Lil Baby Has a One-Trap Mind With Bloated, Unambitious ‘It’s Only Me’: Album Review
Alex Swhear Among the many oddities of a tumultuous, pandemic-addled year in music in 2020, the most surprising might have been that Taylor Swift’s massive “Folklore” was surpassed in consumption by the end of the year by an even more massive album from a still up-and-coming Atlanta rapper. Up until the release of “My Turn,” Lil Baby had still been defined, as with so many of his ATL contemporaries, as some variation of “Young Thug clone.” But the record, boosted by its deluxe release to become the most consumed album of the year, chugged along into a sleeper hit that shot him into the hip-hop stratosphere. It is this rise over the last couple years that undergirds the arrival of his new record, “It’s Only Me,” and what also perhaps explains the mentality behind an often phoned-in slog of a work. The album, Baby’s third studio effort, largely solidifies what was perhaps even more unexpected about his superstardom: the fact that it was built on a sound that, on the star-making “My Turn,” was largely flavorless and inert when taken in its full dosage. Lil Baby rose to the top ranks with a somewhat distinct voice — a smooth, hoarse tone that often sounds effortless on his sprinting flows — but it was typically laid across shamelessly copy-and-paste trap production.