While not exactly bowling shoe ugly, it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of a debut.
The kid needs a new producer, Pi'erre Bourne's production on majority of the tracks really made the album fall flat. The instrumentations on Right Now and Flatbed Freestyle are basically Magnolia ripoffs. The aforementioned Flatbed Freestyle sounds like a down syndrome kid impersonation. The production on Pull Up however was sublime.
Carti enlisted some heavyweight names as features and even they failed to lift the album. Travis Scott delivers nothing we haven't heard before, Lil Uzi Vert dials it in with a basic Uzi Vert verse, Nicki Minaj at least tried to deliver an incredible verse, but falls just short. When inspired Bryson Tiller can single handedly make a song listenable, but he too decides to dial in it on Fell In Luv, the same can be said of Young Thug.
The most enjoyable verse comes courtesy of relative unknown Young Nudy on R.I.P Fredo.
I'm sure he's well connected in the industry at this point so why didn't he call in a few favors, have some Metro Boomin production on the album. Rae Sremmurd even branched out to TM88 and Metro on their album and it turned into hits. There's Mike Will since we're on the Ear Drummers train. Carti was all over both ASAP Mob albums, not one of them made an appearance on here. That's a good thing though, saved them from this disaster of an album.
Those who are longtime fans will enjoy a release like this, but this writer feels it's a waste of 60 minutes and so did he's trap head colleagues.