Album Review: Haunted by Fame by Offset
Despite the spooky timing, Offset’s fourth solo project arrives with a Halloween release date, two months after his introspective Kiari. The mood is less camp and more cathartic.
Offset tends to be his own hype man. Kiari was full of grand gestures: orchestral flourishes, strings and samples from Nina Simone and Drowning Pool, cameos from John Legend, Gunna, and Ty Dolla $ign, and a lead single that debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 and became the most added track at urban radio. He promoted it with a Times Square stunt and therapy‑session teasers, then told the Associated Press that the album closer “Move On” was about putting the Cardi B saga behind him. Yet for all that pageantry, Kiari felt both sprawling and tentative—a brave attempt to explore his identity, but dragged down by scattered sequencing and songs that chased radio instead of soul.
Haunted by Fame feels like his response to that overreach. It’s leaner and recorded on the move, and the palette is darker. The beats often sound carved from Metro Boomin and Southside’s midnight archives: rattling 808s, gothic strings, keys that hum like horror‑movie synths. A few songs still have horns and woozy guitars—production credits include London Jae, Pooh Beatz, Go Grizzly, and Mally Mall—but the overall texture is shadowed. Offset sounds swallowed by the beat, his delivery half-muffled like he’s drowning in the noise he built around himself.
The title track shows Offset rapping as if he's still fighting to control his own narrative (sort of like his previous album). Over an ominous loop, he repeats “I’m haunted by fame, don’t know what to do” and admits he pops pills just to get through the day. Those lines are followed by a verse about four‑door Ferraris, private jets, Rodeo shopping sprees, and a weeklong blowout at Tootsie’s strip club. He’s bragging as much as he’s confessing, moving quickly between glimpses of quiet desperation and boastful luxury. That tension animates the whole album. When he says he sees the truth in the mirror and still tries to hide his feelings, it sounds less like a tidy self‑awareness than a moment of panic blurted in the booth.
“Free Pick” opens with him declaring, “I ain’t never been humble, I’m cocky” before relishing the fact that his enemies get “put in a blender”. The flow is elastic—he still deploys those triplet cadences that made Migos famous—and the hook is catchy, but there’s an exhaustion to the swagger. A decade into his career, he seems aware that the boasts are a shield, not a celebration. That same edge crops up on “Headhunter,” where he sneers that the industry tried to “hang me like an ornament” and boasts of making “fifty million off Pro Tools.” It’s funny and sad at once: a man who’s both tired of the music business and obsessed with proving he beat it.
The rap features provide texture rather than salvation. At least two out of three of them. YoungBoy Never Broke Again dominates “I Heard” with a haunted hook—“I heard a nigga say my name like he wanna fuck with somethin’” and lines about getting dirty with his cousin and bearing a flag from childhood. His Louisiana intonation and paranoia amplify the mood, and you can hear the camaraderie in how the two trade bars. NoCap’s appearance on “N.A.M.E” is the project’s softest moment; he and Offset sing about trench trauma over a folk‑inflected beat and manage to make vulnerability sound stubborn. Lil Dump’s cameo on “Another Problem” is less impactful—his energy is high, but he doesn’t have the melodic or lyrical presence to match the album’s eerie atmosphere. The result feels more like a tour posse cut than an emotional pivot.
The most contentious song is “No Regrets,” which many fans immediately read as a Cardi B diss. He doesn’t name her, but the barbs are razor‑specific: he tells an unnamed woman that men only want her “’cause I fuck with you,” claims he taught her everything she knows, and asserts he’s still in control. Later, he raps that he got rich while she “went and got fucked” and boasts about moving like the president with twenty black trucks, buying a Rolls truck instead of roses, and replacing her with someone “bad and intelligent.” It’s the kind of post‑breakup song that’s less therapeutic than spiteful. In the context of his public attempts to portray peace, it feels either a deliberate airing of grievances or a lapse into old habits. Either way, the misogyny undermines the vulnerability he pushes elsewhere.
What keeps Haunted by Fame irresistible is the sense that Offset is writing through trauma rather than around it. He recorded these songs during a tour in which he performed tracks memorializing his late bandmate, Takeoff, and he has acknowledged in interviews that he’s still processing that grief. Lines about popping pills and waking up at the sound of a drone flying over his estate aren’t there for shock value. They sound like intrusive thoughts captured on tape. Even his boasts are haunted: when he laughs about making millions off Pro Tools or buying the whole club, you can hear the fatigue under the braggadocio. The production details that weariness by leaning into minor keys and long, spidery melodies.
As a Halloween release, the record nods to 2017’s Without Warning without trying to replicate its jump scares. There are no Travis Scott cameos or obvious radio gambits. Instead, the darkness feels lived‑in. Compared to Kiari’s sprawling ambition and sometimes disjointed sequencing, this is a focused document of a man trying to keep moving, even though the quality is still the same. It lacks the theatrical highs of a typical trap blockbuster, but there’s a coherence in its urgency. The pacing drags in places, as “Fashion Icon” and “Ya Digg” blur together with repetitive content and verses, but even those tracks fit the theme of ego as armor.
In conversation, you might tell a friend that Haunted by Fame isn’t Offset’s best collection of songs but might be his most honest. The writing is messy, half of the songs feel rushed and unfinished, occasionally petty, and often gripping. He still has a gift for melody because hooks like “I’m haunted by fame, don’t know what to do” burrow into your head, and his cadence remains unpredictable in spots. But he also lets the ugliest parts of his personality surface, and that rawness gives the album its bite. Whether the cohesion comes from intention or the urgency of recording on tour is hard to tell; what’s clear is that he needed to make this record to clear his head.
Above Average (★★★☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Haunted by Fame,” “I Heard,” “N.A.M.E”