Marco Pavé is the sort of underground-rap hybrid that we need to be celebrating. Pavé is a rapper and community organizer from Memphis, and his music has all the political intensity and inward-looking incisiveness that we tend to associate with Talib Kweli types. But Pavé’s music is rooted in the heavy, guttural crunk that his hometown more or less invented. Pavé’s new album Welcome To Grc Lnd is a sort of concept LP about what happened when police in riot gear shut down a Black Lives Matter candlelight vigil outside Elvis Presley’s estate last year. It’s a powerful piece of work, and you can stream the whole thing at NPR.

The self-released Welcome To Grc Lnd is out 5/12.