Smoovie baby albums full#

It’s a shame considering the flashes of earnestness that Baby has shown, most notably on “The Bigger Picture,” an affecting protest anthem of sorts in summer 2020 that was buoyed most of all by its emotional intimacy. On the opening track, the most vivid he gets comes down to clunky bars about his newfound A-list status: “Got my name from the ghetto / But I’m bigger now / I can go to dinner with Corey Gamble and Miss Jenner now.” Despite the story that could have been told about the dizzying turn that the last couple years undoubtedly have been, Baby has nothing compelling to say about his life here. The moment is short-lived, as a nameless set of hi-hats and lifeless 808s take the wheel, and the typical Baby sound washes over.

“It’s Only Me” opens with the smoky croons of a chipmunk soul sample on “Real Spill” that briefly seems to promise something newly earnest or ambitious. Lil Baby rose to the top ranks with a somewhat distinct voice - a smooth, hoarse tone that often sounds effortless on his sprinting flows - but it was typically laid across shamelessly copy-and-paste trap production.

Smoovie baby albums full#

The album, Baby’s third studio effort, largely solidifies what was perhaps even more unexpected about his superstardom: the fact that it was built on a sound that, on the star-making “My Turn,” was largely flavorless and inert when taken in its full dosage. It is this rise over the last couple years that undergirds the arrival of his new record, “It’s Only Me,” and what also perhaps explains the mentality behind an often phoned-in slog of a work. Up until the release of “My Turn,” Lil Baby had still been defined, as with so many of his ATL contemporaries, as some variation of “Young Thug clone.” But the record, boosted by its deluxe release to become the most consumed album of the year, chugged along into a sleeper hit that shot him into the hip-hop stratosphere. Among the many oddities of a tumultuous, pandemic-addled year in music in 2020, the most surprising might have been that Taylor Swift’s massive “Folklore” was surpassed in consumption by the end of the year by an even more massive album from a still up-and-coming Atlanta rapper.