Uzi switches flows with ease, takes pauses that feel like a sudden pull of the emergency brake, and finishes every line with a high-pitch squeal that rivals Future on “ King’s Dead.” “You Better Move” is similar, as Uzi fires off puns referencing forgotten pop culture tokens from his past-Blue Eyes White Dragon, Zoom, a Microsoft Zune-over a freakish Working On Dying beat, sampling sounds from “Space Cadet 3D Pinball,” which used to come pre-loaded with Windows. “She look good, but she wear Fashion Nova/Took her shoppin’, put her right in some Vetements,” says Uzi, like every line is stepping on the one before it. On “Silly Watch,” Uzi’s pace is relentless: It’s like sitting in the passenger seat while Uzi, head barely over the steering wheel, cruises into triple digits. He has always been capable, but much of his breakout mixtapes took a bright and singsongy approach to pair with his lovestruck personality. Uzi is not just compiling a list of brands he paints colorful scenes down to the specificity of his Air Forces or a tag on his beanie. The album is 18 Lil Uzi songs about money, the luxury that money buys, the girls attracted to that luxury, and the heartache brought on by those girls, a feeling that has always inspired his music. A high-stakes feat, accomplished through a creative kinship with the Philly production collective Working On Dying and Uzi’s increased attention to detail-in the world of Eternal Atake, every spaced-out sample is just as important as any animated punchline.Įternal Atake has a loose concept-something about abductions, aliens, and space, alluded to with a few skits and an album trailer-but none of that really matters. It’s a seamless blend of drill-influenced rapping, melodic crooning, and beats that are aware of hip-hop’s trends, but stretch them to places unimaginable. Eternal Atake is Uzi’s greatest album to date, a scope-defying hour-long epic that couldn’t be made by anyone else. The expectations were otherworldly.Īnd somehow, Uzi met those expectations. It became known by fans as the Uzi opus forever locked away by greedy label heads, but, if it ever did find its way out into the world, it would be a landmark moment for an entire generation. In the meantime, while Uzi beefed with a suicide cult, squared up with Rich the Kid in a coffee shop, had a short-lived retirement, and became a semi-professional Triller dancer, his delayed third album, Eternal Atake, developed a mythical aura. Beginning in January 2018, Uzi began to vaguely hint that his Generation Now label bosses DJ Drama and Don Cannon were preventing him from releasing new music-he only dropped one solo song in 2018. Shortly after the release of Luv Is Rage 2, the 2017 album that made Uzi a star, he entered label purgatory. There’s nothing else like it.īut in the last two years, Lil Uzi Vert songs have become scarce. There’s a reason why the Philly rapper’s leaks and snippets are traded like rare baseball cards in corners of the internet that stream more YouTube than Spotify. There’s the spirit of Meek Mill freestyling on Philadelphia street corners, the breakneck pace of G Herbo, the melodic designer-brand fever dream of a True Religion-wearing era Chief Keef, injected slightly with the pint-sized angst of punk-pop heroines like Hayley Williams of Paramore. But a typical Lil Uzi Vert song also sounds like it was ripped from a harddrive that fell out of the back of a spaceship, all delivered with a medley of influences from the generations that came before him.
In the live, the rapper also talks to Fat Joe about dying at 27, why he chose to put the diamond into his forehead, and more.A typical Lil Uzi Vert song boils down to a few core topics: the millions in his bank account, the cars an average person wouldn’t know how to start, jewelry that wouldn’t shine on anyone else, clothing brands that most can’t pronounce, and girls who would never bat an eyelash at someone other than Uzi. Everything is supposed to be going f*cking diamond.” I have a f*cking pink diamond in the middle of my head, Joe. We expect everything from him because I’m already giving off this persona. The music is definitely there, it’s good production but, honestly, from Lil Uzi Vert we expect a fcking star, moon, spaceships, and the high above. So I dropped this album and the music is tolerable. “Sometimes it’s like, the time and everything, and ‘come on, Uzi, we need to drop’ and I didn’t want it to go on to three years. “I have no problem putting out a leaked song but sometimes that sh*t is personal, Joe,” Uzi said. However, the rapper didn’t want to keep fans waiting for an album, pushing a two-year wait into three years. Uzi also explains the reason he moved forward and released the album had to do with some of his songs being leaked.