A Futuristic Summa Is Not the Album We Expected from Metro Boomin
Metro Boomin’s new tape has teen waves that take us back more than ten years, when we were just starting to get to know the first names in trap music.
A promise I once made to my past self was that I would always look ahead, that I would never sink into nostalgia, especially where music is concerned. Yes, there would inevitably be songs that returned me to moments when I felt carefree, fundamentally “better,” yet I swore to embrace every new turn in rap so I wouldn’t become one of those people who thought trap would last two days and now sing its praise.
Well, spoiler: that vow cracked. I’m past thirty, not sixteen anymore, and I struggle to keep pace with fresh releases; sometimes I’d rather hear someone shout “Hannah Montana” for three straight minutes (if you know, you know) than decode the latest hyped artist.
I’ve become the type who listens to an album and shrugs, “At least they’re rapping.”
The drift isn’t mine alone: the classmates who once convinced me that an alien language existed have grown up, too. One is tied up in a drawn-out RICO case, another lost his group and a cousin, and another simply vanished. One cut an album that got eclipsed by last year’s diss track.
This past Friday, a new Metro Boomin mixtape dropped, and for me, it felt like diving backward through time. Quavo, Young Thug, Waka Flocka, 2 Chainz, Future, Lil Baby—an entire Atlanta roll call waits inside.
It’s a strange record, not the sort you’d expect from Metro right now, even though the cover art instantly recalls Sega Mega Drive cartridges, Habbo Hotel rooms, and other keepsakes tucked beside the diagrams from your oral-exam thesis.
It’s a happy tape; some beats flirt with vaporwave or that instant when trap sounded like Yachty and D.R.A.M.’s “Broccoli.” Young Thug’s “Birthday” and Waka Flocka’s “Clap” feel like fresh overtures from rappers we once took for granted.
The music hurled me back to a summer spent in a bedroom, toggling between Rocci and Socrates translations, until a Facebook post introduced me to Y.R.N. and I lost weeks to three guys rapping about Motorolas and mysterious kitchen whips.
That summer felt like the future. The tape gave me something obvious yet never before linked in my mind to trap: sometimes the future becomes the past, something you watch fondly, with a smile and a tear tracing your cheek.
A Futuristic Summa works that way—twenty-four tracks that made me think of teachers’ excuse slips and the fact that, for a moment, we really did run the world. And it felt good.
The nostalgia rush doesn’t end when the last hi-hat decays. You close the player and swear you can still smell midsummer asphalt, still hear side-door speakers rattling under cheap sub-bass, still feel the pocket-vibe of a Blackberry you couldn’t afford. Metro’s sequencing—loose, party-centered, almost reckless—reinstates the permission structure of those nights: nothing on the syllabus tomorrow that can’t be dodged. Suddenly, the calendar blurs, AND all that matters is a hook you already know after one spin and an ad-lib you’ll steal before sunrise.
Yet the tape isn’t embalming bygone glory. It re-routes it. Newer voices—Bunna B, YK Niece—graze shoulders with elders who once ruled Club Libra. The conversation feels less like revivalism than an overdue roll call. Memory becomes source code.