Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red Turns Rap Loud and Rough — and Mostly Pulls It Off

Whole Lotta Red arrives as a 24-track, 63-minute swing at remaking what a Playboi Carti album is supposed to sound like. It trades the tuneful, sing-song Carti of past work for something harder and stranger, built around distorted, punk-adjacent production and a vocal delivery that veers between soft, high sounds and full-throated screams. The goal is clear: push rap’s popular center into louder, rougher territory, and mostly, it works.

Rockstar Made Through Slay3r

The album opens hard. Rockstar Made sets the tone with beat drops that feel more like harsh, machine-like noise than trap drums, and Go2DaMoon keeps the energy tight and frantic. Stop Breathing is one of the record’s clear strong points — critics singled it out, and it’s easy to hear why. The track is relentless, all bark and low-end, with Carti sounding possessed rather than performing.

Beno!, JumpOutTheHouse, and M3tamorphosis fill out the early stretch without matching that peak. They’re fine transitions — M3tamorphosis stretches to 5:12, the longest cut here, and it uses that space to shift moods rather than build a hook. Slay3r closes this run well enough but doesn’t demand a second listen the way Stop Breathing does.

No Sl33p Through Control

The middle section is where the album’s chaotic delivery is most on display. No Sl33p and New Tank are short, blunt, and easy to forget next to what surrounds them. Teen X keeps the pace up but leans on repeating itself more than a song this length can carry.

Then On That Time hits — another of the tracks that earned real praise, and rightly. At under two minutes, it’s a blast of force that doesn’t stay too long. Meh, Vamp Anthem, and New N3on are lesser entries, filler that keeps the album moving but adds little. Control brings back some focus, riding a beat that’s more tuneful than most of what comes before it.

Punk Monk Through King Vamp

Punk Monk runs nearly four minutes, the album’s second-longest track, and earns the length with real shifts in mood — quiet stretches followed by distorted bursts. On That Time already made the case for brevity; Punk Monk makes the case for patience. King Vamp, later in this stretch, is a strong cut at a moderate pace, one of the more worth-hearing-again moments outside the tracks critics called out by name.

Place, sitting between them, is minor — a two-minute sketch that doesn’t do much beyond bridging the gap.

Sky Through F33l Lik3 Dyin

The back half of Whole Lotta Red holds the record’s best-reviewed material. Sky, Over, ILoveUIHateU, Die4Guy, Not PLaying, and F33l Lik3 Dyin all land somewhere between good and essential, and several of them — Sky, Over, ILoveUIHateU, and F33l Lik3 Dyin — are exactly the tracks critics pointed to as proof the album’s risks paid off.

• Sky: tuneful, urgent, one of the album’s clearest hooks
• Over: forceful without losing shape, a strong point of the closing stretch
• ILoveUIHateU: sharper in feeling than most of the record, still rough
• F33l Lik3 Dyin: closes the album on its most intense note, chaotic delivery pushed to its limit

Die4Guy and Not PLaying are solid but sit a step below those four — good tracks on an album that, by this point, has set a high bar for itself.

The songs on Whole Lotta Red are urgent, immediate.

That line, from Pitchfork, captures what the album gets right even when single tracks stumble. Nothing here feels lazy. Every track sounds like it’s reaching for something, even the ones that miss.

The Case Against Length

Twenty-four tracks is a lot. The album’s biggest weakness isn’t the production or Carti’s performance — it’s the sheer bulk of the track list, which weakens the momentum built by the stronger cuts. A tighter cut of this record, built around Stop Breathing, On That Time, Punk Monk, King Vamp, Sky, Over, ILoveUIHateU, and F33l Lik3 Dyin, would be a five-star statement. As is, the weaker mid-album tracks — No Sl33p, New Tank, Meh, Vamp Anthem, New N3on, Place — run together and ask listeners to work harder than they should.

The reliance on a small circle of producers throughout also means the album’s range of sound, while distinctive, doesn’t vary as much as its 63-minute length implies it should.

Whole Lotta Red is a bold, sometimes thrilling record that proves Carti can push rap’s sound somewhere truly new — “hard, melodic, experimental, and unlike anything else happening in mainstream rap,” as Pitchfork put it. It’s also an album that needed an editor. The highs are among the best rap music released that year; the lows are filler. Both things are true at once, and that pull between the two is the whole story of this record.

Metacritic put it at 75 out of 100. That figure holds up.

2020 releases · album review · hip hop · Playboi Carti · rap album