Carti’s restlessness is the engine of the album, a reflection of his boredom, attention span, and unbridled imagination in equal measure. That chaos is hollow when he’s hastily following the blueprint of popular prestige rap albums, thrilling when it’s used to capture the feeling of the music in his bloodstream. For example, he’s having a shit-talking ball on the Rich Kidz homage “Like Weezy.” And “Opm Babi” is basically Carti’s take on 1017 Thug’s stream-of-conscious mayhem, with a collision of gunshots, Swamp Izzo supervillain laughs, and blown-out bass. While that’s going down, Carti vibes out (his topics of choice are oral sex and ketamine) as his pitch rapidly shifts from sounding like he’s mid-burp to high enough that, when he hangs onto a note at the end, he almost channels the falsetto of a teenage Tevin Campbell.
A decent chunk of the album feels rushed, bringing in ideas almost as fast as it scraps them. On “HBA,” another highlight of the 2024 single run, new snare rolls that sound like they were added at the last minute are so jarring that even the lead producer of the song, Cardo, seemed caught off guard. There are tracks that feel like they were uploaded to the album by accident, like “Twin Trim,” which is, for whatever reason, a 90-second solo Lil Uzi song that might’ve been collecting dust on Carti’s hard drive for years. Carti appears as overwhelmed by the unchecked freedom and unlimited resources the WLR boom made available to him as I am writing about it.
Sharper is “I Seeeeee You Baby Boi,” where the combination of Carti’s vaporous melodies and DJ Moon and Lucian’s lush beat creates a flamboyant bounce. None of that sexiness carries over to “Fine Shit”—even though the beat is pretty—because the misogyny baked into controlling lyrics like, “My bitch so bad, she can’t even go outside/My bitch so bad, she can’t even post online” is amplified when you’ve been arrested for allegedly choking your girlfriend. As Carti pushes into his late 20s, the hypermasculinity of the Opium movement only feels darker and more charged.
Speaking of hypermasculinity, Carti’s thing nowadays is swagger-jacking Future. On WLR, he lifted Future flows on the regular, but now the resemblance is uncanny—his vocal cosplay is better at sounding like a fried Future than Future. His raspy hangover raps have a nice DS2 edge to them on “Overly,” where the pummeling drums give me flashbacks to listening to Juicy J and Lex Luger’s Rubba Band Business mixtape. Meanwhile, when Future pops in (on “Trim” and “Charge Dem Hoes a Fee”), he’s still in the same innocuous event-album mode of We Don’t Trust You and We Still Don’t Trust You.
