Lil Uzi Vert

Lil Uzi Vert

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Essential Albums

  • Eternal Atake (Deluxe) - LUV vs. The World 2
    Eternal Atake (Deluxe) - LUV vs. The World 2
    Eternal Atake (Deluxe) - LUV vs. The World 2

    One of the most heralded hip-hop artists of his generation, Lil Uzi Vert built no small part of his well-deserved reputation off of the promise of a record nobody had heard. For nearly two years, fans eagerly anticipated the release of Eternal Atake, a maddeningly delayed project whose legend grew while tragedy befell some of the Philadelphia native’s emo rap peers, including Lil Peep and XXXTENTACION. With the wait finally over, the patient listenership that made do with running back 2017’s Luv Is Rage 2 again and again can take in his glittering opus. Without relying on showy features—save for one memorable duet with Syd on the otherworldly “Urgency”—Uzi does more than most of those who’ve jacked his style in the interim. He imbues the post-EDM aesthetic of “Celebration Station” and the video-game trap of “Silly Watch” alike with speedy, free-associative verses that run from gun talk to sexual exploits. An obvious influence on Uzi’s discography, Chief Keef provides the woozy beat for “Chrome Heart Tags”, reminding that there are levels to Uzi’s artistry. Not to be outdone, for the deluxe edition of* *Eternal Atake he appends an entire new album dubbed LUV vs. The World 2. Loaded with features by predominantly Atlanta-based rap all-stars, this bonus offering represents a windfall for Uzi’s base while contrasting with the largely guest-free original version. He gives an energetic performance over the synth swells and 808 rattle of “Wassup” with Future, and lets 21 Savage take the lead on the Pi’erre Bourne-produced “Yessirskiii”. Young Thug comes through twice, embracing Uzi’s return on the bubblegum trap of “Got the Guap” and then linking with Gunna for the club-crushing “Strawberry Peels”. Closing out the side is the uplifting “Leaders” with NAV, a fitting end piece from one of his most vocally supportive friends.

  • Luv Is Rage 2
    Luv Is Rage 2
    Luv Is Rage 2

    There are few songs in 21st-century hip-hop that serve as an artist’s mission statement as clearly as Lil Uzi Vert’s “XO Tour Llif3”. In 2017, with a single stroke, Uzi had synthesised the jagged emotionality of the Soundcloud-native rappers bubbling out of South Florida, the melodic trap records emanating from Atlanta and technical rigour from his native Philadelphia. Beyond the text of the song, its release seemed immediately to be an inflection point, the long-awaited realisation of the superstar potential projected onto him from the moment he emerged in the mid-2010s. It would be virtually impossible to overstate the song’s impact on Uzi’s career and on rap writ large. Before it was even officially issued as a single, the Soundcloud version of the pleading, pointed track had amassed a giant cult following; when it was finally available through commercial channels, it became a phenomenon far beyond what a No. 7 peak on the Hot 100 could measure. But rather than serving as a business model, “XO Tour Llif3” comes to define Luv Is Rage 2, Uzi’s studio debut from that same year, on a thematic level. That song’s quick pivots of posture and composure—from callousness to tenderness, defiance to outright desperation—are mirrored over and over throughout the LP. See the way “Dark Queen” is at once a loving portrait of Uzi’s mother and an implicitly icy one of him; see how “The Way Life Goes”, with its extended Oh Wonder interpolation, flits from big-brotherly advice to petty woundedness. None of this tonal morphing makes the songs incoherent—it makes them complicated, the way we all are. Uzi has always seemed to pick beats as if reaching into a boiling cauldron from a children’s cartoon, pulling out tracks that sound slightly haunted but are nevertheless rendered in bright Technicolor. Pharrell’s playful but punishing “Neon Guts” is on the lighter end of this spectrum, while “No Sleep Leak” pushes Uzi’s voice into a lonely vacuum where each paranoid lyric is made to seem twice as foreboding as it would in a fuller mix. While Uzi frequently appears to have gobbled up and metabolised the musical world around him, Luv Is Rage 2 is a chillingly singular record.

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About Lil Uzi Vert

Lil Uzi Vert told us up front, in their intro to Playboi Carti’s “Wokeuplikethis*”: “I’m a rock star.” The metaphor wasn’t about dominance so much as it was about flamboyance, for Uzi as a purse-carrying, post-Kanye MC raised on anime and Marilyn Manson, whose indifference towards hip-hop orthodoxy made them a punk to some and a hero to more. Where previous generations of rappers leveraged influence through the boardroom (JAY-Z: “I’m not a businessman/I’m a business, man”), Uzi represents a generation fluent in fashion and social media, not just a recording artist but a kind of creative director whose personality and sense of world-building comes through almost as loudly as the music. That they could turn a line as bleak as “Push me to the edge/All my friends are dead” (“XO TOUR Llif3”) into a sing-along only made them more vital—here was a person feeling the pain and packaging it in style. So, a rock star, maybe. But definitely not a rapper in the traditional sense. Born Symere Woods in North Philadelphia in 1994, Uzi first started rapping to one-up a classmate, quickly making the leap to national relevance through features with Young Thug and Migos while building a tight-knit collective of producers and collaborators, known as Working on Dying, at home. Like Thug, Uzi is a distinctive rapper (the stage name was given, not taken), but the key to their sound is melody, mixing post-trap rumble with the candied hooks of pop punk and neon surfaces of EDM for a style that splits the starkness of modern hip-hop into prismatic colour. After the massive success of 2017’s Luv Is Rage 2, Uzi announced that they’d deleted all works in progress and were retiring, only to surface in 2020 with the almost mythically anticipated Eternal Atake, following the album about a week later with a deluxe edition that doubled its length. Guess they had to find something to do with the free time. Speaking to Apple Music in 2017, they described themself as an alien, but the reality is more interesting: They're of the earth, they're here, they're now.

GENRE
Hip-Hop/Rap

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