(In the most decisive, unironic voice possible): It takes a certain level of intelligence to understand Playboi Carti. To me — ahem, a seasoned music critic you should never doubt because I’m always right — his talent’s always been as clear as his flawless skin.

But to a musical drifter (re: casual), Carti’s eponymous 2017 debut, 2018’s Die Lit, and 2020’s Whole Lotta Red are the work of a fake mystery man — the logical conclusion of a post-verbal rap world where twitchy beats and arbitrary yelps can define stardom. If you believe in terms like, “mumble rap,” Carti is the final boss. Still, there’s a clear art to it all. What the uninitiated see as a sonic mess is actually an intricate architecture of sounds, textures, and space distortion. His shouts careen off apocalyptic soundscapes like a codeine-soaked pinball, and like Young Thug, his voice is a perfectly modulated instrument; in the crevices of his creaky croaks, sludgy murmurs, and deceptively inventive adlibs, you can find phonetic adventures that insist on being repeated.

You shouldn’t need this, but if you want to really appreciate Carti’s greatness, just try listening to a shitty version of him. There are more than a few. Atlanta’s Ken Carson, signed to Carti’s Opium imprint, was beating the allegations for a while. With his previous album, 2023’s A Great Chaos, Carson showed enough inventiveness to prove he wasn’t one of the inferior rage-rap replicas. There, he delivered layers of cadences and melody, adding color to beats that were already extraterrestrial. The soundscapes could enthrall you, the hooks could hook you, and Carson was his own thing. But on his latest, More Chaos, it’s clear he’s got work to do to step out of the shadow of his label boss.

At just about an hour, More Chaos sees Carson unloading by-the-books flexes over his customary collection of glitchy trap beats. While his lyrics and delivery are almost uniformly rote, his taunts, along with some distortedly blown out basslines, occasionally yield something giddily overpowering. For “Trap Jump,” he blends not-so-humblebrags with a hook that’s anthemic in an endearingly straightforward way. Meanwhile, “Xposed,” is a playground for devilish shit talk. Cruising skittering synths that could’ve come from Jeezy’s TM101 traphouse, Carson lets loose some matter-of-fact threats that are as casual as they are mildly amusing: “I’m on The X-Files, my bitch X’ed up/ Can’t wait ’til we put him down, he think he next up.”

The moments of exhilaration extend to offerings like “Ghoul” and “Lord Of Chaos,” murky tracks that are every bit as fiendish as their titles suggest. Meanwhile, on “Psycho,” he leans into his more melodic impulses on an atypically buoyant soundscape; amid the otherwise sinister beats on the album, it feels like seeing a rainbow from a dungeon window. Unfortunately, moments like that one are fleeting, and for an album that nods to chaos, the project is strikingly monochromatic. Despite the occasional beat switch, the whole first 10 tracks of the LP feel largely interchangeable, with the tempos and Carson’s subject matter, cadences, and inflections all being as one-note as his lyrics, which, even at their best, largely spill out like throwaway Future bars. At their worst, they’re the type of sequences that even Young Thug might call mumble rap.

Admittedly, previous triumphs like “Jennifer’s Body” are hard marks to reach, but More Chaos almost completely lacks the idiosyncrasies and asymmetrical symmetry (“Two things I ain’t ever seen/ A nigga that beat a gun and a bitch I need”) that make that particular song great. On tracks like “Fighting My Demons” and “Singapore,” he skitters across radioactive synths with semi-slurred murmurs that emit convincing, engrossing delirium that’s just not here on More Chaos, where hooks are about as memorable as a lazy Instagram caption you wrote when you just wanted to remind everyone how pretty you are.

More Chaos has a dearth of character — of variance — that becomes even more jarring when you remember that Carti’s Music dropped just last month. On Music tracks like “Like Weezy,” you’re reminded of the Opium leader’s all-around magnetism — an instinct for syllables, soundbeds, and repetition that turns stanzas into supercharged calisthenics: “Uh, lookin’ like Rock, uh, poppin’ that boy like, ‘Pop’ (Pop)/ Uh, poppin’ that boy, I’m like Pac (Pac)/ Spit on a bitch like Pac (Pac)/ I’m in the bitch off the rocks/ Percocеt, yeah, in my socks (Socks)/ We don’t give a fuck about opps, I ain’t nеver ran into an opp.”

There’s a propulsion there that creates mutual engagement between Carti and the listener. Carson’s linear, one-note quips, meanwhile, become easy to ignore because they’re so indistinct from whatever he said last, and he says it all mostly the same way. It comes down to content, too. While Carti isn’t a “lyricist,” he’s capable of densely descriptive bursts of cartoonish excess that, at times, make Carson feel like a less inspired imitation. When combined with his vocality and intrepid sonic space travel, you can see why and how Carti became the defining stylist of the rap zeitgeist. While Carson has shown promise, it’s clear he’s still working on being something more than just a talented artist inside of it.

COLD AS ICE

ROAST ME

Those Kid shows Behind the Scenes 😂 pic.twitter.com/qXxg2IgDvL

— DRUSKI (@druski) April 7, 2025