Genre: Trap / Cloud Rap / Emo Thug Phase Rap
Length: 30 tracks – 1h 16m
Features: Travis Scott, The Weeknd, Kendrick Lamar, Jhené Aiko, Skepta, Future, Lil Uzi Vert, Young Thug, Ty Dolla $ign
Opening Statement by Trishna Chettiar
Playboi Carti’s album MUSIC, hyped up like the second coming of Whole Lotta Red, landed with the impact of an overcooked noodle. After years of cryptic Instagram posts, mysterious leaks, and a fanbase worshipping him like a vampire messiah, Carti finally dropped MUSIC, and it was… definitely something.
As Carti built up anticipation for this album, fans survived off literal scraps: blurry concert clips, weird vampire aesthetics, whispers of unreleased bangers, etc. Lulled by the unreal hype, people predicted MUSIC would change the rap game forever—or potentially even unlock a new dimension. Instead, we got a 30-track mess that felt like Carti recorded it all within the past 3 months. However, this drawn-out buildup remains one of the few things holding this album back from being seen as pure garbage. It was talked up for so long it became a joke, resulting in people listening to it without huge expectations.
MUSIC completely lacks direction. There’s no sense of cohesion— one track might have a blown-out, distorted beat that sounds like a car crash, while the next serves up an ambient loop with barely any vocals. Carti has always thrived on unpredictability, but this time the chaos drowns out anything inspired. He relies too much on his aesthetic and mystique rather than crafting songs that actually hit. Vampires never die—but they certainly do fall off.
Production-wise, it’s criminal to the senses. The dreadful mixing combined with poorly balanced vocals creates an unlistenable sound. The chaotic Whole Lotta Red at least had a vision – MUSIC is a sporadic free-for-all consisting of a ton of different sounds just piled on top of each other. Even guest features from Kendrick and The Weeknd couldn’t save it. They just made Carti’s parts feel even more like background noise. Paired with incredibly vapid lyrics, Carti’s signature energy and engagement falls flat. His delivery comes off as lazy and uninspired, making it a chore to listen to the tracks. This album should have been named I AM NOISE.
Lowlight Tracks
“POP OUT” – Full disclosure—this song is a banger. The beat does crackle and cut randomly, but Carti’s performance lands. The energy, the rhythm, the sound are all there. However, this song should never have been picked for the album intro; it functions better as the third or fourth track. “POP OUT” gives the impression that the album will share its same energy and excitement, but nope.
“OPM BABI” – Pure auditory brain rot. Its dense, chaotic production clashes with all good taste. It sounds like Carti gave a newborn a soundboard and just rolled with it. Carti’s off-putting voice sounds experimental in the absolute worst way. Not to mention the lyrics made zero sense. I recognize the attempt to create a heavy ring of aura around this track; it’s just not the aura he was aiming for. This track had to have been a complete joke that accidentally made the final cut.
“EVIL J0RDAN” – This track’s flow struggles to emerge beneath the awful production. The heavy 808s and tumultuous backdrop work against each other rather than together. The thick, overdone layers of sound distract from the core of the song. The beginning sounds like a wannabe TikTok rapper assembled a beat and sent it over to Carti. Overall, this track lacks the emotional depth a song needs. It’s more about style and sound—which aren’t executed well here. There’s no chorus, no stable beat, and no real flow.
“RATHER LIE” – sounds as though Carti got the shitty first draft of “Timeless” by The Weeknd and threw the beat into a microwave. This track completely leans on effects, but not even post-production could save it. Carti and The Weeknd’s signature catchy hooks have fled the scene. If you ever need a song to clear out a party, this is it. “Timeless” stands as living proof that, in theory, “RATHER LIE” could be a fantastic track, but in practice, it is boooring.
OVERLY – Again, an absolutely garbled flow. It sounds like Carti put a leaked demo on the album INCOMPLETE. If Carti revealed he worked on this track for 5 minutes total, I would fully believe him. The beat comes in strong, but then the song just kind of.. exists? It’s like waiting for a rollercoaster to drop, only for it to slowly roll back into the station. The ending cuts off abruptly. If this song was a meal, it’d be a plain wheat burger with no toppings and missing a patty—food only by a technicality. There was almost no effort put into it; even 20 more minutes could’ve been the difference between a banger and… whatever this is.
“MOJO JOJO” – Carti takes a big risk when he tries to blend himself with Kendrick’s chemistry, and he fails. Reminiscent of when Sabrina Carpenter and Chappel Roan shared the stage, they’re both great artists separately, but they mix like water and oil. Kendrick and Carti try so hard to complement each other’s sound, but it just doesn’t work. The whole endeavor sounds like they’re fighting on the track. This forced duet throws all the potential out the window in favor of an awkward group project where Kendrick scribbles his name on after it’s already been finished.
“CRANK” – Swamp Izzo hopped on this track and stimmed for 2 minutes. Not really, but his irritating interjections peak here.The beat has potential, but it never really goes anywhere. This es flows over a redundant loop over and over. Carti’s vocal incoherence makes you question whether he was actually rapping or just testing the mic levels. While the inscrutable lyrics worked on Tyler, the Creator’s “EARFQUAKE”, “CRANK” just doesn’t hit the same mark. This mid track fails to do anything interesting at all.
Defense by Ike Nabuife
“I make albums so people can play it. And you actually hear it … driving your car you hear another car playing it. Go to the barber shop…turn the radio on, and you hear them playing it. It’s playing everywhere … Not no mysterious shit, and you never hear it.”
~DJ Khaled
If one word describes Playboi Carti—for better or for worse—it is mysterious. Yet, with the buffet that is 2025’s MUSIC, he smears the line between commercial and experimental to force listeners to question their preconceived notions of what the word “music” even means.
A lot of the controversy surrounding MUSIC stems from the shroud of mystery clouding the atrocious rollout that admittedly made it difficult to know where to place expectations. In Carti’s great love-bombing of December 2023, MUSIC was heralded like Tyler, the Creator’s Call Me If You Get Lost – but rather than a Wes Anderson pastel-toned DJ Drama-hosted expedition, we were in for an underworld tour with ‘emo thug’ aesthetics guided by Swamp Izzo. A year later, he propped up MUSIC as a flowery UTOPIA-adjacent project with glossy futuristic pop rap production. Meanwhile, there were ghetto-punk leaks like “Menage” hinting at Stankonia-level genre-blending.
While, yes, the album’s muddled presentation confused many, and I have to admit that the poor sequencing of the tracklist drags on the album, fans feel too entitled to the work of creatives. Not many artists can realistically deliver on 5 years of hype. Said hype-train subtracted from Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, UTOPIA, and MUSIC (in general). This tradition likely drove Frank Ocean away from the industry. To denigrate the project based on how it levels up to an imaginary project that he never promised remains deeply unfair. Whole Lotta Red remains critically regarded as one of the most influential albums this decade, and to expect the bisexual vamp to catch lightning in a bottle twice is a big ask.
The incoherent structure owes to the fact this is realistically two albums (and maybe an EP) packaged as one due to the affordances of the streaming era. Personally, I would have split this into a back-to-back release like Future’s duology last year, but I recognize that this prolificness doesn’t fit Carti’s ADHD-coded procrastination masked as mystique. Last year, many chastised PinkPantheress’ take on TikTok Music, and while I have a few oldhead values, I agree that there isn’t a ‘right way’ to listen to music or curate an album (to an extent).
Highlight Tracks
“POP OUT” – This is far from the best pick for an intro, but it recalls Ye’s “On Sight” as it serves as a tastebreaker, telling listeners to throw out their expectations. The industrial sound design will invigorate trained ears and disorient others, painting a frenzied scene of a wrestling cagematch inside the mouth of a mechanical shark with towering rows of buzzsaw teeth. Here, Carti even endorses women’s pleasure, screaming with his Sid Vicious intonation: “Eat her pussy, yeah (Swerve), say my grace, yeah (Swerve)”. I cosign this heavily.
“EVIL J0RDAN” and “CRANK” – These two tracks embody the cultural divide shaping the discourse around this album. Both tracks exemplify that gritty OG ATL sound with supplemental energy from the loudmouthed ATL-staple DJ Swamp Izzo. The return of authentic regional music has defined the past year, and a lot of the album’s biggest criticisms can be cast aside by cultural differences. Skeptics might write it off as “youngster noise” or “boy music”, but if we give westerners a pass for not resonating with undiluted Afrobeat, we should lend people from outside Fulton County the same leeway. On that note, the sample on “CRANK” graciously shows love to phonk icon SpaceGhostPurrp in a time when most people associate phonk with short-form edits and slop. No matter how commercial this project is, it is still very much a cultural ‘IYKYK’ moment with a clear audience. Not everyone will get the Gucci Mane nostalgia.
“EVIL J0RDAN” is a very unorthodox song with no chorus and a broken piano beat interrupted by Swamp Izzo chirping his name like a Pokemon. It barely adheres to typical western song structures; yet, seemingly thanks to the “—but it makes you float *slowed and reverbed* (EXTRA AURA EDITION)” intro, it finds crossover pop success. Regardless, calling tracks like these “music” directly challenges the eurocentric monopoly on what types of music are legitimate.
Overall, there’s a lot to appreciate on these two brief distillations of southern identity: the seamless flow exchanges on the husky-voiced “EVIL J0RDAN”, the back-and-forth with the different tones of the signature deep-voice on “CRANK”, Swamp Izzo’s slam dunk that is the final “I AM THE MUSIC” on the former track or his dizzying “ALIVE” rally on the latter… Trust me, I can keep going.
“CHARGE DEM HOES A FEE” – The top-tier composition distinguishes itself here—with literal gradations in the song structure. The moment Future’s verse gets stale, they spice it up by tossing a guitar in the mix. The moment that gets stale, Carti enters the spotlight. The one thing Elon Musk’s DOGE actually needs to cut is the government-mandated Travis Scott features.
“GOOD CREDIT” – How many rap songs do you know have a key change to introduce the feature?
Carti’s macabre performance chills like a gothic monster narrating his horror story. Kendrick integrates very well into the style without sacrificing any of his own eccentricity or quality. The way he lyrically skates between Swamp Izzo’s intermissions sounds so fluid over the dazzling production attributed to Cardo’s strobing synths.
People act like this is out of character for Kendrick, but after his outlandish performance on “Range Brothers”, this was inevitable. Some try to paint Kendrick Lamar as this preachy “model minority”, but songs like this serve to show his solidarity with the rest of the community. The innocuous “MOJO JOJO” ad-libs are fun, “BACKD00R” is essentially “Luther”’s loveable ratchet cousin from the south, and “GOOD CREDIT” here is a sparkling banger.
“OLYMPIAN” – This region of the album signals a major gear-switch. The last ten tracks smell like badussy in a good way. They have a nostalgic smell like an old childhood home. They reek of an earned sweaty stank marking an endorphin-ridden workout or excursion on a 90-degree day in Atlanta’s searing heat.
“OPM BABI” – With Whole Lotta Red birthing all modern rage music, Carti had to add a song like this to pay homage to the only literally genre-defining album this decade. This song is not really my style — especially with the overstimulating tags from Swamp Izzo — but I can admire its postmodern take on hip hop and inimitable absurdist performance. “Die Lit” had people calling Carti the “Mondrian of Rap” with its minimalism, but tracks like this lure you in with the smooth soul sample before subverting it with this maximalist chittering explosion of sound showing his range as a performer.
“LIKE WEEZY” – This track makes me wish I went to school in Atlanta so I could experience this album properly. With the Rich Kidz sample, this shows off the album’s thesis — an ode to cultural authenticity and flamboyant Atlanta life. If “OLYMPIAN” embodied endorphins, this delivers pure serotonin and sunshine. On songs like this and “I CAN SEEEEEE YOU BABY BOI”, it’s honestly impressive how this album is simultaneously so commercial yet unique.
“HBA” – While my personal favorite of this era is the anachronistic “2024”, “HBA” is undeniably the staple track of MUSIC. It is a haunting 3.5 minutes of Carti rapping with no guest features or ad-libs over a beat that makes you feel like you are being ruthlessly dragged into the vampire’s lair by bloodthirsty bats. It’s the aura overdose. Could do without the snares, though.
MUSIC’s biggest crimes are how all over the place it is and the predictable features. If this followed GNX’s footsteps and put a bunch of nobodies and fresh faces on the album, it’d largely improve the experience. It’s clearly inspired by DatPiff mixtapes, but Doechii’s 2024 mixtape proves that isn’t an excuse for such an uncurated listen. Length notwithstanding, I would not call this bloated. Considering the runtime, there’s very little fat (skips) to cut; it’s more about portion control and rationing.
This definitely isn’t a bold, avant-garde release like WLR or a master class in abstract impressionism like Die Lit, but I don’t think I Am Music wants to be. Here, Carti seizes the moment to graduate from niche cult classic icon to mainstream personality without overly compromising his abstract self-expression – and based on the current sales, he’s sticking the landing.
Conclusion by Trishna
Instead of delivering anything groundbreaking, Carti seems more focused on making noise than creating a memorable project. The tracks, filled with recycled ideas, lazy vocal performances, and jumbled production, fail to come together cohesively. Despite the potential for innovative collaborations, the album falls back on old gimmicks. What could have been an exciting evolution of Carti’s sound instead unravels into a muttered mess that fails to resonate beyond surface-level aesthetics.
Carti depends heavily on garbled ad-libs that often feel disconnected from the music itself, making it difficult to find any real substance. It’s just nothing special. The 30 song tracklist gives you the illusion of an overstuffed collection, but it offers none of the variety one might hope for. It exposes itself as an exercise in endurance. Each song painstakingly blends into the next. Every track sounds alarmingly similar, lacking the creative spark that made Carti’s earlier work stand out. This excessive, babbling album only contributes to the feeling of noise pollution, dashing any sense of excitement that might have once existed. Carti needs to apply the maxim “quality over quantity” in the next project.
While Playboi Carti’s persona and presence remain fun and magnetic, MUSIC honestly feels like a rushed, uninspired homework assignment that Carti forgot to complete. The level of disappointment this album offers is on par with Kanye’s Vultures 2. It falls short of expectations, leaving listeners wondering if Carti still has the creative edge that once made his music so thrilling.You would think that five years of hype would mean an extraordinary album, but instead it feels like Carti locked himself in a studio with a fog machine, a Red Bull, and zero supervision. Maybe in a few years people will convince themselves this was ahead of its time, but right now, it’s just ahead of my headache. If this is the future of music, we’re probably screwed. The only reason it got the amount of attention it did was because of how long it was cooking. In my opinion, it should have just stayed in the oven. MUSIC was less Die Lit and more Die of Disappointment.
Verdict:
Trishna: 3.6/10
Ike: 7.4/10
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