It is so easy to reach in blindly and pull out a well-produced track with a decent guest appearance and Smoke at his lyrical best.
The album’s strengths are many, from its production to its featured guests’ verses to Smoke’s lyrics and skills. ‘Shoot For The Stars, Aim For The Moon’ showcases a multi-faceted artist only just discovering his potential.
His posthumous album, Shoot For the Stars Aim For the Moon, is ... not only a celebration, but an elegy for what else he could have achieved.
With stakes this high and a legacy to consider, the end result may or may not bear much of a resemblance to what Pop Smoke had in mind. Nonetheless, he sounds alive here, a motivated and vibrant hip-hop talent actively pushing towards that next level.
Shoot For The Stars Aim For The Moon is a collage of Pop’s versatility.
The rapper’s posthumous debut album shows us why he remains the voice of New York City.
Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon neither blights nor burnishes Pop Smoke’s legacy.
Though the first two volumes of Meet the Woo lacked the bombast of Smoke's iconic singles, they demonstrated candor in their representation of the drill heavyweight; SFTSAFTM, by contrast, tarnishes the rapper's visionary style with predatory glitz as everyone jumps for a piece of the pie.
#7 | / | The New York Times: Jon Caramanica |
#10 | / | Complex |
#10 | / | The Ringer |
#14 | / | Highsnobiety |
#42 | / | Far Out Magazine |
/ | Hypebeast |