The newest form of hip-hop, and America doesn't know about it yet. Coming from the exact opposite direction of 88rising, Juu is a singular Thai talent who reps his Asian locality so hard that the music he makes ends up utterly fresh and globally resonant. Captain Beefheart with Auto-Tune? Drake riding a water buffalo? His first full-length album, "New Luk Thung," has arrived.

So who is Juu? Thailand's hip-hop scene keeps producing one compelling act after another, and among them Juu is respected as an OG — yet catching wind of him from outside Thailand is extremely difficult. He sings in Thai, has zero physical releases, and the only traces of him existed on YouTube; OMK (One Mekong) followed those traces and managed to make contact. In 2017 they finally brought him over for his first-ever Japanese live shows, revealing both his outlandish musicality and his personality. The overly fat bass and finely chopped hi-hat grooves are post-trap, but the freely stretching and contracting flow, the mind-bending linguistic sense that weaves together English, Thai, Japanese and Koshu dialect, and the quotations from the rich canon of Thai classics (not to mention his funny character) all showed that he exists on a completely different plane from the trap copycats flooding the world today.

This album is the result of a meeting of minds between this maverick and the OMK crew: co-produced under the lead of Young-G (stillichimiya / OMK), it took roughly two years to complete and stands as Juu's first full album. Most of the tracks come from Young-G's hands, and the sound brims with an ambition that reflects OMK's attitude. Thai instruments like ching, cowbell, khaen and phin are worked in throughout, yet never as exotic seasoning — they're brought in out of necessity, to inject the beats and grooves native to Thailand. And on the mellow numbers, what seeps out is a flow (a sense of song) that connects to both luk thung and Japanese enka. Filtered through Juu's hip-hop and reggae background, it all generates an indescribable "new kayo feeling."

As the title "New Luk Thung" suggests, this album takes luk thung (*1), a Thai popular-song genre that was on the verge of dying out, and pattana-s it (*2) with cutting-edge hip-hop. Like hip-hop, luk thung repeatedly quotes (samples) past classics and brings them back to life. And, again like hip-hop, it's a music in which the lyrics matter enormously. What defines this album is how completely and seamlessly it digests the shared manners of luk thung and hip-hop. The title came from something Juu said to Young-G during the making of the record — "this is new luk thung" — and it's a name that feels inevitable. This is both "the latest hip-hop" and "the latest luk thung." Be sure to check the complete lyric translations, which were an enormous challenge to render, for a look into the poetic world of Juu, respected as the finest "master poet" in Thai hip-hop.