Cartwheeling the Tightrope

Hattie Lindert listens to Playboi Carti’s new album “MUSIC.”

By Hattie LindertMarch 30, 2025

• Music

THERE ARE A FEW salient ways to measure the last four years in rage rap. You could track the evolution of the sound—a scraped-out and screaming blend of trap, punk, and industrial music—in new Rolling Loud franchises, Rick Owens rabbit hat sales, god-awful takes from brain-dead streamers like DJ Akademiks (“u gotta channel ur YE energy,” he urged followers, this year), Nettspends. But the real metronome has always been Playboi Carti, whose 2020 magnum opus Whole Lotta Red drop-kicked the subgenre into a new era of post-punk production meets postmodern MCing: yelps, growls, coos, mantras, and maniacal key changes standing in for verse-chorus-verse or even traditional battle rap structure. He scythed out a pathway for countless imitators, among them a vanity label’s worth of slightly limp potential torchbearers like Ken Carson, Destroy Lonely, and Homixide Gang, plus more legitimate candidates such as Ohio upstart OsamaSon. Then, shoulder blades locked beneath a lofty artistic achievement and a widening playing field alike, Carti had to make a new album. At first, he didn’t hesitate—maybe that was the problem.

Like all of Carti’s best work, his new album MUSIC arrived in pieces. It was first teased as a separate-but-chemically-comparable record called Narcissist, for which alleged release dates came and went and went and came: his 25th birthday in September 2021, Christmas 2022, and January 2024 (one of Akademiks’s aforementioned poor prognoses). Tours were scheduled and canceled, singles uploaded and deleted; Reddit threads and Discord servers spiraled accordingly. By the time billboards paid for by Interscope and “unc of the underground” 42ceo—which promised the record by midnight EST on March 13 of this year—were plastered in Times Square, plenty of zealots had become skeptics. Two more delays and a frantic live-streamed text session with Kai Cenat later, it landed a day late, in the early morning hours, like a schyea-heavy rooster crow.

Under- and overdeveloped at once, MUSIC lands like an event rescheduled in your calendar so many times that you’ve lost track of the agenda—an amorphousness that does a disservice to its unruly and exploratory sprawl of a track list. Unlike the bleeding-edge splendor at the end of the stilted WLR rollout, the 30 songs on MUSIC run the gamut between inspired and insipid. Early, exultant leak-release hybrids like “EVIL J0RDAN,” “H00DBYAIR” (which appears on MUSIC as “HBA”), and the sorely missed “DIFFERENT DAY” primed fans for a less aggressive, more elusive mode: diaphanous 808s and slick-but-hoarse vocals designed not to rile up but merely to unsettle. Fleshing out this fish-bone build, unfortunately, is a glut of fat: shoddy sequencing, reheated stock features from a decade-old idea of rap’s A-list, and milquetoast production heavy on sequenced snares and bargain-basement low-ends. If, as Pitchfork’s Olivier Lafontant astutely points out, today’s Zoomer MCs and rap fans pine for the spiky millennial tip perfected by Santigold and M.I.A., 29-year-old Carti is more invested in the hedonistic excess of late 1970s/early ’80s rock outfits like Slayer, Black Flag, and The Damned. Four years after debuting his own wild interpretation of post-punk, its commercial limits seem reached. Carti the artist is most successful in a spontaneous, raw mode of performance, cartwheeling the tightrope between snippet and song, hook and verse. But Carti the brand has Spotify streaming numbers to game, merch bundles to sell, TikTok-addicted teenagers to please. The only thing less rockstar-made than a billboard in Midtown Manhattan is a direct line to Kai Cenat.

Carti’s stylings have always leaned couture, but consider MUSIC the sample-sale approach: high fashion intended to be handled by the masses, a six-trait starter pack for “avant-garde.” The familiar foibles of an “event album” are at work here—namely, a certain context blindness when it comes to rap’s new guard, who does not include any of the big-name features present here: Future, the Weeknd, cutting-room-floor Young Thug, industry schoolyard pal Lil Uzi Vert at his most Lenny Wosniak, and a downright dejected Travis Scott. It’s easy to picture the board meeting that brought Scott and the Weeknd into all of this, two key figures in the decadent party pop-rap of eras since sent out to pasture. It almost makes sense, until you hear a downtrodden, father-of-two Scott rap about “making hip-hop look like rock,” somehow an even less convincing performance than his role as a gangster-slash-infrared NPC named Zion in Harmony Korine’s AGGRO DR1FT (2023). With Carti’s most rabid listeners skewing young—like, it’s just me and the tween my boyfriend tutors waiting up for the album young—why not inject a fresh voice into the mix: Atlanta upstart producer Vayda, left-field Georgia MC LAZER DIM 700, or, for once, the only real viable heir on his label?

Most successful among the largely burdensome heavyweights is Kendrick Lamar, whose vocals are mixed as if he’s the Insidious demon baring his ugly teeth over your shoulder. Still shaking off the proverbial confetti of what’s arguably the first diss Super Bowl halftime show of all time, Lamar happily takes on unhinged hype-man duties, dubbing Carti his “evil twin” on “GOOD CREDIT” after they trade gleeful non sequiturs on the understated but thrilling “MOJO JOJO.” Not all of Kendrick’s appearances are so effective: his disconcerting, crooned refrain on the Certified Lover Boy–esque “BACKD00R,” is buried in a plodding Lil Wayne flip. Wayne, whose “I AM MUSIC” tattoo seems to have inspired Carti’s title, towers over all the other influences on the album, a stylistic lodestar that’s less at odds with Carti’s air of mystery than it might seem.

The majority of MUSIC reaches past the chilled-out Awful Records haze in which Carti cut his teeth, for influences even older: Wayne’s boisterous theatrics, Future’s plunging cadences, Rich Kidz and SpaceGhostPurrp samples, the gospel-tinged warmth of uncharacteristically forthright closer “SOUTH ATLANTA BABY.” Deep Southern ties weave together statement interjections from Swamp Izzo, who hosts the album like a mixtape and loosens the binding structures of boring tracks such as “WAKE UP F1LTHY.” In a prerelease interview, Akademiks reported that Carti had asserted, somewhat puzzlingly, that MUSIC could cement him as “the Travis Scott of Atlanta.” But where Scott’s attempts at Houston reverie have always come out hollow and virtue signaling (there’s a reason all that UTOPIA posturing still didn’t materialize a tour date in the city), Carti’s nods to past inspiration are vernacular enough to mitigate the territory, well trod by Atlanta rappers and their impersonators alike. Take “LIKE WEEZY,” a tone-perfect palate cleanser that flips Rich Kidz’ “Bend Over” into a jerk playground that may as well be a welcome-home ode to Young Thug (also featured on the cute “WE NEED ALL DA VIBES”). With all the dreams of murder and pentagram T-shirts, it’s easy to forget Carti has a sense of humor—but lines like “I told her I’m big like Bieber, she ain’t believe me” are drawn straight from the charming playbook of a rapper who used to get stoned before high school basketball practice and still put up 30.

If the aggressive and winsome sides of Carti’s personality seem incongruent, they kind of are, as is made evident in song transitions that could be generously called abrupt. But it occasionally pays off, as is the case with “TOXIC” and “MUNYUN,” which crash into each other with the same energy as a newly licensed teenager jockeying for playlist control. Where the bulk of WLR comprised jagged-edged and abrasive material, MUSIC ups the quotient on puckish, even cheeky material (bring on a Skepta barb about your loser boyfriend!). But sometimes the cracks show through—by the time early highlight single “HBA” arrives over an hour in, it seems like an afterthought: a distracting reminder of exactly how long it’s been since he started promising this. The high-low contrast of a teakettle synth and multipart gospel choir give “CRUSH” the momentum of the highest highs on Kanye West’s kiddie roller coaster of a statement album Donda (2021). But (however incensed he may be over the record) it’s as if West walked Carti through the rollout on an earpiece—don’t be surprised if MUSIC 2 pops up on a limited edition Zune by summer.

Despite a deeper (if shallower) collaborator bench, Carti is still at max powers on his own. Where few of these features manage to capture the past glory they want to collect on, Carti has always been at most endearing while out front catching all the bluster—the beguiling lightness of “OLYMPIAN,” which recalls 2017’s “wokeuplikethis*”; the tone poem “MUNYUN”; the early fan-favorite shredder “COCAINE NOSE.” As he falls in and out of melody on “I SEEEEEE YOU BABY BOI,” it’s like watching the Die Lit (2018) cover come to life. MUSIC’s response to “Control,” the mid-album ballad crests into a bluster of node-scratching synth loops as Carti introduces yet another new technique: a singing voice. Carti’s vocal play has long been a leading indicator of his most pivotal career choices—whether in “baby” or “deep” mode, he has managed to fine-tune modes of communication that conjure the naked experimentation of a kid trying out new sounds on their tongue. As far back as his breathwork and button-pop interjections on effervescent debut album highlight “dothatshit!,” this practice falls in a genre-agnostic lineage of trying shit that has spawned some of the greatest artists of all time: Thug rattling off hook after yelped hook during the sessions for his early mixtape I Came From Nothing (2011), Elliott Smith’s first non-Heatmiser demos, Amy Winehouse singing happy birthday. For as stilted and exhausting as this rollout has been, when Carti rounds out the syllables of “She’s a dIfferent brEEd” on “MOJO JOJO,” he sounds anything but out of ideas.

At its worst, MUSIC raises questions about the longevity of Carti’s current sound, so endlessly imitated that it seems near-impossible to recreate. But at its most inviting, MUSIC finds new affectations in consecrated ground, tossing roses at forebears like Thug, Future, the Cash Money crew, Rich Kidz, and Purrp without hypocritically biting any careers. Faced with the challenge of following up a true era shift, he has produced a sprawling collage of the familiar—and, in turn, revealed more about himself than ever before. As titanic rappers of his generation fall out of fashion and into brand deals, Carti makes looking back an unexpectedly intimate affair—for an artist whose entire look is a cloak of mystery, tracks such as “SOUTH ATLANTA BABY” are pleasantly unexpected. Rather than raising the bar he set for rage rap, he’s swinging on it, encountering newfound curiosity and momentum along the way. It’s a lot to sink your teeth into—but that’s what the vampire fangs are for.