'Whole Lotta Red' Album Review

After more than a year of waiting, it's finally out. Here's what I think.

Well, it’s here. On Christmas Day 2020, more than a year after his initial announcement, Playboi Carti finally, finally, finally gave us Whole Lotta Red.

I wanted to wait a few days before sharing my thoughts because to be honest, after the first listen I was left more puzzled than anything. There was so much hype built up around this album - nobody really believed it was dropping on the 25th and when it finally did drop, there was a whole lotta drama. 

Playboi Carti has always held a place in music as someone who no one really “gets” at first. Sure, you can’t always understand what he’s saying, his pictures on Instagram are sometimes a bit scary looking, and he always tYp3s LYk tHi$>+*, but it’s about the ~vibe. If you’re not a Playboi Carti fan, there’s two main things you need to keep in mind before reading this review: Playboi Carti is not a “lyrical” rapper (I hate that term, but that’s another convo for another day) and I do not consider Whole Lotta Red a rap album in the traditional sense. 

That being said, Playboi Carti is not for everyone. If you’ve never really been a Playboi Carti fan, or if this is the first album of his that you’ve ever listened to, please don’t bother. Because I can guarantee you’re gonna listen to it and then come to me talkin ‘bout some, “Tia, what in the world is this,” and while that would be fair, I’m just not tryna hear it. 

Back in July 2019, Playboi Carti made a lukewarm commitment to fans to drop the album “within the next 60 days,” a promise so cryptic that he managed to raise the stakes even more by not dropping it at all. Instead, 2019 saw a ton of leaks, as ravenous fans circulated every single snippet they could find, analyzed innocuous clues for potential release dates, and even went so far as to create fake, fan-made songs. The bar for this album was set impossibly high, not necessarily because of Carti himself, but because Carti fans being Carti fans, gassed it up more than a year before it even came out. And yeah, I was one of those people. But a few months ago, Carti started dropping very clear hints around what the vibe of this new, 2020 version of WLR was - a brooding, dark, punk-influenced project, unlike anything he’s released before. 

The night Whole Lotta Red dropped, I listened to it twice. The first time I listened straight through, and to be honest felt like giving up about 15 tracks in because it was damn near 1 in the morning, a lot of the songs had blended together at that point, and I was listening on AirPods in the living room at my parents’ house, whereas this is the type of music you need to either blast in a car or listen to right before you chug a Monster Energy and punch a wall. Over the next few days I spent more time listening again, and the more I listened, the more certain tracks grew on me. 

That being said, I don’t think WLR is bad, it’s just new, weird and long as hell. And weird isn’t a bad thing, either. I just don’t think it’s as much of a masterpiece as Die Lit, or as much of a vibe as his self-titled tape. It’s just...fine. And that’s just what happens when you hype up an album for over a year (guilty!). 

Would I replay this entire, 24 track album all the way through again? Probably not. But if the album were shorter, and if some of the songs that sounded simply like filler, like “Control” weren’t there and replaced by standouts like “Over” and “Vamp Anthem” , it could easily be lauded as a quirky release that’ll really hit its stride around Halloween. Instead, the average listener is understandably turned off by the time they get to “Punk Monk,” and by “On That Time” they’re thinking hey, this sounds kinda like the first few songs…

The most jarring thing about the album is the length. At 24 tracks, it’s five songs longer than Die Lit and almost double the length of his 2017 self-titled mixtape. It’s hard to mark an album as definitively good or bad if you zoned out 11 tracks in, simply due to the fact that it’s too long to sift through in one sitting.  

Although I didn’t like every single song, I can say that every single song featured production that felt, truly, like an out of body experience. There were a string of different producers, everyone from Pi’erre Bourne and Wheezy to Maaly Raaw and Richie Souf, just to name a few. Every single producer who worked on this album deserves props for how truly one-of-a-kind this sounded. WLR was executive produced by Kanye West, which makes perfect sense because this album is essentially Carti’s Yeezus (which is, ironically, my favorite Kanye album). Red takes a bunch of wacky (yes, wacky) sounds and puts them together for a project that leaves you so stunned you have to take a minute to reflect on what you just heard. 

My personal favorite song on the entire project, “Vamp Anthem,” produced by Jasper Harris and KP Beatz, flips a Johann Sebastian Bach piece from the 1700s, “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” into a clever, infectious tune. It was a clear standout simply for its raw creativity. The beat flip leaves you stunned, and Carti glides onto the track to deliver smooth, bouncy verses over a catchy organ. I actually gasped the first time I heard it, and that is the kind of reaction I’m looking for with a new Carti project. 

WLR takes every aspect of Carti - brooding vibes, crooning verses, and impressive ingenuity - and multiplies it by ten, for better or for worse. On “New Tank,” we get an amped up (or should I say vamped up lmaooo) version of Die Lit’s“Pull Up,” except with a bassline that shakes you to your core and immediately makes you want to mosh to it. “No Sl33p” gives you an equally intense vibe accompanied by a flurry of adlibs and biting lyrics that made me do a stank face while I bopped along. 

As much as songs like “Go2DaMoon” and “King Vamp” felt scattered and threw me for a loop, tracks like “Over,” with its celestial instrumental and slick vocals, immediately won me over as the perfect blend of classic Carti and this new sound he’s been experimenting with. Even besides the new sounds, Red offered official versions of leaks like “New N3on” and “Place,” which combined the new Carti with a taste of the 2019 version of the album that many fans had been expecting (though the placement of “New N3on” right after “Vamp Anthem” didn’t sound right to me). 

However with 24 songs to choose from, many of them were forgettable. The album had plenty of filler songs, sandwiched between a few pleasantly surprising gems. “Slay3r,” for example, stood out to me as a playful, almost cute song, but  it immediately followed “M3tamorphosis,” which by comparison I found overbearing and largely uneventful aside from Kid Cudi’s hums in the background. “Stop Breathing,” while incredibly intense both in terms of its booming 808s and its lyrical content, immediately won me over with Carti’s breathless interpolation of Gucci Mane’s classic, “Shirt Off.”

Now, I’d be lying if I said I thoroughly enjoyed this project on my first listen. To be honest with you, some of my notes after that first listen were just utter disbelief at how all over the place it felt. For example, below “JUMPOUTTHEHOUSE” I wrote: Ok what the FUCK is he saying lmao this don’t sound right. But you know what? One day when we’re outside again, jumping around at some rave, I’m sure that’s exactly what people might want to hear. 

Whole Lotta Red is an intriguing combination of rap, punk, rock, and everything in between. Even though Playboi Carti is largely categorized as a rapper, if you really think about it, other than the fact that he might rhyme every once in a while, he’s made it pretty clear that he can’t necessarily be fit into one box. Rappers are rarely given the space to separate themselves into subcategories within the genre, and much of the critique Carti is getting on this album comes from people comparing it to what their idea of what a new hip-hop album should sound like. 

If you went into this expecting a rap album, of course you’re gonna be disappointed. The first song is called “Rockstar Made” for Pete’s sake. But if you go into it expecting a body of work that cannot be defined by a single genre, you’re a lot more likely to understand that hey, not all of these songs are going to fit your idea of what a “rapper” does. On Whole Lotta Red, Carti bucks those labels, making it clear that he’s out to redefine his own identity within the rap scene.

In my opinion, WLR isn’t comparable to self-titled or Die Lit. Both of those projects had at least one or two songs that appealed to a wider audience - for example “Magnolia” was a huge mainstream hit and “Poke It Out” had a ton of crossover appeal with that Nicki Minaj feature. Whole Lotta Red, on the other hand, is Carti in his zone, in the studio ready to make his project - fans, critics, and the Internet be damned. 

If Carti had wanted an album that would immediately appeal to a mainstream audience and make his fans happy, he’d simply drop the version of WLR that featured every leak from the past year, sit back, and rake it up. Instead, Whole Lotta Red is a foray into a world of experimentation that’s enough to separate the fans who are in it for the long haul from the ones who just want more of the same.

Personally, I’m not sure which of the two I am - I admire the fact that Carti always keeps me guessing with his music - that’s part of what first drew me to him back in 2015 on SoundCloud. But even though I’ve gone back to listen to certain songs on repeat (mainly “Over” and “Vamp Anthem”), I’m not drawn to this album like I was to his past two projects. Overall, like I said, I think it’s fine. Just...fine. Very middle of the road, nothing to write home about, not losing sleep over it, fine. I truly feel indifferent about it - not necessarily disappointed, because by the time it dropped I’d managed my expectations - but also not enthusiastic enough about it to re-listen to the project in its entirety on a consistent basis. In a time when people love to debate at either end of two extremes, I’ve found myself truly in the middle of the road about this project. 

After more than a year of memes, leaks, and hype, Whole Lotta Red had some big shoes to fill - and ultimately, Playboi Carti did what he did best - he gave us an album that was completely, 100% Carti, whether we liked it or not. 

For a bite-sized version of the full album, I made a playlist of my 10 favorites, available on Spotify or Apple Music.