Best Hip Hop Artist / Band

Classified wasn’t planning on releasing a record in 2024. Not at first, anyway. He’d stopped going to the studio during the COVID-19 pandemic, until he realized he missed the routine of it all. And even then, he didn’t have an album in mind. He’d already flirted with retirement before.

“I thought [I’d stop] at the end of Greatful, honestly,” he tells The Coast. “If you listen to the last song on that album, I go through and thank everybody in my career, because I was like, ‘Man, this is it. I’m almost 40; I’ve rapped about everything.’ What else am I going to rap about, you know?

“And then, two months after sitting at home, you start getting bored.”

Thank goodness. That creative itch was enough to spark Luke’s View, the 47-year-old rapper-slash-producer’s latest full-length album. It also earned the Enfield emcee—otherwise known as Luke Boyd—his ninth Best of Halifax gold for Best Hip Hop Artist/Band. Not that any of the accolades have changed Boyd.

“I was a young kid that just liked making hip hop,” he told an interviewer in 2013, “but I always felt like I was kind of that outsider, that young kid coming up, and a lot of people didn’t really get what I was trying to do or like what I was doing. It was always kinda me feeling what I was doing, liking what I was doing. And I just kept doing it.”