Almost no album in rap history has been quite so anticipated as Music, the third album by Atlanta’s Playboi Carti. The harsh, extreme-bass sound of his second, 2020’s Whole Lotta Red, took him to a new level of fame and acclaim – it was canonised as the second best album this decade by Pitchfork (beaten only by Fiona Apple) and a massive influence on a whole generation of rage-rap from Yeat to Ken Carson, OsamaSon and numerous other noisy young MCs. Carti initially announced Whole Lotta Red’s follow-up just three months after its release. Instead, it’s been – cue Titanic grandma voice – over four years, with Pitchfork recently issuing a 34-entry breakdown of all the false dawns and teased info that Carti has drip-fed his starving fans in that time.
It looked like Music (renamed from I Am Music) would finally arrive on Friday, but the promised release time was moved back by three hours. When that time arrived, no album appeared. “My bones are weak, my soul is drained, and my will to live is hanging by a thread” was one typical reaction in the Instagram comments; the danger was that the wait was so long it could never be worth it. But Music is easily good enough to sweep any embitterment away and could come to be seen as a trap classic.
This is not a forum for politically conscious lyrics or scrupulously tailored ethics, nor is it aiming to be (though the latter are complicated in Carti’s case by allegations around his own behaviour: his ex-partner, rapper Iggy Azalea, claimed he was absent from their son’s birth in 2020, and he was arrested in 2023 for allegedly assaulting his pregnant girlfriend, which he denied). Instead it’s a litany of boasts, threats, consumption (material and chemical) and reports of sexual congress that range from coldly efficient to outright demeaning: I winced at “spit on a bitch like Pac”.
But for the most part, Carti’s nihilism is riveting, partly because of what he says (“I put your ass in the food chain” is a Sopranos-worthy threat) but mostly because of how he says it. You can certainly spot the MCs that have inspired him, from Lil Wayne’s gnarled croak to Future’s narcotised mantras, but Carti, a self-styled “emo thug”, subsumes them into his own bizarre and massively varied diction. On I Seeeeee You Baby Boi he babbles in a downy-soft high register, on Evil J0rdan he uses a hoarse, jaded mid-range and on Mojo Jojo there are deep pronouncements like a vocal-fried wizard: his delivery of the phrase “he a goon” is worth the price of admission alone. While many MCs dutifully work their lyrics to the beat, Carti makes the beat for work for him, adding little bursts of chatter or slurred words outside it while maintaining a core rhythm. It makes freestyle tracks like HBA especially involving.
The beats themselves are just as varied, from classic Atlantan trap to a Hungarian psych sample underpinning the superb Philly, dainty chipmunk-soul on Backd00r, bright R&B on We Need All Da Vibes and some mechanistic ragers such as Pop Out and Cocaine Nose, the latter sampling the sensuously heavy guitar from Ashanti’s Only U.
The frequent interjections of DJ Swamp Izzo, admiring Carti or simply shouting his own name at maximum volume, helps to glue these styles together, and nicely offsets the grandeur of this most lofty and long-awaited album project, making it feel more like a mixtape or radio session. But the guest rappers clearly sense the history being made here. Future’s triplet flow is fearsome and relentless on Trim, as if putting his nose to your face and backing you towards a ledge, while Travis Scott subtly moves his lines on Philly up and down in pitch to make cleverly minimalist hooks.
Like Carti himself, Kendrick Lamar bends his voice into various forms, from Mojo Jojo – where he’s a trickster-god capering on Carti’s shoulder, throwing mischievous ad-libs in his ear – to Backd00r, with the doleful melodic style he recently used on SZA’s 30 for 30, to the crotchety-uncle voice he used all over his album GNX which reappears here on Good Credit. And the Weeknd is on top form on Rather Lie, a cloud-rap track of chest-clutching beauty that will probably become the big pop hit in the ensuing weeks – though everything on Music is already proving massively popular, becoming Spotify’s most streamed album in a single day this year.
Across 30 tracks there are some lapses – Dis 1 Got It and Walk can’t break out of Future cosplay, Twin Trim is a witless Lil Uzi Vert showcase, and Munyun is rather tepid and polite for a blown-out speaker-botherer. But for most of the 77-minute running time, Carti meets the expectations he made so high for himself.
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