MUSIC

Since Playboi Carti ditched the underground Atlanta collective around Awful Records for Harlem’s chic A$AP clique a decade ago, his officially released music has had a specific vision. You can almost talk about him in eras, like you would Taylor Swift: From the cryptic teenager who dropped loosies on SoundCloud to the It Boy at the margins of the mainstream on his debut mixtape; from the ad-lib-happy stage diver who shook up popular rap culture on Die Lit to the wannabe Dracula who redefined that culture with the rage-rap maximalism of Whole Lotta Red. The long-hyped and teased MUSIC—which has been in the works for almost five years but feels like it was made in a week-long bender—isn’t easy to shave down to a short description. Because rather than undergo another reinvention, Carti celebrates his status as the torch-bearer of modern Atlanta rap with an overwhelmingly self-indulgent 30-track flood of everything.

MUSIC is the synthesis of all of Carti’s impulses both good and bad: the inspired hip-hop head and transactional businessman; the disruptive rapper of his generation and the morally bankrupt social climber; a little grandiose self-mythologizing Kanye here, a little futuristic swag-era Atlanta nostalgia there; a sip of apolitical Travis Scott blockbusters, and a shot of Future-style degeneracy. There’s also a lot of mixtape Wayne in his soul, down to the “I Am Music” slogan he ripped from the Hot Boy. On one listen, you might get the impression it’s a jampacked strip club CD hosted by Swamp Izzo, the loudmouthed DJ known for talking his talk on Atlanta street rap mixtapes of the 2010s and for his longtime residency at the adult lounge Blue Flame. On the next, it’s bloated streambait, fattened with big-time guests in service of selling concert tickets and merch.

For music that is almost exclusively about hanging out, getting laid, and poppin’ molly, there genuinely is so much going on. It’s 77 minutes of nonstop trap beat variants, EDM flourishes, half-finished and overthought songs, and Carti pulling off such a range of voice work he’s like the rap game Dana Carvey. Take “Crush,” the album’s second track, which expands on the EDC festival build-ups he got into while on tour for WLR. The synths ride without a drop for more than 30 seconds as Carti toasts to the possibility of getting to have sex—it’s both restrained and kind of silly. That moment is undercut as soon as the rattling drums kick in, and out come the played-out trifecta of Mike Dean-inspired guitars, Travis Scott catchphrases, and Kanye-brained church choir bullshit. “Evil J0rdan” has a similar problem. The wonky Cardo-produced track, a highlight of the singles Carti released at the top of 2024, is a blur of punchlines in a voice more worn down than a home-plate umpire who just called a doubleheader. But the album version is overwrought, with a long, atmospheric intro that seems like it was conceived by a PC Music poser.

Carti’s restlessness is the engine of the album, a reflection of his boredom, attention span, and unbridled imagination in equal measure. That chaos is hollow when he’s hastily following the blueprint of popular prestige rap albums, thrilling when it’s used to capture the feeling of the music in his bloodstream. For example, he’s having a shit-talking ball on the Rich Kidz homage “Like Weezy.” And “Opm Babi” is basically Carti’s take on 1017 Thug’s stream-of-conscious mayhem, with a collision of gunshots, Swamp Izzo supervillain laughs, and blown-out bass. While that’s going down, Carti vibes out (his topics of choice are oral sex and ketamine) as his pitch rapidly shifts from sounding like he’s mid-burp to high enough that, when he hangs onto a note at the end, he almost channels the falsetto of a teenage Tevin Campbell.

A decent chunk of the album feels rushed, bringing in ideas almost as fast as it scraps them. On “HBA,” another highlight of the 2024 single run, new snare rolls that sound like they were added at the last minute are so jarring that even the lead producer of the song, Cardo, seemed caught off guard. There are tracks that feel like they were uploaded to the album by accident, like “Twin Trim,” which is, for whatever reason, a 90-second solo Lil Uzi song that might’ve been collecting dust on Carti’s hard drive for years. Carti appears as overwhelmed by the unchecked freedom and unlimited resources the WLR boom made available to him as I am writing about it.

Sharper is “I Seeeeee You Baby Boi,” where the combination of Carti’s vaporous melodies and DJ Moon and Lucian’s lush beat creates a flamboyant bounce. None of that sexiness carries over to “Fine Shit”—even though the beat is pretty—because the misogyny baked into controlling lyrics like, “My bitch so bad, she can’t even go outside/My bitch so bad, she can’t even post online” is amplified when you’ve been arrested for allegedly choking your girlfriend. As Carti pushes into his late 20s, the hypermasculinity of the Opium movement only feels darker and more charged.

Speaking of hypermasculinity, Carti’s thing nowadays is swagger-jacking Future. On WLR, he lifted Future flows on the regular, but now the resemblance is uncanny—his vocal cosplay is better at sounding like a fried Future than Future. His raspy hangover raps have a nice DS2 edge to them on “Overly,” where the pummeling drums give me flashbacks to listening to Juicy J and Lex Luger’s Rubba Band Business mixtape. Meanwhile, when Future pops in (on “Trim” and “Charge Dem Hoes a Fee”), he’s still in the same innocuous event-album mode of We Don’t Trust You and We Still Don’t Trust You.

Actually, none of MUSIC’s guests—the 2010s all-stars, we’ll call them—are doing anything inspired. Another Weeknd hook (“Rather Lie”) that I’ll hear on the radio and immediately switch to another station only to be disappointed that it’s on that station, too. Three more Travis Scott verses that could have just been a buy my new shoe email. There’s a Young Thug verse that sounds like Carti downloaded it from YouTube without permission. At least Kendrick Lamar, who is on three songs, steps into Carti’s world instead of the other way around. “Vamp life, spooky,” he coos over the drawn-out soul sample of the knockoff Kanye beat, coming off as stiff as when Fabolous hopped on sexy drill. Sure, Carti and Kendrick have absolutely no chemistry, but it is pretty funny that, outside of “Good Credit,” Carti mostly uses Mr. Super Bowl to riff and ad-lib like Thug does with his YSL weed carriers.

I’ll give Carti a pass for Skepta’s brief appearance on “Toxic,” because together they revive the unbothered fly of the Cozy Tapes. Otherwise, the revolving door of familiar faces signals what seems to have been the album’s original concept: an Atlanta street rap mixtape done like the kind of moment-making spectacles that have been the norm in hip-hop since My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Good thing Carti pretty much dropped that idea—nobody wants Opium Utopia (see: Yeat’s 2093). The unfiltered, impulsive mind dump happening instead is bolder. On “Walk,” he’s doing pretend Future on a 10-year-old Bankroll Fresh beat; on “Crank,” he lets Swamp Izzo catch the holy ghost on a flip of SpaceGhostPurrp’s “Fuck Taylor Gang (Not a Diss We Are Just Not Dickriders)”; on “Cocaine Nose,” he declares Opium the next Roc-a-Fella over a rage spin on a 2004 Ashanti single. The controlled havoc of Whole Lotta Red gives way to Carti doing stuff for the hell of it.

Somewhere out there, there’s a better and more focused version of MUSIC; the Opium Discord channels are surely hard at work piecing that together. And somewhere else, there’s a version that is safer and bleeds the eccentricities out of him. The MUSIC that does exist is somewhere in between, a flawed, contradictory, inflated, loud, exciting, mainstream-ified, uncomfortable, nostalgic event, but one that is still fixated on the music above all. It might go down as the purest distillation of Playboi Carti.