2013 In Review: Sizing Up The Year’s Breakout Hip-Hop/R&B Producers

Hudson Mohawke

If you scan across the production credits on Kanye West’s Yeezus, it pretty much reads like a who’s who of emerging producers and avant-garde EDM artists — including, but not limited to, Gesaffelstein, Arca, and Evian Christ — who have been blowing up music blogs for the past two years. But young Brit Hudson Mohawke‘s work on the searing “I Am A God” and, most importantly, the cataclysmic “Blood On The Leaves,” allowed him to leave the biggest mark on the year’s biggest hip-hop album. He’s shown great promise since signing with Ye’s G.O.O.D. imprint in 2012, popping up on tracks like the effortlessly cool posse track “Mercy” and Azealia Banks‘ “Jumanji” before getting invited to Kanye’s now infamous Paris hotel room in January to work on what would become Yeezus. But, as far as I’m concerned, the volcanic, horn-laden beat drop that Mohawke contributed to “Blood” — which itself was a reworked version of his and fellow collaborator Lunice‘s “R U Ready?” from their TNGHT project — is a piece of production he can hang his entire career on.

After poring over Yeezus for a good 48 hours after it was released, I remember scouring Twitter for reactions, and seeing one music writer comment that he wished he could go back in time and hear those horns on “Blood On The Leaves” for the first time again. If your beats elicit those kinds of reactions, young HudMo, you’re doing it right.

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