Schoolboy Q is the most promising foot soldier in Kendrick Lamar's Black Hippy crew, a small circle of talented rappers currently reinventing West Coast hip-hop. His dark and moody second LP is a sumptuously produced and deeply enjoyable hour-plus slab of weed-clouded rap, but it's more than that. Schoolboy is an odd, genuinely unpredictable presence who sometimes seems to be rapping entirely for his own amusement. With his wearily flat voice, his lyrics deal with all the dark stuff of gangsta rap-- poverty, violence, drugs, hopelessness-- but it never bogs down in momentum or succumbs to despair. It's hard to imagine that there will be many more original or satisfying hip-hop long-players this year.

Now a roaring, technically adept band rather than Dylan Baldi's bedroom solo project, Cloud Nothings undergo a total overhaul on their bracing Steve Albini-recorded second LP. It's an aggressive, catchy collection full of blunt lyrics, big choruses, devastating dynamics, and lots of screaming. Baldi's vocals are close-mic'd and raw, the drums loud as hell. Folks who grew up on Drive Like Jehu, Braid, and Jawbreaker can listen to these eight songs and sense their artistic legacy is in good hands, but there will inevitably be teenagers for whom Attack stands to be that kind of record to call their own.