Westside Gunn takes a drastic turn on new album

One of our writers looks at Westside Gunn's new album...

George Neal
17th November 2023
Imagecredit:Instagram@westsidegunn
Westside Gunn has made a name as one of hip-hop’s most outlandishly creative artists in recent years. All the way until his final instalment in the Hitler Wears Hermes franchise last year, the founder of Griselda has provided endless sugar rushes of beautifully sampled beats, zany flows, and iconic cartoonish adlibs. With his 2020 album Pray for Paris having gathered critical acclaim, this sequel And Then You Pray for Me was hoped by fans to expand on its predecessors’ chilled confident rapping and luxurious instrumentation by Camouflage Monk and Alchemist. While this sequel does have occasional moments of classic boom-bap rap Westside is known to thrive over and various excellent features, its majority could not have been a bigger 180 from what we have come to expect.

could not have been a bigger 180 from what we have come to expect

While we may have received a trap cut off Westside’s last album, ATYPFM is dominated by loud shrill trap beats from the likes of Tay Keith. While verging into unknown territory is usually admirable for artists so long engrained into a particular style, Westside unfortunately sounds painfully unnatural attempting to keep up with these modern beats. Gunn has been shown to lay vicious, constantly-switching flows on the most outlandish and bloodthirsty boom-bap cuts, like Hell on Earth, Pt. 2 and Bad News, but one simple trap cut is enough to have him cling to a single flow like a support raft throughout all one hour sixteen minutes. Production itself also ranges from outdated to almost unlistenable at points when it attempts to embrace modernity on cuts like JD Wrist, which is ironic considering Gunn’s tradition of utilising old piano-heavy samples to create fresh postmodern classics. Upon viewing the track list, I was expecting Rick Ross and Westside to embark on the musical equivalent of an expensive dinner with luxurious Paris scenes and a surrounding French orchestra on DunnHill, given the two’s similarly confident laid-back charisma. Instead, I got the equivalent of two men attempting to be macho by starting a bar fight only to immediately regret it.

It is only more tragic when realising the excellence to be salvaged when Westside sticks to his literal guns here. Mamas PrimeTime, Kitchen Lights and Suicide in Selfridges all have more glamorous progressive production, which our star not only thrives over but allows JID, Conway and Stove God Cooks to show artistic sides of themselves never seen before. This album ultimately shows disconnecting Gunn from boom-bap and instead plugging in the trap is like hooking someone to the wrong blood type. He hopelessly struggles with himself, and the result is an inevitable mess.

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