A course correction after the wild genre experimentation of last year’s Pink Tape, Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atake 2 isn’t so much an evolution of 2020’s Eternal Atake as it is a watered-down rehash of it. Gone are the personality, ambition, and world-building visions that defined those previous two albums, replaced with 16 tracks’ worth of disjointed flows, bland beats, and shaky vocal performances.
In theory, a sequel like this should be a cakewalk: a snappy collection of vaguely poppy, energetic crowd-pleasers with just enough drill influence to still qualify as rap. In other words, Uzi’s bread and butter. But the minimal legwork required to get there is sorely lacking here, and Eternal Atake 2 suffers from a serious lapse in quality control.
Say what you will about the lyrical drivel coming from Uzi’s mouth half the time—the low point being two different songs hinging on cringe-worthy homophones, with titles like “PerkySex” and “Lyft Em Up”—but even the album’s auditory profile is consistently off. Lil 88, the architect behind Destroy Lonely’s equally lifeless Love Lasts Forever, continues to cling to stale 808s and looping piano riffs, while Mike Dean can take much of the blame for the poorly mixed “Chips and Dip,” whose sound is compressed into oblivion.
Eternal Atake 2 quickly spirals into a series of microwaved leftovers, each track blurring into the next. Attempts to jolt some energy into the album come off as odd and misguided: “I’m straight off the nitrous,” Uzi announces in a pitched-down vocal straight out of Playboi Carti’s playbook on “Light Year (Practice),” which might explain why the next few songs rely so heavily on the vocal effect. This particular stretch, from “Meteor Man” to “The Rush”—the latter of which comes complete with a shamelessly clickbaity Big Time Rush feature—feels downright inert.
Uzi can still rattle off a rapid-fire barrage of ad-libs and designer name-drops (see “Not an Option,” one of the album’s few tolerable tracks) and twist their voice into a high-pitched emo yelp (as on “Conceited”). But these moments are few and far between on an album that feels more like a product for mass consumption than a showcase of the artist’s skill as an MC.
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