! - Trippie Redd: Review
is an Atlanta via Ohio rapper that blew up in late 2017 into 2018 alongside young voices like XXXTENTACION and 6ix9ine on a wave of SoundCloud rap. Trippie set himself apart with a unique and zany singing voice that helped his first two mixtapes A Love Letter To You 1 and 2 become sleeper hits. He released his debut album Life's A Trip last year to mixed critical reception before dropping the breakout hit single Topanga which landed on his next mixtape and his most critically acclaimed project to date A Love Letter To You 3.
Review By Lavender:
I have always been pretty tightly aligned with the masses in regards to Trippie Redd. He flashes potential with some singles but his first two mixtapes left a little bit to be desired, and by the time his debut album came along I was more than a little disappointed by it. Much to the surprise of me and many others Trippie wasn't done in 2019 and followed this underwhelming record up with his best single yet Topanga and his best full length project yet, A Love Letter To You 3, both of which snuck their way onto my year end lists and seemed to indicate a bright future for Trippie. ! seems to be where I break apart from the crowd in regards to Trippie's music as many across the web have been slamming this record, but I actually find it to be a disappointing but still worthwhile record in his growing discography.
! gets off to a pretty good start with its title track, a song that features a wild electronic instrumental that reminds me of something Flume would do and has Trippie seriously giving it his all on the hook to match the energy of the track. When Trippie can pull an interesting instrumental on this album he is usually up to the task of putting his unique vocal talents to work on the hook and this album has a number of good tracks that result. Be Yourself is hilarious tune where Trippie challenges his contemporaries to either be themselves, or kill themselves. It is placed directly after a song that takes a misguided dive into suicide prevention that we will talk about later but Trippie seems content to take it on the nose with this one in order to spawn one of the records funnier tracks. Immortal is a song with a feature I didn't expect to pop up on this record with The Game, who actually sings a part of his verse with autotune and it is just as awkward as you'd expect. Aside from this he is very sharp and Trippie delivers a great hook that may have a few lyrical shortcomings, but ultimately redeems itself and the track with sheer catchiness.
Keep Your Head Up is one of the better positivity anthems on the album with a simple but effective instrumental and Trippie pulling out a Drake impression that is WAY more accurate than I would have ever guessed he was able to do. Riot is an interesting song that sees Trippie trying to write a 6ix9ine style hook but not really willing to commit all the way too it. The song gets better in its second half especially with Trippie hilariously banters with himself over the final hook and delivering lines like "Imma take you bitch like a Vicodin".
The record also has a pair of solid songs in its final stretch that I enjoyed quite a bit. Under Enemy Arms is one of my favorite tracks here with a huge orchestral instrumental that Trippie meets with one of his best and most unique performances as well as yet another very solid and memorable hook. Lil Wayne is a short but solid album cut that sees Trippie rapping over some bouncy keys and hitting a short verse between two renditions of a chorus that I enjoy quite a bit and has been stuck in my head for a while now. Unfortunately there is plenty here that is far less worthwhile.
Snake Skin and I Try are some very misguided positivity ballads that sound more like Logic songs than Trippie Redd trap tunes. The instrumental for Try also sounds straight our of Lupe Fiasco's Lasers which is not at all a compliment and these two tracks kind of make me question if Trippie really understands who his fanbase is, or maybe they are just attempts at generating a crossover hit with mainstream audiences, either way I don't like these tracks. When Trippie brings on some lesser known guests onto the record it goes very poorly 100% of the time. Mac 10 is an awful posse cut with a bearable chorus and an absolutely comatose verse from Lil Duke that I could comfortably fall asleep too. The songs low point comes on a Lil Baby verse at the end of the track that shows absolutely no awareness for the energy of the track and completely falls flat on its face with no chemistry whatsoever to the other artists. Everything Boz features some silly adlibbing and childish rhyming that could fit into the new genre I'm inventing called Sesame Street Trap. But by far the worst moment on this song and on the entire album is an absolutely obnoxious feature from Coi Leray that proves absolutely no quality control was deployed at any point in the processing of this song.
Throw It Away is an emo trap ballad and one of the only points on this record where Trippie drowns his voice in so much auto-tune it is completely lifeless and unbearable. There is an element of serious heartbreak to this song that is completely ruined by the excessive vocal effects and I just wish he hadn't bothered because I think I actually would have liked this song. Signing Off is one of the most uninspired songs here and unfortunately it's the closer. The song just drags on and says absolutely nothing worthwhile and the choppy and broken flows along with Trippie moaning out every single rhyme at the end of each bar completely wrecks the song and it just sputters out to nothing randomly at the end.
So as I this review was being copy-edited there was a strange development that made me return to it. The song They Afraid Of You was removed from the album on all streaming services, the track itself is pretty much dominated by a long and wonderful Playboi Carti verse as he continues to be one of the artists I'm most excited to catch a feature from. But if the song was truly removed because people were dragging Trippie for Carti's verse being the best on the album I can't disagree with them and I think removing it completely was not the right solution. Given that I had already scored the record I'm keeping my original assessment since the song was mostly a Carti track anyway and I feel mostly the same about the album at large in its absence.
! is a step backwards for Trippie who once again fails to deliver on his talents consistently. There are plenty of moments on this record where Trippie assembles a great song or sings a fantastic chorus both of which see him playing favorably to his strengths. But on a number or tracks here Trippie is diving into misguided experiments or coming up short with underwhelming songwriting. Though he clearly has talent it is going to take some more time and focus before Trippie Redd can be taken seriously as an album artist, though a fire mixtape or two in the meantime wouldn't hurt. 5.5/10
