When it comes to rap mixtapes, there are bad, good, and great ones, and then there are mixtapes that are so fantastic it can take weeks and months to let the whole experience seep in. These are the ones that are so strong your brain stays glued to the first handful of songs long after your ears have moved on to the end of the collection, where your brain continues to wrestle with the details of those tracks even when there’s silence.
I’ve run into a small batch of mixtapes in recent memory that fit that very definition, and some—like Danny Brown’s XXX, Tree‘s Sunday School, and Jeremih’s Late Nights With Jeremih, which is more of an R&B mixtape with lots of rapping than a hip-hop mixtape but is still quite fantastic—have taken up permanent residence in my skull, most likely at the expense of things I once found useful, including my rudimentary grasp of Italian. Now there’s another one vying for a plot of space in my mind: The Luca Brasi Story, a brand-new collection from Kevin Gates.