Recess

Album ∙ Hip-Hop/Rap ∙ 2025

That Mexican OT

Among the artists responsible for Texas’ current national hip-hop renaissance, That Mexican OT holds a rarified space within the contemporary canon. With 2023’s Lonestar Luchador and the following year’s Texas Technican, the explicit yet charming Bay City representative became one of the state’s most visible modern rappers. Just months after his joint 2025 Chicken & Sauce project with Houston’s own Sauce Walka, he’s back with a characteristically engaging full-length called Recess.

Intermittently interrupted by proudly sophomoric skits that play on the titular schoolhouse theme, the album plays to his strengths as a lyrical misfit while also testing his potential to break into different genre spaces. Whether suffering from success on “Hate Being Famous” or detailing his salacious appetites on “Foreign to Me,” his Southern bona fides naturally come through. He leans into a country-fried motif on the witty “Weed Eater” and applies a hilariously heavy-handed stepdad metaphor to the wack rapper smackdown “Rap Sons.”

Recess continues his collaborative streak, with old friends and new showing up to get into his kind of mischief. Some of these veer into relatively poppier territory than his prior albums, including “U and Me” with Dallas’ BigXthaPlug and the Lil Wayne team-up “Baby Mad at Me.” Just in case that unsettles his Day Ones, tracks like “Accessories” with Peso Peso and “Business” with Money Man feel quintessentially within his established comfort zone. Still, it’s hard not to appreciate his evident growth on the boom-bap refresh “Blocka Blocka” with Denzel Curry or the heartland rock ballad “Runnin.”