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Larry June's Who Coppin: Uncle Larry Keeps Cooking

Sixteen tracks, zero rush — the Bay Area's healthiest hustler drops his second album of the year

Sister Nancy

Nineteen self-released projects deep before most fans caught on.

Album twenty just dropped — and he's still not rushing.

Larry June doesn't sound like he's in a hurry, and that's the whole point. Born Larry Eugene Hendricks III in San Francisco's Hunters Point neighborhood, raised partly in Atlanta before finishing school back in the Bay, June built his name the slow way — nineteen self-released projects deep before most casual fans caught on, with a brief stint at Warner Records in the mid-2010s that he walked away from to keep doing things his own way. These days he's independent again, releasing through his own imprint The Freeminded, and that independence is the whole engine behind his catalog: no label calendar to answer to, no filler to pad a rollout — just steady, well-made albums on his own schedule.


The other half of the June story is the one that made him a Bay Area icon beyond rap circles entirely: he's arguably the genre's first true wellness rapper. Long before "clean living" was a hip-hop talking point, June was rapping about fasting until 1pm, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and morning walks instead of trap-house war stories — trading crime narratives for spreadsheets and smoothies, basically. The orange became his whole visual language, down to the merch and the album art. Albums like Orange Print (2021, which topped Billboard's Heatseekers chart) and Spaceships on the Blade (2022) built the template; The Great Escape with The Alchemist (2023) and last year's Life Is Beautiful with 2 Chainz and The Alchemist widened his audience further.


Who Coppin, released July 17, 2026 on The Freeminded, is June's second full-length of the year — landing just five months after Spiral Staircases, his joint album with Curren$y and The Alchemist. Sixteen tracks, about 49 minutes, and true to form for an artist who treats consistency as a personality trait rather than a marketing strategy.


What stands out on Who Coppin is how sparingly June uses his guest list. Motivational speaker and podcaster Wallo267 opens the record on "Go Outside Intro," setting a tone that's part pep talk, part scripture. Jhené Aiko shows up on the airy "California Dream," floating over production from Cardo Got Wings. R&B veteran Musiq Soulchild brings a softer, more vulnerable register to "Pretty Green Eyes," produced by Jay Versace. Bay Area veteran B-Legit adds a rawer voice on "Win or Lose." None of it feels like a guest-chasing exercise — each name earns its spot rather than padding the tracklist.


The album closes on "God Got Us (Ain't Too Many)," which critics have singled out as June at his most effective: part hustler, part motivational speaker, closing the record the same way he's built his whole career — one steady step at a time, no shortcuts implied. It's the throughline of everything June makes: the luxury-rap surface stays intact, but the actual message underneath is discipline, patience, and doing the work quietly until the results speak for themselves.


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Sources & Further Reading

  1. Album Info — Apple Music —  Who Coppin
  2. Wikipedia — Larry June 
  3. Ratings Game Music — Who Coppin (Album Review) 
  4. HipHopVibe — Larry June Drops "Who Coppin" Album
  5. Shatter the Standards — Album Review: Who Coppin
  6. KQED — The Bay Area's healthy rap wave


Official Artist Links


No affiliation — Funknuz earns nothing from these links; they go straight to the artist.


larryjunetfm.com — official website (listed as his site in his Wikipedia infobox)

larryjune.bandcamp.com — official Bandcamp store, distributed via EMPIRE


A note on this article: This piece was researched and drafted with Funknuz AI, then edited, fact-checked, and finalized by our editorial team. All sourcing is linked above. AI can make mistakes, and so can we — if something reads off, that's on us, not the tech.

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Erykah Badu & The Alchemist: Before the World Blows

Eleven years apart, one shared beat, and a phone-free room in Toronto

erykah bady and the alchemist typographic graphic in pink and gold

Erykah Badu and The Alchemist's joint album

Before the World Blows started with a Mobb Deep beat and became her first LP in over a decade.



It started with a beat Erykah Badu couldn't let go of. Riding around with her friend Cole Chris, she kept coming back to "The Realest," the 1999 Mobb Deep track built on an Alchemist beat, singing over it like it was already hers. Chris turned out to know Alchemist and made the introduction. Three years and 18 months of studio time between Dallas and Los Angeles later, that car-ride impulse became Before the World Blows: The Abi and Alan Experiment, released August 28, 2026 — Badu's first album since 2010's New Amerykah, Pt. 2 (not counting the 2015 mixtape But You Caint Use My Phone), and her first as a fully independent artist on her own label, distributed through Young/Beggars Group.


Most of the record was built in the same room. The two of them traded off between Badu's studio and Alchemist's, rarely apart for the length of the sessions. The project's working name, "Abi and Al," comes from Badu's own middle name — a small but deliberate move, she's said, to let listeners step outside "the 30-year Erica Badu program" and meet something newer, less armored. "Before I met Al, I was kind of hardening up," she's said of the years leading into this collaboration — worn down by an industry culture that chases "a moment"; working with him helped her lighten back up and remember why she makes music at all.


Even the title has a backstory: it began as a poem, built out of a running refrain — one more blunt, one more glass of water, one more shot, before the world blows — half doomscrolling anxiety about the state of things, half an inside joke about how long the album itself was taking to land.

They road-tested it live before anyone outside the room had heard a note. In August 2025, Badu and Alchemist played the entire album at Toronto's History with backing collective The Cannabinoids — a phone-free show, no recording, no leaks, just the songs doing the introducing.


The credits read like a map of who's been paying attention to both of them for decades: Westside Gunn (twice), Earl Sweatshirt, Steve Lacy, Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, DRAM, and Badu's fellow neo-soul-era traveler Joi. A few of those pairings have their own small stories — the "To the Moon" beat sat with Jay Electronica for three years before Alchemist finally got it to Badu, and DRAM reportedly wrote full songs to five different Alchemist beats off voice notes on a tour bus before Badu called time. Even Badu's 17-year-old daughter, who records as Mars Electronica, wrote the chorus melody on "Love Me Not." As Stereogum put it, Badu raps nearly as much as she sings across the record, in a loose, whispery style that blurs the two.


The rollout matched the record's spirit — cryptic "One More Song…" posters across five cities, a puzzle-based reveal of the title, an interactive "Badu Burner Phone" experience where fans who crack the code get a real callback. Playful, a little conspiratorial, entirely on brand for an artist who's never done a press cycle the normal way.


Sounds



Sources & Further Reading


Official Artist Links


No affiliation — Funknuz earns nothing from these links; they go straight to the artist.



A note on this article: This piece was researched and drafted with Funknuz AI, then edited, fact-checked, and finalized by our editorial team. All sourcing is linked above. AI can make mistakes, and so can we — if something reads off, that's on us, not the tech.

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E-40: Turning His Money Over, One Hustle at a Time

Inside the Bay Area legend's new 40-song quadruple album — and the entrepreneurial empire that's been building alongside it for over a decade

Typographic graphic for E-40, lettering in Rap·Hip-Hop gold

40 songs. 4 discs. 1 independent hustle.

Since 2013, E-40's Earl Stevens Selections has grown into 17+ wines, six spirits lines, and two food brands — built, by his own account, with zero outside investors.

Three decades into a career most artists would've long since wound down, E-40 just did the opposite: he dropped a 40-song quadruple album. Turning My Money Over arrived August 28, split into four themed 10-track discs — Once, Twice, Thrice, and Cuatro — and stacked with guests spanning eras and coasts, from Bay Area mainstays Too $hort and cousin B-Legit to Larry June, Juvenile, Busta Rhymes, Anderson .Paak, and Killer Mike. He announced it himself in typically unbothered fashion, telling fans simply that the greatest game spitter of all time is back. It's the kind of scale that would read as excess from almost anyone else. From E-40, it reads as pace — the same pace he's kept since 1992, when Vallejo's most prolific voice started building a catalog that now ranks among the deepest in Hip-Hop.


But the album is really only half the story of what E-40's been building. Since 2013, he's poured that same restless energy into a business empire that's grown almost as large as his discography. What started as a single wine, named after himself, is now a full portfolio under his Earl Stevens Selections label: 17-plus still and sparkling wines, E. Cuarenta Tequila, Tycoon Cognac, two whiskey-adjacent spirits in Kuiper Belt Bourbon and Kuiper Belt Gin, Tycoon Vodka, the Sluricane cocktail line, and a golden lager. Off the drinks side, there's Goon With The Spoon (sausages, burritos, ice cream) and The Lumpia Company, the Filipino food business he co-owns that now runs a restaurant in Oakland, a stand inside the Giants' Oracle Park, and a food truck in San Francisco. He's said as much himself: "We family-owned. Black-owned business for real from the ground up," E-40 said on The Breakfast Club. "I'm talking about no investors. No nothing."


The word tying it all together — tycoon — isn't incidental. It's one of his. As he told Forbes, the name wasn't invented, just repurposed: "Of course it has always been in the dictionary, but nobody was screaming tycoon until I was screaming tycoon on numerous records." That's the pattern with E-40's vocabulary generally, and it's worth pausing on for one line: he was calling weed "broccoli" as far back as 1993, on "Practice Lookin' Hard" — years before the term resurfaced and sparked arguments over who said it first. Money got its own word from him too: scrilla.


Turning My Money Over works as a title for both halves of what he does — the music and the businesses run on the same hustle, and thirty-some years in, neither shows any sign of slowing down.

Sounds

Sources & further Reading

Official Artist Links


No affiliation — Funknuz earns nothing from these links; they go straight to the artist.


A note on this article: This piece was researched and drafted with Funknuz AI, then edited, fact-checked, and finalized by our editorial team. All sourcing is linked above. AI can make mistakes, and so can we — if something reads off, that's on us, not the tech.