DaBaby

BLAME IT ON BABY

In the moments that DaBaby peels back his layers to reveal more than a persona, he feels connected and centered. Though we love the bops, sometimes balance is necessary to keep a career fresh.

Blame it on Baby is no more or less serious than last year’s Kirk, and while most of the songs on it could easily have come from that album, they do help us understand the rapper’s path forward.

The bold, swagger-heavy rap songs are growing more tedious, and the experiments with singing and emotional nuance are mostly underdeveloped. DaBaby still has a grip on the special magic that put him on most listener's radars, but with the middle-of-the-road material of Blame It on Baby, we can hear that grip loosening.

Blame It on Baby is an obvious misstep in DaBaby’s otherwise flawless rise to rap stardom. This isn’t to say that he won’t be back soon with something more substantial but as it stands, this album has his least playback value.

Sweeter, smoother, and designed to be more palpable to the masses, DaBaby’s third studio album, Blame It On Baby, is a course correction from a course that didn’t need correcting, an adjusted recipe meant to appeal to a subset of fandom that’s no longer his commercial core.

Offering 13 tracks of Hennessy-infused rhyming, drums on drums on drums and a nasty Kidz Bop styled beat to tie it all together, the album is sadly a fresh reminder that DaBaby is hip-hop’s biggest one-trick pony. Unlike the release of his second studio album, KIRK released last year, a major fraction of Blame It On Baby lacks effort and even originality.

Even at its best, Blame It on Baby sounds like something DaBaby's done before and better.