Actually, fuck it: Chief Keef does need that stuntin’ break after all. Almost immediately after releasing one of his most consistent projects in five years (The Cozart, in all its insane, EDM-heavy glory), here goes Sosa destroying any and all good will we might have built up for him — with Back From The Dead 3. This is the flat-out worst project the drill king has ever dropped. Sounding like it was recorded in a closet and mixed on an iPhone, there’s not a single redeeming moment across the hour-long mixtape, which features some of Keef’s laziest lyrics — bars like “all white diamonds, mayonnaise / got two letters, A and K” are the closest he gets to genuine wordplay here — and production that usually just consists of a looped, 30-second, ringtone-worthy instrumental (the little player-piano snippet on “Pharrell” grows tiresome barely 20 seconds in; the song is five grueling minutes long).
Even when Keef attempts to weird things up a bit — like with a Soulja Boy collab that goes on for seven minutes (“Gated”) — it never amounts to much of anything other than dead air (the majority of “Gated,” for instance, is spent on both rappers ad-libbing and seeing how many times and ways they can say “yeah”). It’s difficult to imagine any amount of effort going into a song here, considering how utterly incoherent Keef sounds most of the time. Gone is the commanding timbre his voice once carried, turning King Glo’s usually stony delivery into the generic welp that a million other SoundCloud clones have claimed. In a year of artistic highs for Keef, this is not only an obvious the nadir — it’s the lowest that drill’s most important voice has ever sunk.
Published as part of What Meek Didn’t Do | The Rap Releases We Missed in 2018.
