Let's Start Here.

Sprawling hip-hop, always for artists making challenging works and this is Lil Yachty likely making the music he listens to. Inspirations are numerous and easy to point out but they come off more as homages or are straight up produced by these artists so can’t fault Yachty at all in fact I’m here for it. Diana Gordon absolutely killed it all across this album.

All that said Lil Yachty cannot sing, even with auto tune the listens are toooough at points, and what was that rap verse on “The Ride”(thought teezo was trying to get rid of the mid not make more). There’s little things like the outro of “Pretty” which is so bad, I wonder how those choices aren’t edited out. I imagine this is where “Poland” would have been, since Yachty uses the wobble vocals to great effect. Lyrically as well things could have been seriously worked on, I think the 5+ writers were too busy with production to actually do some editing? “failure” is so badly written especially considering that it was his spoken word moment (happy to have this trope die with the spoken word outro of “Pretty”). The writing needs to be as tight thematically as “the black seminole” or sway a little deeper introspectively; There are nice one liners but then the rest of the song is made up of, I love you’s and I'm high’s. “Say Something” is so guilty of this, it’s such a great track but the words are worse than imitations, “our energies align inside your pond”.

Yachty has something here and I think he does a lot better than with his trap focused records. This isn’t some masterpiece record more a welcome surprise from an artist I thought had very little to say outside of a single or three. Hopefully he continues to explore this sound and mix it with the brightest parts of his previous records, sort of like what we saw on “Poland”.

Hope to see a deluxe version with that blood orange feature 🍊.