McKinley Dixon Announces New Album Magic, Alive!

In December 2023, we named McKinley Dixon’s Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? the third-best album of that year. “Dixon’s songs are not figments of the past so much as they are considerations of the present and the future, depictions of how each soul around him continues to get by in the places they came from,” I wrote back then. The album, which featured songs like “Run, Run, Run,” “Tyler, Forever” and the fantastic, sax-jazz concerto title track, was full of conceptual sincerity, and it established Dixon as one of the best rappers alive.

But it was Dixon’s 2021 opus, For My Mama and Anyone Who Look Like Her, that left the biggest mark on us here at Paste. In 2024, we named it the best album of the 2020s so far. I wrote, “With references to Toni Morrison’s Songs of Solomon and The Bluest Eye pulsing within, Dixon’s work is like an ongoing novel, one that projects a very plainspoken, beautiful articulation of how Black love intersects with violence and community, and what tenderness might look and feel like when it interacts with wreckage—a theme Morrison was often gnawing at in her own bibliography.”

McKinley Dixon’s work is done as a way of building a museum that tends to the conversation around Black art—a far-ranging and breathing memoir that is eternally in progress via the forever-evolving ways that Black people write about place or experience place in the shadow of vacancy.

Today, Dixon has announced Magic, Alive!, his fifth LP and yet another notch in his ongoing catalog of joyous breakthroughs. The project is full of stories, particularly that of friendship and grief, songs that surround a trio of little homies trying to outrun and outsmart mortality. Dixon made the record in his native Richmond, with Sam Yamaha and Koff and featuring guest appearances by folks like Shamir, Pink Siifu and Teller Bank$. “It’s like a celebration when I make a record back in Richmond,” he explains. “Everybody has grown, but now here we are together again.” Magic, Alive! is ushered to life by its lead single, “Sugar Water,” which features contributions from producer-rapper Quelle Chris and singer-songwriter Anjimile.

Listen to “Sugar Water” here and check out the Magic, Alive! artwork and tracklist below.

Magic, Alive! Artwork:

Magic, Alive! Tracklist:
Watch My Hands
Sugar Water (ft. Quelle Chris & Anjimile)
A Crooked Stick (ft. Ghais Guevara & Alfred.)
Recitatif (ft. Teller Bank$)
Run, Run, Run Part II
We’re Outside, Rejoice!
All the Loved Ones (What Would We Do???) (ft. ICECOLDBISHOP & Pink Siifu)
F.F.O.L. (ft. Teller Bank$)
Listen Gentle
Magic, Alive!
Could’ve Been Different (ft. Blu & Shamir)

Read: “Entering the Kingdom of McKinley Dixon”