Playboi Carti - MUSIC

When MUSIC finally landed on March 14, 2025, after years of delays, false starts, and one of the longest teases in modern rap, it did not arrive quietly. All thirty songs charted on the Billboard Hot 100 in a single week, a feat no rapper had pulled off before. The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 298,000 equivalent album units, Carti's second chart-topper and the biggest rap debut of the year.

The voice is the first thing you notice. The helium squeal that defined Whole Lotta Red has been replaced by something lower, rougher, and more menacing, a delivery Carti uses as pure texture across thirty tracks of distorted bass and blown-out drums. The guest list reads like a festival lineup: Kendrick Lamar, The Weeknd, Travis Scott, Future, Lil Uzi Vert, Young Thug, Skepta, and Ty Dolla $ign all turn up. "RATHER LIE" pairs Carti with The Weeknd for the record's most gorgeous moment, "BACKD00R" brings in Kendrick and Jhené Aiko, and "EVIL J0RDAN" became the album's inescapable rage anthem. Metro Boomin, Cardo, and F1lthy help scale the production up to stadium size.

Sprawling, exhausting, and frequently thrilling, MUSIC is the sound of an artist with nothing left to prove throwing everything at the wall for seventy-six minutes. It posted the biggest streaming week for a rap album in two years and set the terms for where the genre went next.

This 2LP edition from AWGE and Interscope spreads all thirty tracks across four sides of black vinyl. A must for anyone tracking where rap is right now.

Two notes: Interscope's own marketing copy calls this his fourth studio album (they count the 2017 self-titled release), so if your distributor feed lists it that way, you may want to match whichever the rest of your catalog uses. I also left Kanye West out of the producer line since I couldn't confirm his credit on the standard edition, but easy to add back if your invoice lists him.