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From the moment Errol Holden’s raps entered the public sphere in the early 2020s, listening to them has felt like hearing a stranger on the street earnestly tell you how the city has changed. It’s a type of transient, often one-sided interaction that’s delivered with blistering intensity, beaming information to your mind about buildings and storefronts that no longer exist and people long departed. That urgency has marked Holden’s prolific output—especially the thrilling first installment of his Supreme Magnetic series in 2025 and 2022’s Joe Frog—as the Harlem rapper uses his street-hustling past to paint an autobiographical portrait. Even when situated next to the godfather of East Coast underworld raps (as on the brilliant “Rain Dance,” from Roc Marciano’s 656), Holden has emerged as a singular presence, piercing through gloomy instrumentals with details mined from the deepest crevices of his brain.
Holden writes complex images without fluff. Early in SUPREME MAGNETIC 3, his stellar new album, he recalls arising from the rubble: “Sold skag out the shithole I was living in/Bundle after bundle I crumbled under the rubble/Then re-emerged on 123rd/Every day was the first,” he barks on “What Do you say to Drugs?” His verses expand rapidly, his voice occupying a slightly higher register, like a pastor barreling toward the thesis of his sermon; the production landscape offers a menacing, spacious atmosphere, rarely deviating from chaotic chops and eerie vocal loops. Over the record’s 33 minutes, Holden delivers an outstanding addition to his catalog that’s as absorbing and realist as any rap album this year.
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Holden’s ear for beats has steadily improved to fit his breakneck delivery since 2022, peaking with 2025’s Mulberry Silk Road, which was primarily laced by German producer 2000 Souls and executive-produced by Marciano. There, an ominous cloud settled over Holden’s every word, with a stream of samples that made the beats feel textured and lush. SUPREME MAGNETIC 3 holds to similar tenets with slightly more edge, and 2000 Souls returns to produce a majority of tracks. The production naturally moves from a ghostly haze (“From A place wit A name bigger than a kountry that ain’t even a Borough”) to feeling like it’s stitched together by numerous Rodney O & Joe Cooley tracks (“All Hail the Foulness”); other tracks feel draped in the quiet beauty of a piano recital (“King Heroin”), while some sound like incantations to raise the dead (“What Do you say to Drugs”). The beats create ample negative space for Holden to employ riskier flows, often deploying a double-time pace to burn through technically dense passages.
Holden’s vignettes are caked in grime and emerge at a reckless pace. Armed with a deep and irreverent reference catalog, he’s adept at simultaneously reconstructing his past and making his current moment feel alive. “Locked the top lock when I leave/My mother screamed as she headed to the door/As she headed to the store/So much Amelie on door,” he says on “King Heroin,” after describing some of the “terrors” of former mayor David Dinkins’ early-1990s New York. In another breath, he leaps from the biblical figures Bartholomew and Matthew to Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems, cutting himself off to leave you hanging on the bar. Though he may evade traditional song structure, Holden employs an enthralling repetitive tic that feels reminiscent of battle-rap style—rooted, in turn, in the way Black preachers build their speeches to a climax—to emphasize his brutal shit-talking. “Homie still with us so it’s evident it wasn’t enough shots,” he raps twice on “From A place,” doubling down to make the near miss feel even more sinister.
In an interview this year, Holden recalled encountering Five Percenters as a kid; on SUPREME MAGNETIC 3, the 1985 Louis Farrakhan speech that described the group’s ethos rubs up against specific tactile details like cast iron pans and ’90s Reeboks that you can pump up with the button on the tongue. In a creative landscape that’s increasingly catering to corner-cutting, there’s an invigorating feeling to the way Holden burrows deeper into the minutiae of his life to create something new. His proficiency, buoyed by his expensive taste and skill in daisy-chaining images together, got his foot in the door of the indie-rap revitalization. But the tireless churn of his storytelling, picking up and depositing little clues of what came before, is the mark of an auteur who has barely scratched the surface of his prowess.
