Lil baby. Photo by Kevin Mares.
Lil Baby's fans have grown restless. He's aware: "I'm nowhere near falling off [but] if I was, I wouldn't be mad," he told Lil Yachty in an interview last month, a curiously circumspect statement for a rapper whose last album cover depicted his face four times a la Mt. Rushmore. WHAM — which stands for Who Harder Than Me, an acronymic nickname Lil Baby appears to have assigned himself — feels too big to fail, i.e. risk-averse, as if overwhelmed by the stakes of the moment.
Where the Atlanta rapper's previous LPs were charmingly efficient, his fourth studio album is bleakly corporate, employing pedestrian images and amateur conceits to rapidly diminishing returns. On the outro, Lil Baby brags, "Lately I been on business time, got a driver in the Maybach," more focused on the destination than the journey; on the intro, he makes getting head on a private jet sound less exciting than a spreadsheet, checking his email mid-coitus. Neither inspirational nor aspirational, WHAM is anhedonic and apathetic, a grab bag of outtakes from a rapper whose best days are currently five years in the rearview.
Lil Baby's biggest strengths as a rapper are his pocket-seeking flow and his ear for legato melodies, distilling Future and Young Thug at their most fluid. These skills shine on even his dullest songs, and so the margin between great and garbage on WHAM can be shockingly thin. The breathless sprint of "F U 2x" prioritizes speed over form, but its insipid bars fall flat on closer listen (“Fake good bitch, so I treat her like a dog”). Compare this to the hookless pulse of "Due4AWin," pitter-pattering through agile bars about Ifá-practicing shooters and Instagram models eager for a couple racks, or the Cash Money bombast of "Free Promo," where automotive flexes grow hyperspecific: tintless European whips, custom wrapped electric vehicles, a Trackhawk "on some Jeepers Creepers shit."
These idiosyncratic instances are thrilling but scarce, adrift in an ocean of anodyne Atlanta trap. Lil Baby can make good songs on autopilot ("Stiff Gang"), so you'd hope for the filler to be few and far between. And yet, WHAM is a shipping crate stuffed with Styrofoam peanuts. Take “Stuff,” where Travis Scott numerically groans about a legion of hoes, and “Drugs Talkin,” a standard-issue, detail-free romantic ditty. Lil Baby love songs are broadly hit or miss, but here they’re all misses, aiming for the muted transcendence of 2018’s “Close Friends” and landing closer to romcom slop. “I Promise” is competent if forgettable, but “So Sorry” is blatantly muddled, mixing an apologetic hook with accusatory verses (“What you was doin' when I called and you didn't answer? / I seen the new Hermès on your arm, where you get that from?”). One assumes the goal is complexity, an unvarnished look at the travails of dating while rich, or even just a window into how two lovers can hurt each other, but Lil Baby refuses to expand on the contradiction, leaving it for the listener to fill in the emotional blanks.
To be sure — most Lil Baby listeners are not turning on WHAM in hopes of finding the perfect song for their Valentine’s playlist. But even the straightforward bangers come across lackluster, routine rather than revelatory. GloRilla oozes so much charm she easily outshines her lyrically adept host in just six bars on “Redbone;” when she inverts Lil Baby’s hook to crow, “They did not stop makin' good dick when they made yours,” it’s a much needed breath of fresh air on a suffocating album. Then there’s “Dum, Dumb, and Dumber,” iconic on arrival for Young Thug’s first verse post-incarceration and not much else. Being around his superiors naturally sharpens Lil Baby’s raps, but the duo are just too far ahead for Baby to catch up with Future’s princess cut and solitaire gems or Thug’s rolodex of overseas baddies.
Still, there are flashes of the world-conquering rapper Lil Baby can be, like when his densely woven verse counterbalances a gravelly 21 Savage feature with melodic aplomb on the trunk-rattling “Outfit.” The pair are in rare form, sounding not only engaged but excited, Lil Baby sending WHAM-branded loud packs to Thailand while 21 shows off “colored diamonds in the Richard like Hi-Chews.” And album highlight “By Myself” is suffused with pathos, finding new problems behind every stack of blue notes as the song spirals skyward. Where his mogul raps have an air of trickle-down economics, linking up with Rod Wave and Rylo Rodriguez coaxes Baby into tenderer waters, so when he sings, “Had to cut my brother off, I can't believe you broke the law,” it’s heartbroken as opposed to hardheaded.
But these glimmers of personality are sporadic at best. Lil Baby says he has a second semi-eponymous project coming next month, a more introspective project called DOMINIQUE (Obviously a Serious Album because the title is his government name). In that context, these songs are a throat-clearing before the main event, not the first half of a watershed cultural spectacle. Instead, WHAM functions as an inverted deluxe, odds and ends hastily assembled into a questionable prelude. In the album’s penultimate bar, Lil Baby confesses, “I was goin' through some stuff and didn't want to rap.” Yeah man — we know.
