After four and a half years of waiting, the highly anticipated follow-up to rapper Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red (2020) was finally released this past March. A long wait comes with grand expectations for a star as big as Carti, and to deliver can always be difficult to live up to. Unfortunately, the nearly five-year wait did not result in a product that many had hoped for.
Hailing from Atlanta, Georgia, but cutting his teeth in the 2010s New York City hip-hop scene, Carti came into his own with projects including Die Lit (2018) and his self-titled debut (2017). The young artist carved a niche by pioneering the “rage” sound; this being the heavy, churning bass, aggressive synths and floating melodies that rumble at a high octane. This abrasive energy–showcased on Whole Lotta Red–simultaneously captivated and polarized the masses. The music world proceeded to wonder how he would build from this raw, albeit novel, genesis. Frustratingly, it seems that Carti is not interested in pushing the envelope on MUSIC (2025), his latest release, instead sticking to a sound on the record that feels like an attempt at recreating his own style. From the opener, “POP OUT,” there is a distinctive rattling melody with Carti’s signature ‘baby voice,’ which comes across as a bland repeat of “Rockstar Made” or “Stop Breathing,” a couple of consensus highlights from Whole Lotta Red. Carti opts for a different direction from these previous efforts by altering his voice toward a more moody, raspy and sinister tone that adds even more energy to his intense sound.
Travis Scott sets an underwhelming tone for the vast majority of the features on the album with “CRUSH,” and the record soon dives into one of a list of songs that could have been left off the project entirely with “KPOP.” Perhaps as a response to having taken so long to complete it, Carti loaded up MUSIC with 30 total tracks, many of which were not of the quality that fans and critics expect.
The latter half of the album is especially weak. Most of the cuts are brief and sound unfinished. Several of the final tracks including “WALK,” “TWIN TRIM” and “OVERLY” are all under two minutes long and share a feeling of ineffective replication of a previous sound that was already effectively honed on Whole Lotta Red. This propensity to merely stay in this pre-established groove without pushing its boundaries or further experimenting is perhaps the greatest tragedy of MUSIC. Carti is clearly a creative and bold artist who has shown he has the talent to take risks and make them work well. With this album it feels like he wanted to stick to his guns and not change up a proven formula. This can work on a concise, intentional, thought-out project that has a selective and curated list of tracks that genuinely play off each other well. But here, it feels like Carti is throwing together an unfocused compilation of ideas he had generated from the sessions for the album and kept most of what he liked without polishing them.
“OLYMPIAN” is one of the few standouts from MUSIC. It is a vibrant and exciting track that showcases what Carti is sonically capable of. Carti’s latest effort is an addition to a long lineage of highly-anticipated projects that are overwhelmed with quantity with little reserved focus for quality. MUSIC’s “RATHER LIE,” “EVIL J0RDAN” and “TOXIC,” show that Carti is still clearly capable of fleshing out his creative visions, but the album nonetheless exhibits a clear lack of cohesion and consistency that hampers it from reaching its full potential.
