Anyone looking to be surprised by what a chart-topping “pop“ album can sound like in 2020 should listen to Whole Lotta Red. Playboi Carti had been a divisive force in rap since “Magnolia” came out in 2017, a visionary to progressive listeners and horseman of the apocalypse to more conservative ones—two horsemen if you wanna count his ”baby voice”. Where the arc of trap music as drawn by artists like Migos and Young Thug bent toward beats that were both increasingly stripped-down and increasingly weird and psychedelic, Whole Lotta Red—produced by moment-defining guys like F1lthy and Pi’erre Bourne—pushed the sound even further, making bright, menacing music that captured the high of a great slasher movie (“No Sl33p”, “Stop Breathing”) or binging viral videos on repeat. Picking Carti apart for his lyrical simplicity or the almost maniacal way he would get stuck on a single phrase like an engine backfiring in the mud—“Jump out the house! jump out the house! jump out the house!”—is beside the point: He’s not rapping here, he’s transmitting pure, instant energy. You could trace it back to stuff like Three 6 Mafia or the blown-out sound of old arcade games or the compressed violence of ’80s punk and hardcore. But the precedents didn’t matter, at least not really: Whole Lotta Red felt most of all like an album that reset the counter, ignoring the traditions of rap in favour of something that felt sometimes transcendently of-the-moment—and in it, too. It’s weird, it’s risky, it’s fashionable and ugly and childish and sophisticatedly minimal at the same time. It might make you feel dumb. And that’s part of what makes it brilliant.