Album Review: early life crisis by Nettspend

An 18-year-old from Richmond pours lean, Percs, and ketamine into his debut. The beats are better than he is, but the kid keeps slipping.

Courtesy of Nettspend/Grade A/Interscope Records.

The jerk and rage underground spent two years making the most abrasive, speaker-wrecking music in internet rap. Xaviersobased’s 1c34 collective laid the foundation with fidgety rhythms, staggered snares, and bass mixed so hot it distorts on any consumer speaker. OsamaSon’s Psykotic and Che’s REST IN BASS pushed the sound toward its sharpest and strangest in 2025. And the kid who became the public face of all of it, Gunner Shepardson, from Richmond, Virginia, rapping under the name Nettspend, was barely old enough to drive when “Drankdrankdrank” went viral on Twitter in late 2023. He dropped out of Hermitage High School during COVID. His father sings country music. He grew up on Michael Jackson, Katy Perry, and Justin Bieber. He signed with Lil Bibby’s Grade A Productions, walked the Miu Miu runway in Paris, and walked for Gucci in Milan. He turned 18 five days before this album came out.

His 2024 mixtape BAD ASS F*CKING KID ran almost entirely on distortion and aura, songs rarely cracking two minutes, the production doing most of the heavy lifting while the vocals blurred into the static. early life crisis is his answer to whether there’s an artist under the noise. Sometimes, yes. And then the next track plays and the answer changes. But the cuts that work on early life crisis work for reasons that have nothing to do with aura. On “pain talk,” Nettspend and OsamaSon trade verses over Rok, Skai, Gyro, and Warren Hunter’s churning production, and the refrain strips down to the simplest possible version of what the entire record circles around.

“Poppin’ pink, but still in pain
Poppin’ pink, that’s for the pain.”

He’s swallowing codeine for the color and the numbness, and the distinction he draws between “lames talk” and “pain talk” is the closest the record gets to a central claim without forcing one. OsamaSon’s verse hits harder bar-for-bar, but Nettspend holds the whole thing together because the hook belongs to his voice and his cadence, stuttered and nasal, looping the word “pain” until it stops meaning anything. On “no sleep,” he says it even plainer over Cranes’ rattling beat.

“Patrón and pills in my brain
I don’t wanna feel all my pain.”

And then, quieter, buried in the verse: “Took me away from home/Rap game put me in this shit, I was young.” He was a listener trying to smoke weed. Now grown women are trying to find out where he lives. He mixes Patrón and champagne and pills because that’s what the people around him do, and also because he is 18 and afraid of feelings he can’t name.

Lean, Percocet, Xanax, ketamine, champagne and codeine stirred together. On “stab,” he cops to rewiring his own brain on Xanax and “politicin’.” On “plan b,” he admits he blacked out too hard off a bar to remember anything except that he had sex and needs the girl to take a Plan B. On “hey, hello,” the record’s best and most unhinged cut, he drops the line that holds the whole chemical economy of early life crisis in one sentence: “Without the drugs I wouldn’t be hard.” That verse is the longest on the LP, and it rambles from kidnapping threats to buying someone eyelashes to doing things “without attachments,” and it holds together specifically because it is a person who is high and talking too much, bouncing between aggression, tenderness, consumer impulse, and paranoia in the space of thirty seconds. Rok’s beat gives him the room to wander and he fills it. That’s more than can be said for half the record.

Nobody wants to politely avoid the identity question, so here it is. Nettspend is a white teenager from Richmond who raps about Dracos, trap houses, lean, and baby mamas. He claims on “who tf is u” that his “baby mama batshit.” He does not have a baby mama. He is 18. On “trap house 2016,” his mother apparently knows he’s on drugs, and on the same song he notes he’s “old enough to pay your rent, not old enough to buy no gin.” He flipped the Drake “Hotline Bling” cadence on “who tf is u” and he flipped Miley Cyrus on “shades on,” and the Miley sample isn’t incidental. “23” was the record that sparked the conversation about Miley’s Bangerz-era cultural appropriation in 2013.

A white teenager from Virginia building a club track around that vocal thirteen years later, while rapping in a blaccent about Percocets and Wraiths, is a choice. Whether it’s self-aware or oblivious, the LP doesn’t say. Neither does the album. He namedrops Dean Blunt three separate times across “stab,” “ce,” and “paris hilton,” signaling taste that runs well outside the jerk underground, but the Blunt references just sit there, never connecting to the music he actually makes. He walked Miu Miu and tells you about it on “you ready?,” rapping “I’m Miu in Miu, but I ain’t got no role models,” and that couplet is more interesting than any sustained engagement with race or borrowed style that the album attempts, because the album doesn’t attempt one. It just raps.

CXO, Rok, Legion, Azure, Cranes. If you want a case for sitting with all 21 tracks, it’s the producers. CXO made the most cuts and several of the best, including “shades on” and “halftime.” Rok gave him “crack,” the most addictive cut here, built on Crystal Castles-adjacent arpeggios and a hook so dumb and sticky it justifies its own existence. The “Oh, oh, oh” refrain that sits between the aggression on “crack” is the closest Nettspend gets to pop instinct, a melody that shouldn’t work lodged inside production that could pass for a malfunctioning Game Boy.

Legion’s work on “stab” and “ce” bends darker, heavier, and Nettspend matches it on “stab” with the most uncomfortable lyric on the whole LP, reaching for someone and yanking it back in the same breath: “One thing that I need is for you to be next to me, hold up, I’m just jokin’.” He did that twice. He wanted sincerity, flinched, and turned it into a punchline both times.

Azure’s “cross em out” is pure Virginia pride, the chorus nothing but “Tip-toe, finesse, VA shit, hold on” over spinning Forgiatos, and it’s one of the rare moments where Nettspend sounds completely comfortable on a track, not performing disaffection but just rapping from where he lives. The problem is that for every “crack” or “hey, hello” or “pain talk,” there are tracks like “sick” and “make it bleed” and “paris hilton” where the beat carries its own weight and Nettspend just sits on top of it, phoning in ad-libs and recycled bars about guns and women with nothing binding them to what’s underneath.

Somewhere around track 19, you start to hear what he could become if the pills thin out and the pen sharpens. “lil bieber” is the record’s most revealing moment, not because it’s the best but because he puts the comparison on wax himself: “I brought drank back, new Justin Bieber.” He’s the teen idol for the lean generation, and he knows it. The second verse gets stranger and sadder, winding through drowning imagery and a line that needed better than the mumbled delivery it gets: “May the bridges I burn light the way I cruise.” You can write that off as druggy rambling, and maybe it is.

But across early life crisis, there are enough of these moments, the four-time plea on “halftime” to just sit down and think, the “Am I the villain?” on “hey, hello,” the way “meet me in richmond” tries to be sentimental about home but he’s too barred out to get there, that you start to notice a person underneath the distortion who keeps reaching for something and pulling his hand back. Twenty-one tracks was too many. A third of these songs didn’t need to exist. But the ones that did need to exist are worth hearing, and early life crisis is worth the time it takes to find them.

Slightly Below Average (★★½☆☆)

Favorite Track(s): “crack,” “hey, hello,” “pain talk”