Into The MusicSideshow does not fit anywhere cleanly, which is probably the point. The Tigrayan-American rapper from the DMV area released Tigray Funk in February 2026, a 32-track, four-disc project that refuses to behave like a conventional rap album. Pitchfork put him on the cover last week. If you have not heard him yet, that interview is as good a place to start as any. The writing is as dense and surprising as the music.
He was born in Tigray, Ethiopia, and spent his early years moving between Virginia and Los Angeles. The biographical facts matter because they inform everything: the paranoia, the tenderness, the way his verses feel like they are processing something that language is not quite equipped to handle. He is connected to the 10k collective, the label-and-crew around MIKE, and carries some of that group’s devotion to craft and interiority. But Sideshow sounds like nobody else in that circle or outside of it.
Tigray Funk is the capstone of a run that started with two EPs in 2020 and built through Wicked Man’s Reprise in 2021 and DON’T JUST STAND THERE! in 2023. Each record pushed further into something more personal and more formally ambitious. This new one arrives at what feels like a culmination, though with artists like this the word “culmination” is almost always wrong in retrospect.
The album works through the Tigray War obliquely, through fragmented memory and metaphor rather than direct documentation. He frames the whole thing around a parable about animals becoming predators and prey. The abstraction is earned, not evasive. He is not refusing to confront the subject. He is finding a way to confront it that does not collapse under its own weight.
Productionwise, the record moves between smoky soul samples, chopped and fractured percussion, and moments of near-silence that land harder than anything louder could. The collaborators, including harrison from Surf Gang and Tony Seltzer, understand the assignment. They build rooms for Sideshow to inhabit rather than competing with him.
The Pitchfork feature ran two days ago and framed him as one of the most interesting new voices in rap right now. That framing feels right without overstating it. He is interesting not because he is doing something completely unprecedented, but because the intelligence and the honesty operating inside the form are at a level that is genuinely rare.
Spend time with Tigray Funk. It is a lot of record, 32 tracks across four discs, but it earns the length. Start with disc three if you need a way in. Then go back to the beginning.