Never Broke Again has been dropping albums like a bad habit. In 2022, the prolific rhymer released several projects including, The Last Slimento, 3800 Degrees and Ma’ I Got a Family. On Friday (Dec. 23), just in time for Christmas, NBA YoungBoy delivers a compilation album titled Lost Files. The 21-track collection boasts songs that have been out and some previously-unreleased tracks the Louisiana rhymer had stashed in the vault. This is a very nice Christmas present for his fans. YB better.

After recently visiting an erupting volcano, Sauce Walka returns dripping with more heat to close out the year. The H-Town native releases his latest project Sauce Ghetto Gospel 3. Putting out the first two projects in the trilogy in 2018 and 2019, Sauce delivers the new 19-song release that features guest appearances from Babyface Ray, Jackboy and Sauce WoodWinnin. The boisterous Texas rapper previewed the project via the single “Here I Am.” Sauce has enjoyed a productive year that includes him releasing the albums Al Rage Walka and Sauce Beach Florida.

2KBaby puts a bow on 2022 with his new mixtape, Sorry 4 the Hate. In classic mixtape fashion, the Louisville, Ky. rhymer offers up fresh new vocals over 11 of the year’s most popular beats. The melodic spitter glides seamlessly over instrumentals of songs such as Metro Boomin’s “Superhero,” Yeat’s “Kant Dië” and Jack Harlow’s “Churchill Downs,” the original version of which features Drake and landed 2KBaby’s fellow Kentucky-bred artist a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Song.

According to 2KBaby himself, Lil Wayne’s epic mixtape run in the late 2000s and early 2010s is exactly what inspired Sorry 4 The Hate, its title and its cover art, which are both directly reminiscent of Tunechi’s 2011 mixtape, Sorry 4 The Wait. 

“[Lil Wayne] been inspiring [ninjas] for as long as I can remember and at the same time, paving the way for artists to do a lot of the shit we do today,” wrote 2KBaby via Instagram on Monday (Dec. 19) upon the project’s release. “Sorry 4 the Wait was the first remix tape I got put on to and Sorry 4 the Wait II was the last. So, I thought I’d try to make my own remix tape of the hottest 2022 songs on the chart right now.”

Check out more of this week’s new projects below.