MUSIC

MUSIC: PLAYBOI CARTI’S THIRTY-TRACK DECLARATION OF SELF

Playboi Carti’s MUSIC, released March 14, 2025 on AWGE/Interscope, is the Atlanta rapper’s most sprawling statement yet.
Also referred to as I Am Music (both stylized in all caps), it is his third studio album, released through AWGE and Interscope Records.

A trap album, it marks a stylistic shift from the “baby voice” vocal approach of Carti’s previous studio album, Whole Lotta Red (2020), toward a deeper and raspier delivery, while retaining elements associated with 2000s Atlanta mixtape culture.
Five years in the making, chaotic in its architecture, and ruthless in its commercial ambition, MUSIC arrived with the weight of one of rap’s longest-running anticipation cycles behind it — and somehow exceeded the streaming velocity to prove the wait was commercially justified, if not always artistically tidy.

Production Architecture: Thirty Canvases, No Single Frame

Production on MUSIC was handled by Ojivolta, Cardo, and F1LTHY, alongside Bnyx, Kanye West, Maaly Raw, Metro Boomin, Wheezy, and members of 808 Mafia, including TM88 and Southside.
That roster alone signals the album’s structural ambition — or structural restlessness, depending on your threshold for tonal whiplash. What they’ve collectively assembled is not a unified palette but a genre-spanning exhibition:
Carti drops rubbery cadences over tracks that flit between grinding industrial noise on “Cocaine Nose,” 8-bit vaporwave on “Like Weezy,” and throwbacks to classic Dirty South hi-hats on “Radar.”

The production philosophy across the album’s best passages is one of controlled extremity. F1LTHY, who has been Carti’s most symbiotic beatmaker since Whole Lotta Red, constructs several of the most kinetic cuts here — dense sub-bass architecture, 808 patterns that run in irregular subdivision against snare hits placed half a beat outside expectation. On tracks like “Pop Out,” the kick drum sits sidechain-compressed hard against a melodic synth lead, creating that signature trap breathlessness where the low end seems to duck and surge in tidal motion. Ojivolta, who acts as something of a connective tissue across multiple tracks, favors minor-third melodic movement and synthetic string textures that give several passages a faint gothic register. The Kanye West-produced “Good Credit” — featuring Kendrick Lamar — is the outlier with the most structural depth: built on a sample of Lil Wayne’s “Red Rum,”
it is co-produced by Kanye West, Scott Bridgeway, and Ojivolta.

Critics highlighted elements including a Hungarian psychedelic sample and chipmunk soul influences
as markers of the album’s eclecticism.
Reviewers identified stylistic variety among the tracks, with “Pop Out” and “Crush” described as energetic compositions, while “Rather Lie” and “Backd00r” were characterized as more melodic.
“Rather Lie,” produced with Cardo Got Wings and featuring The Weeknd, is built on a sample of The Weeknd and Madonna’s “Popular” — a sample that introduces a bright pop timbral quality almost entirely absent from the surrounding material, making its placement feel like a strategic concession to crossover radio formats. The contrast between that and the pitch-dark, low-register tonal center of “Cocaine Nose” illustrates the album’s central tension: Carti is operating across registers that don’t naturally cohabit a single LP. For a thematically adjacent experience rooted in Atlanta’s lineage, the catalog entry for 21 Savage’s What Happened to the Streets? offers a useful counterpoint in how a Southern rap album can exercise production restraint without sacrificing aggression.

Vocal Performance and Lyrical Posture: The Register Shift as Artistic Declaration

MUSIC marks a stylistic shift from the “baby voice” vocal approach of Carti’s previous studio album, Whole Lotta Red, toward a deeper and raspier delivery, while retaining elements associated with 2000s Atlanta mixtape culture.
That shift is not cosmetic. The falsetto register that defined Die Lit and saturated Whole Lotta Red was a self-consciously provocative choice — a timbral mask that drew from Memphis rap’s slowed distortion and hyperpop’s pitch manipulation simultaneously. Its abandonment here signals a deliberate recalibration toward legibility and weight, even as the lyrical content remains broadly hedonistic and positional.

Carti’s vocal range and delivery were praised by critics, with some noting his ability to shift styles and create a sense of kinetic energy.
That range is most audible in the contrast between “I Seeeeee You Baby Boi,” where a near-falsetto returns momentarily as melodic texture, and the low, pressurized delivery on “Cocaine Nose,” where his voice operates at a register that feels physically downward.
The hook-filled “I Seeeeee You Baby Boi” plays to Carti’s more melodic instincts, and tracks like these are simple in the best way, complementing his loose, spontaneous rapping style — but over the course of the album’s 30 tracks, the lack of vision becomes apparent and the inconsistency becomes egregious, according to musicOMH.

The standard version of MUSIC features guest appearances from Travis Scott, The Weeknd, Kendrick Lamar, Jhené Aiko, Skepta, Future, Lil Uzi Vert, Ty Dolla Sign, and Young Thug, as well as hosting from DJ Swamp Izzo.
The structural role of these guests is worth scrutinizing.
Kendrick Lamar appears on “Good Credit” as well as contributing to “Backd00r” and “Mojo Jojo.”
Lamar’s presence on three tracks is the most surprising A&R decision of the album — surprising not merely for the pairing but for the timing, arriving in the immediate aftermath of the Drake-Kendrick cultural event of 2024. His verse on “Good Credit” is measured, confident, and tonal rather than declaratory: he is not here to demonstrate dominance but to add harmonic credibility to Carti’s most composed production moment. Jhené Aiko’s contribution to “Backd00r” softens the track’s melodic midrange, her sustained phrasing acting as counterpoint to the brittleness of the underlying synth pad. Skepta’s feature, meanwhile, extends the album’s geographic imagination in a direction that few Atlanta projects bother to pursue — and which reads, in hindsight, as one of its more prescient inclusions given the album’s measurable performance in the UK market.

Lyrically, MUSIC does not aspire to the kind of narrative architecture that its release-event scale might imply. The writing is broadly impressionistic: status markers, antagonism, and a persistent sense of self-mythology that borders on abstraction.
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.