every single year xxl gets the people talking and they just dropped their 2026 freshman list today… it’s also officially the ten year anniversary of the most legendary xxl class of all time, that largely blew up the brand to a whole new level and honestly had a major role in kickstarting the soundcloud era. lil uzi vert, denzel curry, kodak black, 21 savage, lil yachty… legendary ten years later, xxl has a really intriguing mix of people that’s been splitting folks online. slayr stands as the one artist that’s firmly from the “underground” scene we think of when we think of adjacent artists in lucy bedroque egobreak prettifun etc. it’s an intriguing thing to see as we haven’t really seen xxl adopt the underground much over the past few years, aside from sofaygo, even though they got him years after he blew up that’s also been a note most folks have been speaking about online. some of the folks on this lineup, from sosocamo to skrilla, have been around for a couple years at this point. skrilla of course blew up to a whole new national level with ‘6 7’ trim, la reezy, trap dickey, chris patrick, hurricane wisdom, and various others make up a list that either has people saying it’s a great variety or i’m also seeing a bunch of ‘who??’ comments if anything, it simply speaks to how fragmented hiphop as a whole has become, and how you’re really never going to get a unified opinion via the de*th of monoculture. and of course, that 2016/2017 moment essentially seems like something some folks tend to hang onto, though we know it can’t ever be replicated xxl’s curation (imo) could be a bit better for sure, but they’re also put in a really impossible situation trying to curate a list for the culture holistically when that’s definitionally not possible with the genre’s fragmentation thoughts? lmk below <3 — #xxlfreshman #skrilla #slayr #undergroundrap #playboicarti