Music reviews: Playboi Carti, Charley Crockett, and Throwing Muses

“Music,” “Lonesome Drifter,” and “Moonlight Concessions”

Rapper Playboi Carti debuts his new album "Music" onstage during the Rolling Loud Festival at Hollywood Park Grounds on March 16, 2025 in Inglewood, California
Rapper Playboi Carti debuts his new album 'Music' at the Rolling Loud Festival on March 16, 2025 in Inglewood, California
(Image credit: Scott Dudelson / Getty Images)

‘Music’ by Playboi Carti

Playboi Carti “couldn’t be a normal rap star if he tried,” said Tom Breihan in Stereogum. On his long-awaited new album, the man who invented the rage-rap subgenre “seems to work entirely on impulse,” switching flows and vocal styles as the spirit moves him, and “if you’re willing to embrace the chaos,” the music on Music is “truly exhilarating”—“like running directly into a hurricane.” Carti is not a master of speech or message, and “from all available evidence,” he’s “not a good guy.” But “his electrified jabber is a whole new instrument, a vehicle for drug-dazed death-drive energy,” and “you can’t ignore Carti and remain fully tapped in with the things that are currently happening in popular music.” This star-studded record, his first album since 2020’s revolutionary Whole Lotta Red, “has real problems,” and not just that it’s overlong, said Mosi Reeves in Rolling Stone. The lyrics, which can be both ugly and mundane, describe a world “where coercion and violence dictate who wins.” But “for Carti’s fans, his words are just ear-tickling frisson.” It’s the surface of the music that’s worth hearing, because it’s “utterly engrossing.”

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