Albums are what matter. As much as we love all those great verses, awesome beats, and memorable singles, its albums that define genres and eras. Albums provide solid foundations for legacies to lie. It seems simple enough, it’s just a collection of dope songs loosely held together by a concept, theme, or sound. But even then, there aren't any hard and fast rules about how to create a great album.

Sometimes, they just seem to happen; an artist just cracks some unseen code in the Matrix and breaks through with a monumental piece of work. Sometimes, we see it coming all along as an artist finally lives up to their previously untapped potential, other times it comes out of nowhere as a new artist establishes him or herself seemingly overnight. It’s hard to make a great album, but when you do make one best believe we'll cherish it and hold it close to our hearts.

In the last half decade, thousands (if not millions) of rap albums and mixtapes that have been released. We no longer really see the difference between mixtapes and albums; if it's all original music, then it's an album to us. So we narrowed them all down to pick the best of the best. These are The 10 Best Rap Albums of The Last 5 Years...

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