Rapper 21 Savage has built his career into a major name in the mainstream. With his monotone vocals, he helped bring Trap into the mainstream with projects like “Without You” and his Savage Mode series. His success has been great, but his music has been less so. Since the start of the 2020s, Savage has had hit albums, but hasn’t been doing well with the critics. This was the point when Trap music became so big that it started to all sound the same. Nothing new was being added to make it unique, and it became basic mainstream music just to feed the algorithm. It also didn’t help that Hip-Hop was starting to become less popular as commercialized country/pop music took the spotlight. Another thing was that Savage was taking Drake’s side on the beef, which took a toll on his popularity. The confusing part is that he was also friends with Metro Boomin, who helped Kendrick start the beef. Even with all of these factors pressing in from all sides, Savage pressed forward. Seemingly, starting to take more of a personal touch to his work with his last project, “American Dream.” Unfortunately, those themes don’t help the mediocrity of that album. Without songs like “redrum,” that album would have been a commercial failure. Now he’s back with his newest album, which he announced out of nowhere. Without any hype or rollout, does this project hold up? No. It actively helps to ruin it more.
The intro, “Where you from,” starts with a very silent sample before the song begins. After that…nothing interesting happens with the music. Savage’s vocals sound like he didn’t care, and the beat was barely anything interesting. Think the most basic and low-key trap beat you can think of, that’s this beat. It sounds like something you would search up on YouTube when you need a free beat. As for the lyrics, it can go from lines about living in G-Block to the most random stuff ever. For example, the lines range in quality and meaning from “Savage, where are you from? G Block, where they bomb / (Stuff) like Vietnam, gun smoke in my lungs” to “All you content creators/Catch you down bad and break your MacBook.” Obviously, not that great of a start to the album, and I have said many times before that the intro is one of the most important parts of an album. Those first seconds to minutes can determine the whole album. If you can’t get that right, you should try harder.
One of the biggest moments for mainstream Hip-Hop in 2025 was the release of Gunna’s newest album. Many people were excited for new music, only to find that it felt like a rehash of the last album. Non-stop boring beats and basic rapping that never improved from his last two albums, and were released solely to generate revenue. This album is like that, but no one cared about it to begin with. The song, “Ha,” reminds me of this perfectly. It’s such a nothing song. It has a beat that you can make in 20 minutes, with boring, monotone rapping from Savage. I can’t even think of anything interesting about this song besides that it has a Gucci Mane sample.
But nothing compares to the biggest song of the album, “Mr. Recoup.” Featuring Drake on his journey to try and stay relevant, they rap over one of the worst beats ever. It’s just piano. Nothing else. And to add to that, it is a simple progression that goes up and down before lopping again, barely changing. Sometimes, it will get spicy by adding a quick blast of bass that doesn’t go well with the piano, and both Drake and Savage seem bored while rapping, as they have no emotion and treat this less as art and more as their job. It’s like Savage and his producers in this song lost all sense of how to make music and would rather focus on making another generic trap beat for a mainstream audience who are sick of generic trap beats. It feels like slop that is being fed to us for no reason, and I was kind of done with it.
Side note: While listening to this album, Apple Music experienced a glitch when I tried to play the album, but it only allowed me to play one song before switching to autoplay. Every time that happened, I felt like Apple Music was telling me, “You could be listening to something so much better than this.” And I agree because this album is trash. 2/10.
