It’s taken over four years for Playboi Carti to produce the follow-up to his landscape-shifting album Whole Lotta Red. Titling its successor, Music, with devious opacity, the famously withholding rapper gives us something new for him: excess. Even though Whole Lotta Red and 2018’s Die Lit were both an hour long, they still felt focused and of a piece. Music is a good 15 minutes longer, offering 30 tracks that span myriad styles and producers. It’s messy and less cohesive than anything he’s released to date, but it also demonstrates the staggering range of mainstream rap’s most eccentric, experimental, and enigmatic auteur.
The vocal styles on display throughout are perhaps Music’s greatest asset. Carti’s vocal evolution has been the stuff of lore: He debuted a new voice on Travis Scott’s 2023 hit “Fe!n” that was shockingly deep and garbled, like he had bronchitis and was also drunk. The “Fe!n” voice shows up here on “K-Pop,” and it’s as if he’s auditioning to be a ventriloquist, or embodied by a demon doing a Stitch impression. And he’s hoarse and reptilian yet slipperily effeminate on “Radar.”
Carti’s choices can be pointed, as he dips into his baby Carti voice on “Opm Babi” and knowingly affects a Future-esque croak on “Toxic,” whose title is basically synonymous with the Future brand at this point. Indeed, Carti’s Future aspirations are egregious on Music: He clearly aims to sound like him on songs like “Jumpin” and “Walk” to the point that it’s distracting. For someone so imaginative at morphing their vocal tone, this kind of mimicry is unnecessary.
Which isn’t to say that Carti isn’t happy to vary the sounds of his music as much as he does his own voice. “Pop Out,” for one, is a clear continuation of Whole Lotta Red’s rage-rap electricity, its beat vibrating like barbed wire coming into contact with acid rain. But while the previous album’s blown-out bass and cursed-object vibe are also evident on “Munyun,” Carti isn’t just repeating himself on Music. “Backd00r,” co-produced by Kanye West and Ojivolta, is the antithesis to Whole Lotta Red’s shifty paranoia, featuring Carti practically cooing over a swishy Evilgiane-type beat. The result is the one of the most seductive Carti tracks ever.
On “Rather Lie,” a fantastically celestial cut featuring the Weeknd, Carti is no less approachable, coming off refreshingly at ease. Elsewhere, there are theatrical, orchestral synths and keys that relay a menacing effect on “HBA” and “Overly.” And the chilly, flitting electronics of “I Seeeeee You Baby Boi” is reminiscent of Swedish collective Drain Gang, whose main progenitor, Bladee, paid tribute to Whole Lotta Red on last year’s Cold Visions.
The album’s eclectic aesthetic comes to a head with a particularly jarring transition deep into the runtimes, specifically when the muscular, electric-guitar-looping “Cocaine Nose” abruptly switches to the polished, bouncy melodic rap of “We Need All Da Vibes,” which gives Young Thug the spotlight for much of the song. It’s one of several cuts that could’ve been made and points toward the patchwork nature of the album’s assemblage.
Similarly, “Jumpin” features Lil Uzi Vert repeating “pink tape” ad nauseam, a reference to their album of the same name that was released nearly two years ago (the song is likely a leftover from those sessions). Music’s other Uzi track, the 90-second “Twin Trim,” is the most squeaky-clean, linear groove on the album, and Carti doesn’t even appear on it at all.
The majority the songs clock in at under three minutes. It’s not that any of them feel incomplete or half-baked, but there’s very little structure or guiding purpose to how the album is arranged. It’s a big dump of raw files to feed fans starved of no official releases for close to half a decade.
Luckily, Carti isn’t some bloviating, self-serious drone. He’s a crafty and often funny trickster. He and Kendrick Lamar, who features on no less than three of the songs on Music, have a blast on the delightful “Mojo Dojo,” with Kendrick volleying exclamatory ad-libs after just about every Carti line. Carti’s offbeat vocal approaches make lyrics like “I just put on my boots/Ain’t worried ‘bout no rain,” from “Evil J0rdan,” sound absurd and silly. “Crush” hilariously employs a backing choir for a song that barely properly begins and is largely Carti muttering “shawty gon let me crush,” with the choir over-emphatically echoing the sentiment. This is emblematic not only of Carti’s sense of humor, but of how much pure style and leftfield maneuvers are given precedence in his music and how inconsequential substance and traditional lyricism are to him.
Indeed, Music, even more than the rapper’s past albums, is post-language: There’s very little storytelling going on here, and many lines are so incomprehensible that they’re being debated on Genius, as the Carti team has yet to release any official lyrics. But he’s able to invest his unique colloquialisms with feeling and import. Carti’s greatest trick is turning his fragmented, repetitious, stream-of-consciousness phrasings into blistering anthems and piercing confessionals. Calling his verses associational would be too prescriptive.
From its title to its intent to its thematic and aesthetic through-lines, Music is all-encompassing, abstract, and opaque. One occasionally gets lost in the too-muchness, but for an artist with this much to offer, a rangy hodgepodge is more enticement than shortcoming.
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