Miki Hellerbach

3 days ago | insidethecredits.substack.com | Miki Hellerbach

The best r&b album of the year thus far, easily, is Xavier Omar’s arguable opus HunnyMoon Mountain. While Omar’s timeless tone centers the energy, where the album truly thrives is in the variance in the production and composition. Omar maintains a smooth r&b core to his deep dive into relationship complexity, but uses an array of adjacent influences to expand that world while keeping it fluid.

1 week ago | insidethecredits.substack.com | Miki Hellerbach

It happened again. I found a new artist who lit up my ear and I looked inside the credits. I found their producer and went back through their catalog. I found that they helped create other stuff that I love. Let me introduce you to Brad Cook, the mastermind behind the boards of the just released Jensen McRae album I can’t get out of my head and can’t stop listening to.

2 weeks ago | insidethecredits.substack.com | Miki Hellerbach

What’s happening for the sixteenth time paid subscribers?! After a little over a year of INSIDE THE CREDITS you committed your money to my writing. Your investment makes me feel deep gratitude. So, I’m gifting you a breakdown of my favorite songs that have dropped this month and each month of the year with some words to accompany my reverence for the tracks.

2 weeks ago | insidethecredits.substack.com | Miki Hellerbach

Don’t get it twisted, Kaytranada has a lot of great songs, with some range of sounds. I remember first becoming aware of him when he did his collaborative Ocean & Montana ep with LA rapper Buddy in 2017. Their chemistry felt pure as his contained two step cadences merged with Buddy’s Devin the Dude/Nate Dogg coded textures. But there was something about Kaytranada’s production that always worked best to me with a smooth melody.

3 weeks ago | insidethecredits.substack.com | Miki Hellerbach

Sometimes numbers align, and since this is ITC 56, it’s pretty cool that 6 is such an important number for this piece. As the subheading indicates, I made a pretty cool six song discovery. Ian Kirkpatrick, a pop music wizard I’ve come to find out, achieved a whopping feat of producing the best song on an impactful six albums—at least to my ears. The impetus for this discovery is, to me, the most interesting part. I’ve been running the new Jessie Reyez album PAID IN MEMORIES a lot since it dropped.