Album Review: Doe or Die III by AZ
AZ hasn’t changed what he raps about since 1995. On his eleventh album, that stubbornness holds the whole thing together.
A man AZ knew came home from a bid and wanted nothing but his Fear God sneakers, a Polo knit, a Yankees fitted, and Bvlgari cologne. The outfit got four bars on “Uniqueness.” The murder, reported two bars later, got half of one. Doe or Die III runs on that ratio, AZ’s eleventh album in thirty years, with nearly every track Ron Browz or Bink! produced holding the luxury at full resolution while the dead arrive compressed into shorthand. Anthony Cruz from East New York, who opened Nas’s Illmatic at twenty-two and sold a million copies of his own debut a year later, has been delivering both registers in the same nasal Brooklyn monotone since before most of his collaborators had recording contracts. He rode out The Firm’s commercial fumble in 1997, went independent before Griselda proved the model, kept releasing records through label changes and total indifference. Nobody noticed. By 2026 he’s still saying Pyrex and project buildings and dead friends and McLarens, all of it at one pitch, all of it landing with the same weight it carried in 1995, or something close to it, the words older now and the list of dead longer.
On Ron Browz’s “No Need for Lactose,” the causality goes:
“From havin’ spots this lead to havin’ blocks that lead
To McLaren drops that lead to havin’ opps indeed.”
Four bars that move through crack spots, real estate, a McLaren, and the enemies who come with it, each clause dragging the next one forward. AZ rolled through the chain holding one tone across the money talk and the death talk, and he just kept going. A hundred million dollars gets buried in a coffin on Bink!’s “So High,” three bars after the hedge funds and nest eggs. Over on “Surprise,” he’s at a resort in Cabo one line before he’s running a drug shipment across the border, sharing a chorus with Nas who matches his deadpan bar for bar. The songs tangle their subjects together so tight that pulling one thread wrecks the rest, and after thirty years of building these chain sentences AZ’s stopped pretending anyone should bother.
Born a few months before the first Doe or Die dropped in 1995, AZ’s son Amar Noir shows up on “Winners Win” rapping about his father’s blood in his DNA, keeping it P, turning poverty to sovereignty. It’s imitation more than arrival, and the verse knows it. All of it phrased so close to AZ’s own delivery that the Buckwild beat barely adjusts. But putting a son on Doe or Die III turns the trilogy’s title into a literal inheritance, and when AZ talks to him father to son in the outro, telling him to stay prayed up and stay dangerous, it doesn’t sound rehearsed. On “Gimme the World,” Jadakiss tore through Large Professor’s boom-bap demanding everything back. Sharper guest verse by a wide margin. Still. “Winners Win” is the one that changes what it’s about, a son listed next to Half-A-Mil and Phil and all the dead friends AZ’s been naming since before the kid could walk.
Somebody on the skit “Ho Happy” introduced four women by name and added up what they’d extracted from men: a Bentley GT, a beauty salon, a down payment in Alpine, two million in hush money from a judge. “Still Jackie” followed one of them to a bar where AZ recognized her and gave two verses to her routine, different Jeeps every day, dinner at Chop House or Philippe’s, jewels stacked on top of trips to Greece. He brought that deadpan precision to Jackie’s hustle and kept going, same as he does on every track here (and possibly in his life, hard to know). Back to back those tracks dragged worse than anything else here, all lifestyle, all extraction. Dead weight, both of them.
Compressed into a single rhyme scheme on the opener, four men from his block each got a different ending: one died, one lied, one fried, one survived. Blunter than anywhere else on the album, AZ names Rakim, Kane, Kool G Rap, and Pretty Tone on “I Was Once There Too” as the people who built his style, an MC at fifty-four still pointing backward. On “We Made It,” he spun through the blocks where he and Half-A-Mil used to chill, named Phil, named the fist brawls, and said he made it. Half-A-Mil got killed. So did Phil. AZ kept the words and kept going, thirty-four minutes of them, the gold on the chain a little thinner at the collarbone than it was the day he put it on.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “No Need for Lactose,” “Uniqueness,” “Winners Win”