DAHI'S BLACK BOY ALTERNATIVE ARRIVES AUGUST 28

Dahi has produced hits for a decade without putting his own name on the marquee, and his debut album finally does it with Kendrick Lamar, Childish Gambino, and Vince Staples all on the same eleven track list. Black Boy Alternative arrives August 28 through Alter Music, and the feature sheet alone is the kind of lineup most artists build a whole career toward, not a first release. Dahi built it as the record where he stops being the architect behind other people's rollouts and becomes the name on the cover.

August 28. Eleven Tracks. Three Marquee Names.

Black Boy Alternative drops August 28 on Alter Music with eleven songs, and the credited features read Kendrick Lamar, Childish Gambino, Vince Staples, Channel Tres, Fousheé, Ravyn Lenae, Baby Rose, Moses Sumney, and Amber Mark. "How To Pray" pairs Kendrick Lamar with Amber Mark, while "Who Are You" stacks Vince Staples, Channel Tres, and French Anthony on a single track, which is a feature density most debut albums never attempt.

That density is the actual headline. It is not often a producer's first album as a billed artist arrives with three separate A list rap features already cleared and credited, and it says Dahi called in relationships built across more than a decade of session work rather than chasing a single viral pairing. Alter Music, the label releasing it, is not a major imprint chasing a first week number, which means the eleven tracks were sequenced for the record's own theme rather than for a radio single.

Dahi Made Money Trees Before He Made a Debut

Dahi produced "Money Trees" on Good Kid, m.A.A.d City in 2012, the song that gave Kendrick Lamar his first real commercial breakout and gave Dahi his own. He returned for five tracks on DAMN in 2017, including "Loyalty" with Rihanna and "XXX" with U2, before spreading into records for Drake, Big Sean, SZA, and Travis Scott. Black Boy Alternative is the first time that entire session history gets to answer to Dahi's own name instead of a client's.

The credits explain why the Kendrick feature on Black Boy Alternative reads less like a favor and more like a callback. Two producers who built a platinum single together in 2012 are finishing a different kind of record together in 2026, and the through line is fourteen years of studio trust, not a publicist's pairing. In between those two records, Dahi produced Drake's "Worst Behavior" and Big Sean's "I Don't Fuck With You," the kind of catalog that gets a producer credited on award show plaques but never once forces a listener to learn his name.

"Running" Is the Single. It Is Not the Center.

"Running," the Childish Gambino collaboration, is the song Dahi chose to introduce the album, which tells you where his confidence sits. The track runs past four minutes on a minimal rhythm bed, guitar notes carrying the warmth instead of a hook, and the arrangement shifts into a saxophone lined jazz passage midway through, a mix decision that trades an obvious chorus for atmosphere. Gambino and Dahi have worked together before this album, and "Running" leans on that familiarity rather than treating Gambino's name as the hook.

Dahi has described Black Boy Alternative as a project that reframes Black identity as self defined, built from his own history of absorbing hip hop, R&B, and rock in the same rotation. That framing matters more for how the album is sequenced than for any single feature, since a record built around one theme has to make eleven very different voices sound like they are answering the same question.

Look at the Credits Sheet, Not the Feature List

Vince Staples does not lend his voice to filler. His appearance on "Who Are You" alongside Channel Tres and French Anthony follows the same instinct that put him on Converse's Cry Baby rollout in Los Angeles, where he treated a release as a full staged performance instead of a streaming drop. Staples picks collaborators who match his own production standards, and Dahi's session resume is exactly that standard. Fousheé, Ravyn Lenae, Baby Rose and Moses Sumney round out the featured list, a group that leans R&B and alternative rather than straight rap, which is the same genre blending Dahi has described as the album's actual thesis.

Black Boy Alternative lands August 28 with eleven tracks, a Kendrick Lamar and Amber Mark pairing on "How To Pray," and a Childish Gambino collaboration already released as the lead single. Dahi spent fourteen years building the credit sheet that made this possible, starting with a Kendrick Lamar song most people know by heart and never connected to his name until now.