YoungBoy Never Broke Again

October 10, 2019 at PDT

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 No. 1 album. Only it wasn’t the result of a months-long promotional campaign, carefully rolled out to maximize 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.

18 Tracks

October 3, 2019 at PDT

Bandit - Single

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December 19, 2018 at PST

Realer

Realer tops off a busy—and tumultuous—year for Baton Rouge rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again: three mixtapes, three EPs, one studio album (Until Death Call My Name), and a move from regional voice to national player—all on top of a felony arrest that nearly derailed his career. Like the rest of his recent output, the sound here is tough, sometimes brutally so, but it’s offset by flashes of vulnerability and a handle for melody that makes even his harshest lines go down with unsettling ease: See the switch-up from confession to threat on “Slime Belief,” or the standout “Valuable Pain,” a throwback New Orleans-style track featuring a line that captures his spirit in five words: “I murder from the heart.”

12 Tracks

September 10, 2020 at PDT

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.”

21 Tracks

August 3, 2017 at PDT

AI YoungBoy

15 Tracks

April 26, 2018 at PDT

Until Death Call My Name Reloaded

Seven extra doses of reality on the debut from Baton Rouge's hardest.

20 Tracks

May 21, 2020 at PDT

Need It (feat. YoungBoy Never Broke Again) - Single

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September 6, 2018 at PDT

Decided

Baton Rouge rappers have a history of being tough but vulnerable, and YoungBoy—the brightest star among his city’s new guard—seems determined to carry on that legacy in his tales of loss, loyalty, and hustle. You could call him cold-blooded on tracks like the Trippie Redd-assisted “Murda,” where he yelps, “I ain’t scared, we go to war where I’m from.” But YoungBoy wears his heart on his sleeve, and Decided deals with love and heartbreak just as often as it does violence. Over moody piano on “Sky Cry,” he’s strikingly poetic about a relationship’s end: “I see your soul in the sky through a symbol.”

11 Tracks

December 9, 2021 at PST

From The Bayou

By now, you probably know what to expect from YoungBoy, the Baton Rouge rapper whose harrowing tales of trauma, violence, and his endless legal battles have made him one of the most popular rappers on the planet. And you probably know what to expect from Cash Money head honcho Birdman, who’s been talking his shit—his very expensive shit—for three decades now. From the Bayou brings together two wildly different generations of Louisiana street rap, though it’s mostly a showcase for the younger star; songs like “The Bigger End” and “Heart & Soul” have all the heartache and urgency of YoungBoy at his best. (“Went to jail, came home, time passed, went back again/All the pain I felt inside myself, thought it would never end,” he spits on the latter.) He doesn’t really need Birdman’s help, but it’s always nice to hear the OG pop by with some flashy non sequiturs—Roberto Cavalli floors, $10,000 robes, you know the drill.

13 Tracks

September 23, 2021 at PDT

Sincerely, Kentrell

23 Tracks

September 13, 2018 at PDT

4Respect 4Freedom 4Loyalty 4WhatImportant

YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s 4Respect 4Freedom 4Loyalty 4WhatImportant was teased to fans over the course of three EPs, each four-song pack intended to represent a specific theme. All of the songs from those, plus four that were unavailable previously, come together to form a long-playing manifesto of the Baton Rouge rapper’s most current focus. While the 4 Respect and 4 Freedom EPs were presented as collaborative showcases with Baton Rouge OG Kevin Gates and Savannah’s Quando Rondo, respectively, YoungBoy has plenty to say for himself across the album. Opening track “Dropout” is gleefully aggro and a step away from the cathartic and soul-baring hymns that have become the rapper’s signature. The pain is ever-present, however, with YoungBoy addressing the public’s judgment of his legal woes on “Can’t Be Saved” and rebuking rap punditry altogether over a classic Isaac Hayes sample on “I Am Who They Say I Am.”

16 Tracks

April 23, 2020 at PDT

38 Baby 2

17 Tracks

June 14, 2018 at PDT

Master the Day of Judgement

Like so many of Baton Rouge’s rap greats, YoungBoy Never Broke Again understands that there is no pleasure without pain. On his eight-track Master the Day of Judgement EP, the rapper reminisces on his violent early life in the streets as he celebrates his current-day success: “I know I won’t make it to heaven,” he sing-songs on the brooding “Rock and Roll.” But YoungBoy’s not completely resigned to his fate: On the twinkling trap ballad “Over,” he warbles, “I was done with love, but I done relapsed now,” and promises his girl that he’ll become a better person for her sake.

8 Tracks

August 4, 2022 at PDT

The Last Slimeto

In July of 2022, a weight was lifted from the shoulders of beloved Baton Rouge MC YoungBoy Never Broke Again when a Los Angeles court found him not guilty of possessing a firearm and ammunition as a felon. A conviction would have added to a near endless amount of interruptions that YB’s career has sustained from trouble with the law, so the clearing of his name was as good a reason as any to celebrate, which he does with The Last Slimeto. At 30 songs, the album is true to YB’s reputation as one of the most consistently prolific artists of his era, YoungBoy weaving in and out of two of his most prominent vocal styles: aggressive-to-the-point-of-teeth-gnashing rapping, and his twangy, unmistakable, and dependably emo singing. There’s enough YB to go around here, and, if the pace at which he traditionally releases music is to be trusted, more than enough to hold fans down until the next time he drops.

30 Tracks

December 16, 2020 at PST

How I Been - Single

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October 5, 2017 at PDT

Ain't Too Long

Seven songs that affirm success couldn't change him.

7 Tracks

February 18, 2019 at PST

Gangsta Fever - Single

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June 2, 2019 at PDT

Freeddawg - Single

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May 11, 2023 at PDT

Richest Opp

His second release inside a month is a 17-track mixtape—in Spatial Audio.

17 Tracks

September 6, 2022 at PDT

Realer 2

For a razor-toothed mixtape, Realer 2 is, to a surprising extent, a family affair. The record was announced before its release by YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s beloved mother, Sherhonda, and the only feature across its 15 songs is from the Baton Rouge rapper’s partner, Jaz, the mother of two of his children. Normally a chameleonic collaborator, YoungBoy chooses instead to seal himself off from the outside world, letting his own tics and neuroses set the parameters for what listeners might expect—which is to say, he seems to revel keeping those listeners off balance. See the way, on “DentHead,” cascading runs seem to stop dead so YoungBoy can collect himself, or how, on “Boot Up,” an extended discussion of guns melts into a frank discussion of his dating philosophies. Over and over, YoungBoy blurs the lines between one song and the next, so that—despite sharp musical divergences—his trains of thought seem to constantly collide.

One of YoungBoy’s great gifts as a writer is his keen understanding of how to manipulate the stakes. Frequently in his records, grisly events—ones he remembers from his childhood and adolescence, or ones he’s threatening to visit upon his enemies—are stacked in such quick sucession so as to have a dizzying effect, or to serve as a performance of stoicism. Alternately, there are times, such as on Realer 2’s “Dangerous Love,” when two juxtaposed images—in this case, YoungBoy as a child enveloped in his grandmother’s arms, then the adult rapper sitting in court after being denied bond—are allowed to carry staggering emotional weight.

Realer 2 also features one of the oddest and most endearing songs in YoungBoy’s vast catalog. “Fresh Prince of Utah,” a riff on the Will Smith original, traces the artist’s journey from North Baton Rouge to Salt Lake City, where he later endured a stint under house arrest. It is neither novelty nor true inversion; YoungBoy is somehow able to retain the Fresh Prince sense of playfulness while making clear that his problems wouldn’t wrap themselves up tidily at the end of a 22-minute episode.

15 Tracks

July 18, 2019 at PDT

4 Sons of a King - Single

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November 16, 2017 at PST

Fed Baby’s

There’s a level on which Moneybagg Yo and YoungBoy Never Broke Again seem like irreconcilable opposites. The former is a playful, tightly metered technician from Memphis whose stark—and frequent—moments of introspection are often disguised as variations on his innumerable club hits. The latter, by contrast, is a demonstrative bleeding heart from Baton Rouge, his emotions wailed and barked and otherwise telegraphed across his songs, which are often referred to as “pain music.” But each rapper rose to fame through saturation rather than judicious planning. Their collaborative mixtape, Fed Baby’s, understands this to be true, and documents two livewire MCs working out their creative partnership in real time.

While Fed Baby’s sometimes leverages these differences in style to compelling ends, it also nudges each artist into the other’s territory—especially when Bagg is coaxed into YoungBoy-esque harmonization, as he is on the coy “Preliminary Hearing.” Meanwhile, YoungBoy, who is prone to breaking from long melodic runs into purposefully jagged runs of staccato rapping, borrows from Bagg the poised, seesaw delivery that hears him become almost metronomic. See “Contempt of Court,” where competing impulses to be there for his son and to check out of life forever are coiled so tightly together that a listener would be forgiven for missing the fissure between them.

In addition to the relationship between the two artists as individuals, Fed Baby’s is a study of the subtle misalignment of Memphis and Baton Rouge’s rap scenes. While Bagg and his contemporaries are led by the drums, fashioning their taunts and missives around irrepressible rhythms, Louisianans like YoungBoy have yanked their songs in more—and more divergent—directions. As in Memphis, modern Baton Rouge rap stems from dance music and club culture. But many YoungBoy tracks have a confrontationally digital feel, the natural evolution of late-’90s Cash Money songs from New Orleans, or are given over fully to their emotionality, leaning on acoustic guitar or piano. Fed Baby’s takes the notion of collaboration far more seriously than sliding two rappers onto a track together.

14 Tracks

November 12, 2020 at PST

Until I Return

15 Tracks

June 17, 2020 at PDT

One Shot (feat. Lil Baby) - Single

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