SV
Slum Village were J Dilla's creative home base — T3, Baatin, and Dilla himself, three Detroit teenagers making music in Conant Gardens before any of them had a record deal or a name outside the city. The group's cassette-only Fantastic Vol. 1 circulated through hip-hop's underground in the late '90s as something that sounded completely unlike what was charting: loose, warm, bass-heavy, built around Dilla's off-grid drum programming and the group's easy, conversational rapping. Fantastic Vol. 2 (2000) was their proper debut, and it remains one of the great documents of what hip-hop sounded like when the producer was also a band member rather than a collaborator. After Dilla departed and Baatin passed away in 2009, T3 kept the name going, but the original trio's run is the one that matters — a blueprint for how a producer-centric group can make music that sounds like a conversation between friends.
Fantastic Vol. 2
2000
The canonical Slum Village record — Dilla's most fully realized early production work under the group format, warm and deep and endlessly revisitable.
Trinity (Past, Present and Future)
2002
The major-label debut, still Dilla-heavy, and a record that introduced the group's sound to a larger audience without diluting what made the cassette tapes compelling.