Mark Battles, Young Neves, Lee Haze

“I just want to borrow your attention for, like, 45 minutes,” Mark Battles says in the opening moments of his latest album Day 2, and for the next 11 tracks, he earns it. That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who’s followed the young hip-hop artist’s short but busy career, because Battles is only 25 and is already prolific. The Indianapolis-based rapper started performing in earnest when he was still a teenager; before he was 21, he’d started his own label called Fly America, where he self-releases his own work as well as the output of several other rappers. He’s still relatively under the radar outside of his home state, though don’t be surprised if he becomes the next big thing in the indie hip-hop game.