YoungBoy Never Broke Again

YoungBoy Never Broke Again

Pre-Release

Essential Albums

  • Top
    Top
    Top

    One of YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s most popular songs is “Outside Today”, from 2018’s Until Death Call My Name Reloaded, in which he takes great pains to explain just how much he doesn’t want to leave the house. If Top, the second YoungBoy offering of 2020’s quarantine period, tells us anything about the Baton Rouge MC, it’s that solitude is clearly still the preferred vibe. The MC sounds like he’s in a great space across songs like “Kacey Talk”, which features his infant son, and also “Callin”, a song where YoungBoy—paired with maybe the perfect guest, Snoop Dogg—works through his own very relatable need for weed. He’s sharper-tongued on “Murder Business,” a quick reminder that life is the cost of disrespect, but reveals himself sensitive on “All In”, rapping: “Hope God put loyalty in all my friends/’Cause lord knows that I got they back till the end.”

  • AI YoungBoy 2
    AI YoungBoy 2
    AI YoungBoy 2

    It’s fitting that events which, for other artists, might serve as career-defining achievements seem to happen, for YoungBoy Never Broke Again, in media res. In 2019, AI YoungBoy 2 became the Baton Rouge firebrand’s first U.S. No. 1 album. Only it wasn’t the result of a months-long promotional campaign, carefully rolled out to maximise exposure. In fact, it wasn’t even an album—it was a mixtape without a hit single, marketing gimmick or any press campaign to speak of. Even its title, which refers back to his 2017 breakout project, suggests that this is not designed to welcome in the uninitiated. And yet it serves as evidence of the way YoungBoy’s pain music connects with audiences on an almost spiritual level. How else to account for the way his tales of crime and vengeance in Baton Rouge—seldom given enough breathing room to appeal to voyeurs—have helped to make him one of the biggest rappers of his generation? The sorrow and longing YoungBoy is able to communicate in the tone of his voice alone transform verses that would otherwise be diaristic into rallying cries. Take the downtrodden “Make No Sense”, where a complaint that is hyperspecific to YoungBoy’s life—in this case, that he can’t stand outside the trap house anymore because his face has graced too many magazine covers—is made emotionally legible, not a boast but a confession. From the time he exploded with the original AI YoungBoy, the artist has moved fluidly between rapping and singing, often to superb effect. But on “Slime Mentality”, he takes this a step further, seemingly prepared to rap, sing or simply speak the next thing that comes to mind. This suggests an invigorating formlessness, one that might accommodate the messier thoughts coursing through YoungBoy’s head. But by the song’s finish, it has cohered into something nearly pop—a magic trick from a city, in YoungBoy’s telling, that has run out of magic.

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About YoungBoy Never Broke Again

Raised by his grandmother in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, YoungBoy Never Broke Again (born Kentrell DeSean Gaulden in 1999) started recording with a supermarket-bought microphone as a teenager, writing tracks for his early mixtapes while in juvenile detention. It’s a path that would continue to cast shadows on his career. After a flurry of increasingly strong mixtapes (most notably 2017's AI YoungBoy), Gaulden made his major-label leap with 2018’s Until Death Call My Name, only to be derailed by further arrests. He bounced back later in the year with a string of similarly titled EPs (4Respect, 4Loyalty, 4Freedom, 4WhatImportant) that continued to chart his sound, featuring collaborations with Young Thug and Kevin Gates. Aggressive but soulful, Gaulden’s music feels like a natural step in the evolution of Louisiana hip-hop, echoing both Boosie Badazz (a collaborator) and Gates (who went so far as to get a tattoo of Gaulden’s face) as well as the serious, sing-songy feel of classic Cash Money. Speaking to The FADER in 2017, Gaulden described the pressure he felt to succeed—for his family and for himself. “I can see, I can hear, I can smell, I can speak, I can touch,” he said. “Ain’t no excuses.” In the 2020s, YoungBoy charged ahead with projects like Top, Sincerely, Kentrell, The Last Slimeto, I Rest My Case and Don't Try This At Home, among others. With each release, he adds to a catalogue defined by raw emotion—an explosion of feeling his fans are happy he never learned to control.

HOMETOWN
Baton Rouge, LA, United States
BORN
20 October 1999
GENRE
Hip-Hop/Rap

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