It was nigh on impossible not to get a strong sense of déja vu when the promised release of Playboi Carti’s long-anticipated third studio album, MUSIC, was pushed back by a few hours earlier this month, and then failed to surface on streaming platforms at said newly pledged time. After all, fans of the near-mythical Atlanta trap rapper had already experienced several false dawns with regards to its release since he first teased a follow-up project only three months after 2020’s trailblazing rage-rap classic Whole Lotta Red came out.
Having spent most of the night issuing updates to fans about sample clearances delaying the record’s arrival, Carti finally dropped MUSIC – initially hurriedly posted without feature and songwriting credits – almost nine hours late. Taking in 30 tracks across its 77-minute runtime, which has since been expanded to add four further songs on the bonus release MUSIC – SORRY 4 DA WAIT, the rapper has certainly gone some way to making amends for its long gestation period. MUSIC sees Carti move away from the more focused, punk-infused energy of its predecessor, in favour of giving us, well, a bit of everything.
Therein lies some of the record’s problems, though. The track sequencing and a number of its transitions feel somewhat awkward and unwieldy at times, grand-sounding intros and outros frequently building to nothing. Within hours of the album dropping on streaming services, some eagle-eyed fans had noted that ‘POP OUT’, a pleasingly rowdy banger that opens the record, was seemingly set up to naturally transition into breezy trap cut ‘EVIL J0RDAN’, which appears here in reworked form having initially emerged as a SoundCloud loosie early last year. Instead, the two tracks are separated by the choir-aided, anthemic goofiness of ‘CRUSH’ and whimsical electric guitar epics of ‘K POP’. With such oversights, as well as some rather muddy-sounding mixdowns across the album, it’s hard not to imagine that Carti would have put out a somewhat better record, and overseen a less shaky rollout, if he didn’t have the obligation of a headline appearance at California’s Rolling Loud festival two days after its release looming over him. Despite this, it’s an opening run of tracks that comes together nicely enough.
It’s in the presence of other cuts on MUSIC – many of them featuring the album’s star-studded cast of collaborators – that the record doesn’t fare quite so well. Travis Scott guests in typically forgettable and underwhelming fashion across tracks like ‘PHILLY’ and ‘CHARGE DEM HOES A FEE’, while Future also largely phones it in, popping up both on the latter song and ‘TRIM’. The Lil Uzi Vert-featuring ‘TWIN TRIM’, meanwhile, leaves you wondering whether someone included it on the album by mistake, or simply forgot to add Carti’s verse in the rush of getting it released in time.
Calming as it is amid the disorderly energy of much of what surrounds it, there’s a deeply generic vibe that permeates ‘WE NEED ALL DA VIBES’ with its Ty Dolla $ign-provided hook and a guest verse from Young Thug that feels awkwardly tacked on simply to get the influential rapper’s name onto the features list. That’s certainly not to say that MUSIC doesn’t have its unremarkable moments when Carti’s left to his own devices. On ‘WALK’, he needlessly does his best Future pastiche, while the opening bars of ‘FINE SHIT’ (“My bitch so bad she can’t even go outside / My bitch so bad she can’t even post online”) leave a particularly bad taste, even on a record where it’s not remotely surprising to find the spectre of toxic masculinity looming over proceedings.
For all of these clunky moments and unfortunate missteps though, there’s a genuinely great and immensely fun album to be found within MUSIC amid Carti trying out various vocal stylings – from raspy goblin mode and drowsy chatter to shrill, pitch-shifted coos – to riveting effect. Appearing back-to-back in the second half of the record, ‘OLYMPIAN’ and ‘OPM BABI’ are a febrile one-two punch of bass-boosted Atlanta trap brilliance, the latter in particular a dizzying clash of gunshot samples, the rapper’s Auto-Tune-assisted falsetto and the maxed-out vocal tags of Swamp Izzo, the Atlanta DJ whose voice appears erratically across MUSIC having lit up various mixtapes coming out of the city in the 2010s. ‘COCAINE NOSE’, with its callback to the instantly recognisable guitar licks of Ashanti’s 2004 R&B hit ‘Only U’, is another highlight, with Carti dipping firmly back into his maximalist rage bag.
Other cuts like ‘HBA’, ‘CRANK’, ‘I SEEEEEE YOU BABY BOI’ and the Rich Kidz-sampling ‘LIKE WEEZY’ are highly addictive, replete with swaggering trap drums and carefree lyrics. Some of MUSIC’s guests do indeed bring something to the table too. ‘TOXIC’ is a nonchalant intercontinental link-up between Carti and Skepta (following their 2018 collaboration ‘Lean 4 Real’) that finds both on fine form, while The Weeknd turns in a nice, if admittedly schmaltzy, earworm of a hook on the sprightly ‘RATHER LIE’, which will no doubt be the album’s big radio hit.
Kendrick Lamar also appears across three of the record’s tracks. On ‘MOJO JOJO’, the rapper regarded as perhaps the biggest hip-hop artist on the planet right now is reduced to the role of mere hype-man popping in to offer some candid, if slightly awkward, ad-libs here and there. Over ‘BACKD00R’’s perky R&B beat, meanwhile, Lamar recalls the smooth speak-sing melodies that lit up recent collaborations with SZA, ‘Luther’ and ’30 For 30’. His most substantial contribution follows on ‘GOOD CREDIT’, on which he revives the villainous vocal style that defined much of last year’s surprise album GNX and serves up some comically sharp one-liners (“I carry the weight, n***a, I’m Luka Dončić”), even if he’s convincing nobody when he stresses “Carti my evil twiiiiin”.
If you’re so inclined, you can certainly make a better and more concentrated version of MUSIC simply by firing up the streaming platform of your choice and playlisting all of its standout cuts. There sure are enough on offer to make it worth your while, and you can also sidestep the ungainly sequencing that disrupts the record’s progression in the process. While I and other traditionalists might gripe about the erosion of the art of making an album, MUSIC is a very modern-day record in that sense, satisfied to showcase all manner of modes and sounds in Carti’s locker in the hope of pleasing every kind of fan.
It’s certainly not the first high-profile album release of recent years to opt for overloading on ‘content’ as mere streaming fodder – and it sure won’t be the last. The MUSIC you get, as a result of that strategy, is flawed and considerably bloated, but nonetheless tremendously entertaining and packed with bangers for the club. It might lack the innovation and urgency of Whole Lotta Red and the rampant, moody energy of 2018 debut album proper Die Lit, but the infectious chaos of those previous projects remains in abundance, and who said Carti needed to reinvent his own wheel anyway?
