The drought between Complete Lotta Purple and MUSIC made it appear to be the prior gaps in Carti’s catalog had been mere blips. This time, the signal-flare promo singles have been launched with extra evident intention, however nonetheless held off of DSPs. Followers cataloged Carti’s each transfer with acquainted diligence, however a brand new nihilism had set in: the album, the tour, the following spherical of merch — none of it was ever coming, they joked. He’s in Houston, now, or perhaps London; he’s in Marrakech; he’s within the studio with Pi’erre once more; he’s making an attempt new designer medicine with Kanye; he’s bulking up for Milan’s trend week; he’s slimming down for New York’s.
What was clear, nevertheless, was that he was rapping with as a lot pressure and instinct as ever, his vocal elasticity, uncanny sense of rhythm, and slyly outré imagery in good ensemble. See “Completely different Day,” which is delivered like a breathless, center of-the-night account of a horrible dream; see “H00DBYAIR,” which, mercifully, made the ultimate minimize and imagines that the inventive explosion of circa-2014 Atlanta rap befell, as an alternative, in hell.
MUSIC is just not the paradigm-warping pressure that Complete Lotta Purple was, both for Carti or for rap writ giant. It ingests and spits out much more diverse and attention-grabbing sounds than simply the fashion and rage-adjacent rap that exists in WLR’s wake, however the sound palette, tempos, and guiding sensibilities are related sufficient that you just’d count on it to be obtained as an extension somewhat than reinvention. And whereas it justifies its size and infrequently drags, the LP as an entire lacks the inevitable, irreducible high quality of its greatest songs, letting MUSIC drift, at instances, dangerously near .zip file territory.
Thankfully, even when caught flat-footed, Carti is ready to gather himself and exert nearly unbelievable quantities of gravity. The relative retread “OLYMPIAN” is salvaged instantly by “OPM BABI,” a delirious inversion of soul-sample music mechanics. That the A listing options (Future, The Weeknd, Travis Scott, Kendrick Lamar) are nearly superfluous solely underscores Carti’s marquee standing. If not uniformly engrossing, MUSIC is not less than incessantly hypnotic.
Typically it even makes that bent towards hypnosis literal: On “Cocaine Nostril,” what sounds just like the chirp from a W. Bush-era Nextel cellphone echoes underneath the refrain, like a sonar searching for Instagram fashions. That’s removed from the one relic of the previous that Carti repurposes right here. DJ Swamp Izzo, a fixture on the mixtape circuit that helped break a lot of those self same 2014-vintage Atlanta artists, hosts MUSIC, his bark littering tracks and injecting them together with his frantic, towel-me-off urgency. However opposite to what he says at the start of “Munyun,” you do not need to be dwelling “underneath a rock” to be unfamiliar with him — you would possibly merely be underneath 30. This performs in a different way than when, for his 2021 album Name Me If You Get Misplaced, Tyler, the Creator enlisted DJ Drama to host and solid the LP as a mixtape from his Gangsta Grillz sequence. The place Tyler was mining nostalgia, Carti appears extra fascinated with collapsing time altogether.
