If you had to select just one hip hop label as the most influential today, it would have to be Griselda Records. Founded by Buffalo, New York rapper Westside Gunn in 2012, the label’s principal players include Gunn as well as his half-brother Conway the Machine and their cousin Benny the Butcher, who work with such talent as in-house producer Daringer, Detroit native Boldy James, and female rapper Armani Caesar. Notably, although they became labelmates united for business purposes, they are essentially a tight-knit hip hop community sharing a similar musical vision.

It was in 2016 that the world started to take notice of Griselda. That was the year Gunn finally released his first studio album, FLYGOD, after recognition of the artist grew among hip hop enthusiasts through his many mixtapes. Although the album achieved only lukewarm commercial success, the media and other artists focused their attention on his solid rapping and the robust quality of the music. What happened next was astonishing. The very next year, Eminem, recognizing Griselda’s potential, reached out to them and soon after they were signed on to a distribution deal with Eminem’s Shady Records. Griselda’s image as an indie label hadn’t changed, but the scale of their promotion and distribution had entered a brand-new stage. 

This is when Griselda really started to explode in popularity: Gunn, along with Conway the Machine and Benny the Butcher, released a series of quality albums, enthralling dedicated hip hop fans and critics alike. The genre of these releases would be best described as coke rap. An offshoot of gangsta rap, songs in the coke rap subgenre explore themes related to crime. Now hailed as the best in the genre, artists like Pusha T, Roc Marciano, Ghostface Killah and Feddie Gibbs expanded the range of every aspect of the genre from music to production, capturing the world of crime in songs with an almost cinematic quality.

Griselda inherited the same flow but at the same time cultivated their own distinct brand of coke rap. In one instance, Gunn found inspiration from attending a Paris fashion show put on by Virgil Abloh’s fashion label Off-White, after which Gunn recorded his 2020 album Pray for Paris, featuring a shockingly fresh sound that seemed to transform an intimidating drug dealers’ alley into a fashion runway. (Writer’s note: Virgil Abloh is the first Black artistic director at Louis Vuitton and one of the most influential fashion designers in the world.)

Benny the Butcher’s 2019 album The Plugs I Met and its 2021 follow-up The Plugs I Met 2 are not to be missed either. He makes references to director Brian De Palma’s gangster masterpiece Scarface (1983) in these extremely absorbing coke rap albums revolving around the distinctive concept involving “plugs,” or drug dealers. The concept is a particular stroke of genius: a dramatic metaphor about drug dealers that exposes the dark side of the rap industry. Conway the Machine also played a major role in firmly solidifying Griselda’s strong position with high-quality crime rap on albums like From King to a God and La Maquina.

What’s most surprising is how they have consistently produced such unbelievably incredible albums like these in such a short period of time. Go Google their discography right now. Their output since 2020 alone is so astonishingly high that no one else can compete. That’s why we have to know Griselda if we want to know today’s hip hop.