Album Of The Week: Rae Sremmurd SremmLife

Nothing happens in early January. It's sad, but it's true. In movies, January is where the big Hollywood studios throw every movie that apparently didn't deserve a release date during the rest of the year. And in music, major and indie labels alike take a couple of weeks to shake off their holiday slumber, perhaps figuring that people would prefer to hang onto their iTunes gift cards for a few weeks. In the years I've been writing this column, the first couple of Tuesdays in January are the most weirdly desperate weeks of the year; you find yourself madly hoping for, like, a Dropkick Murphys album that you can have fun repping for. In some ways, 2015 is no exception; the release calendar is just about bare until Sleater-Kinney and the Decemberists and Belle And Sebastian all rumble back into action on 1/20. But 2015 is different in a very crucial way. On the first two Tuesdays of the year, we have a couple of great albums sneaking out, laughing at the odds and showing the world that things don't have to be so goddam slow. We'll get to next week when next week arrives. But today, on this most nothing-happening Tuesday, we are a lucky people. We are lucky because two kids from Mississippi have made the catchiest, dizziest, most inventive and energetic major-label pop-rap album in recent memory. You might not have guessed that the mid-'10s needed their own Kriss Kross. But they did, and now they have it.