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. 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. 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. 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 nothing else like it.
But in the last two years, Lil Uzi Vert songs have become scarce. Shortly after the release of Luv Is Rage 2, the 2017 album that made Uzi a star, he entered label purgatory. 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. 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. 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. The expectations were otherworldly.
And somehow, Uzi met those expectations. Eternal Atake is Uzi’s greatest album to date, a scope-defying hour-long epic that couldn’t be made by anyone else. 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. 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.