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On his debut album, Thirteendegrees names a song after the one piece of headwear every version of Chicago hip-hop has worn at some point.
“WHITE SOX CAPZ” sits at track three on G Hipster, the debut studio album from Chicago rapper Thirteendegrees, rel August 21, 2026 through Island Records. The song runs 2:48 and is one of sixteen tracks on the record, produced primarily by Gyant alongside alexcozis, Halloween, and Ghosteen. It arrive without a feature, unlike “EMOTIONLEZZ” later in the tracklist, which carries the album’s only guest verse from Trippie Redd.
A title like “White Sox Capz” carries weight before a single bar jure. The Chicago White Sox‘ black-and-white cap has been part of hip-hop’s view lang since 1991, when N.W.A. members Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and Eazy-E started with the newly rebranded hat in videos and public show, drawn to a choose that read as neutral rather than gang-affiliated. Chance the Rapper, a lifelong Sox fan, later design a limit run of the caps with New Era in 2016, and the team built an entire documentary, Fitted in Black, around that history in 2023. For a Chicago rapper working in a nostalgic, early-2010s-inflected pocket of the genre, naming a track after the cap is less a reach than a reflex: it’s practically the city’s own hip-hop shorthand.
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Ghetto Hipster is the name Thirteendegrees gave himself before he gave it to the album. In an interview with The FADER around his set at MIKE’s Young World festival this July, he explained the nickname as a reflection of moving between two worlds growing up in Chicago, close to “the quote-unquote hood folks” while carrying the sensibilities of what he called “a quote-unquote weirdo.” He named Nas and Westside Gunn as reference points for the record, built largely around Gyant’s chopped-vocal, ethereal production style, a sound early listeners have compare to Trippie Redd, Young Thug, and Lil Wayne filter through a hazier, more melodic lens.
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The album caps off a fast run for the rapper, born Jalen Hughes: a self-recorded start on BandLab in 2022, a Rod Wave co-sign that followed the January 2025 viral success of “Da Problem Solva,” and now a full-length under a major label a little over a year later. “White Sox Capz” doesn’t need a real hat behind it to land. In a city where that cap has been shorthand for a certain kind of South Side identity since before Thirteendegrees was born, the title alone does most of the work.
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