Cloud Rap roundup
The Best Cloud Rap Songs Right Now
Essential tracks for understanding cloud rap: from Clams Casino's defining productions and A$AP Rocky's breakthrough to Lil B, Yung Lean and Bones.
A selection of essential tracks provides the clearest introduction to cloud rap as a listening experience. The following represent the genre's sound across its foundational period, covering its production approach, its lyrical register and its range of moods.
Clams Casino — "I'm God" (2011)
Built on a pitched-down sample of Imogen Heap's "Just for Now", this production is the defining single artefact of the cloud rap sound. Washed-out, reverb-heavy, slow and deeply melancholic, it functions as an ambient piece as much as a rap beat. Its influence on subsequent atmospheric hip hop production is incalculable.
A$AP Rocky — "Peso" (2011)
The track that introduced the sound to a mainstream audience, "Peso" pairs Rocky's confident delivery with SpaceGhostPurrp's hazy production. The combination of aggressive rap content with dreamlike sonic texture is characteristic of cloud rap's tension between energy and atmosphere.
A$AP Rocky ft. Drake, 2 Chainz, Kendrick Lamar — "F**kin' Problems" (2012)
Though more firmly in commercial hip hop territory, this track demonstrates how the atmospheric production elements of the underground scene entered mainstream rap vocabulary by 2012, with production that retains some of the hazy quality of A$AP Rocky's earlier work in a more polished context.
Lil B — "I'm God" (2010)
Lil B's own version of the track title, this early recording exemplifies his lo-fi, stream-of-consciousness approach to rap. The production is minimal and murky, the lyrics associative and philosophical, and the overall effect is of something raw and unfinished in a way that came to define the aesthetic.
Yung Lean — "Hurt" (2013)
Yung Lean's breakthrough single established the Sad Boys aesthetic internationally. The combination of hypnagogic production, AutoTune and emotionally direct lyrics about isolation and sadness brought the cloud rap aesthetic to an entirely new audience and demonstrated the genre's capacity to travel across cultural contexts.
Bones — "WhereTheTreesMeetTheFreeway" (2013)
An early Bones track that captures the harsher, more nihilistic end of the atmospheric underground. The production is lo-fi and distorted, the delivery monotone and detached. It represents the genre at its most raw and underground, before the sound was absorbed into more accessible forms.
For key artists, see the artists guide. For a complete overview, see the full guide.
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