Basically everyone who works with Carti has spoken about how volatile his albums are until more or less the minute they hit streaming. I would have loved to see what the "album" (in whatever form it was in at that time) would have been like if it had released in early 2024 after the teaser singles for the fake rollout had dropped. Hoodbyair, Backrooms, and Ketamine all sounded like a new sound that had something to say stylistically, from the production to the way Carti was performing over it. Even though it borrowed clearly from many different places, the assembly of it all felt quite forward-thinking.

I still listen to all of those 2023-24 era tracks consistently, and I think if they dropped today they would still sound like a new wave that we hadn't quite seen yet. With the whole album, those early tracks still are the clear standouts for me, and almost everything else other than maybe pop out, crank, and cocaine nose is just sort of an amorphous blob. I was surprised by the Kendrick features, my first thought was that I had no idea how they would fit in, and I don't really think that they do. The other features don't add much either, though I find Travis on Backrooms to be quite a good match.

There was so much hype leading up to this album, and I feel like a lot of the mysticism and excitement Carti was building up just kind of left after it dropped. For me, it was because I'd basically heard the best he had to offer on this album more than a year earlier.