It’s hard to take any of this music seriously, even as he responds to his tumultuous last three years with wounded Southern pain rap. This isn’t the first time he’s taken his sound in a gentler direction, but it’s nowhere near as earnest as, say, Beautiful Thugger Girls, which, with all its naked, voice-cracking melodies, felt like a genuine expression of love and sorrow. Here, the weepy pianos and stripped-down acoustics just feel like Thug’s waveriding of Rod Wave, the Florida sadboy who has been one of rap’s streaming goliaths of the 2020s. Thug is decent at the style, though. “On the News” has arguably the album’s most heartfelt hook and is bookended by a shot-throwing Cardi B verse that’s better than anything on her new album. His broken falsetto on “Blaming Jesus” makes him sound like a sparrow with an injured wing. Wheezy puts some omph into the gloom of “Catch Me I’m Falling,” as Thug sings, “Turned me to a felon now nobody would hire me/This rap shit gotta sell ’cause that’s the only commodity,” an impressively honest admission that his bogus circumstances have forced him to squeeze as much money out of this album as possible.
But so many of these songs keep on returning to Gunna, and at this point, whether he really means it or not, Thug’s endless references to their shattered brotherhood feel like another way to juice streams. “I been cryin’ all day/I seen my brother turn rat in my face,” he says, in a whimpery singsong on “Sad Spider,” sounding about as real as a kid tryna manipulatively pout their way into an extra scoop of ice cream. On “Dreams Rarely Do Come True,” a messy six-minute ballad with Mariah, he goes, “Why would I cry over a bitch I gave to Gunna police-ass?” and it completely throws off one of the more emotionally complex verses on the album. These days, it’s hard to tell with Thug what’s a bit and what’s not, which undermines every moment of potential sincerity.
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