Album Review: It’s Us Vol. 2 by Concrete Boys
The crew that lost its breakout star came back bigger, louder, and with something to prove. Sometimes they prove it.
A Red Lobster employee posted on social media that Karrahbooo, the woman who stole the On the Radar cypher and the assumed breakout of the entire operation, told her she’d been kicked out of her own group and bullied. Lil Yachty went nuclear on Instagram Live, ten minutes of fury: he wrote every verse she ever rapped, he dressed the group, he put eight carats of earrings in everybody’s ears, he engineered her cypher slot to come last so she’d get the biggest reaction. He played the reference track. Karrahbooo called him a liar. By fall 2025, she was publicly accusing him of trapping her in a 360 deal. This is the wreckage that Concrete Boys, Yachty’s Atlanta rap collective now running with a reconfigured five-man roster, carry into It’s Us Vol. 2, their second compilation tape. While the format has the unit “mostly on autopilot,” and Yachty’s crew approach something close to “rapper cosplay,” it has some okay moments. Vol. 2 doesn’t mention any of the fallout. It doesn’t have to. The whole album is an answer to a question nobody in the group will say out loud.
Karrahbooo’s replacement is Honest, born Trhae Mitchell, a former South Alabama basketball player who spent time in the NBA G League with the Birmingham Squadron. He’s Yachty’s relative. He has no prior music career. On “285,” his showcase, he runs through I-285, the Atlanta perimeter highway, and the references pile fast. RVD thumbs-up, GSP on the lookout, rubber bands around money so call him TIP, supersizing, Polo Ralph Lauren, cologne, stacking cream. It moves quickly and goes nowhere specific. On “3 SYRUPS,” he asks, “Is he a scammer or rapper? Is he a hooper or trapper?” The line has a particular charge knowing he actually was a hooper, that the question isn’t rhetorical flex but a real inventory of a life that swerved hard. Honest isn’t bad. He fills space competently. But competence is a thin replacement for the voice that got people talking about Concrete Boys in the first place, and nothing he contributes across these seventeen songs suggests he was chosen for any reason other than proximity.
Draft Day makes the strongest case for this outfit’s continued existence. On “PUSH IT,” over an Exile beat, he names his father Jeff in federal prison and promises to hold it down. Then he counts his way through high school, grade by grade:
“Ninth grade, it was fuck the field, in them classrooms
Tenth grade, I picked up the mic and I cash rules
Eleventh grade, I got a lil’ taller, but I’m a different baller
Twelfth grade, the boy ‘comes a man, eye to eye with father.”
It’s the most specific, least posturing writing on the record, and it works because Draft Day doesn’t undercut it with punchlines or pivot to flexing. He stays in it. Yachty’s verse on the same song hits a different register, asking, “I bet you’d lose your faith if you was broke as we was,” and closes by admitting he got rich off “One Night” and is still impatient. On “IF I WASN’T RAPPIN’,” all five play hypothetical. Yachty picks organized crime, DC2Trill claims he’d still be around rappers but he’d rob them, Draft Day insists the whip would still be candy paint, his cup still purple and yellow. The song is honest about what the alternative looked like, and nobody pretends otherwise. These two tracks together are the spine of Vol. 2, the moments where the collective stops cycling through lean-and-money inventory and hits on something that would be hard to swap between rappers.
The guest spots and sharpest solo turns keep the middle of the record interesting. Veeze shows up on “ALL THE SAME,” a track that already has Yachty stuttering over a flipped Envyi sample, stumbling through “Grippin’ on your butt when it’s—uh, ayy,” restarting, half-finishing sentences on purpose. Veeze slices through the fog. “If I tell you ‘swear to God,’ probably lyin’ to you,” and later, “I’m probably goin’ to Hell, the opps die, I laugh at ‘em/I help so many people, sometimes I be tired of ‘em.” That’s a complete character sketch in four bars. Camo!, who tends to blur into the crew’s middle on posse tracks, sounds sharpest alone.
On “RACE TO AN M,” over a Boi-1da and TrapMoneyBenny beat, he brags that his Amex doesn’t get tired, his bank teller is his therapist, and he’s competing with the other Concrete Boys to see who can blow a million dollars fastest. He’s texting somebody’s friend and praying to God she doesn’t find out. He’s scraping his Benz rims on the curb, driving a hundred-thousand-dollar car the way most people drive a Corolla. The specificity carries it. Camo! names prices, describes the physical act of ruining expensive things, and the carelessness comes off as earned instead of performed. DC2Trill goes solo on “WEIGH MY OPTIONS” and spends two verses filling a super soaker with lean, changing penthouses, and calling out rappers who talk tough in songs but wouldn’t harm a fly. “He won’t harm a fly, he on raps talkin’ ‘bout he a killer” is a small, sharp jab buried inside an otherwise druggy sprawl.
The problem is length. Seventeen tracks means roughly half the tape is five guys rotating through money, lean, women, and guns without enough individual personality to distinguish one pass from the next. “COKE WHITE” is a Yachty solo where the most memorable claim is that he’d rather be fat and rich than broke and skinny. “BREAK THE BANK” runs two parts deep and the standout line is Draft Day threatening to hang somebody up on the rack, “dried up like pork rinds,” and claiming his diss would be a “New York Times” issue. “16 YEAR OLD DRANK” (the title refers to sixteen-year-old lean, not a teenager) stacks DC2Trill’s family loyalty next to Rio Da Yung OG bragging about pouring drank so well he should be studied and wanting a bow of whatever Metro Boomin is cooking. Rio Da Yung OG is funny and quick, but the song evaporates. The production upgrade is real. F1lthy and 5star built the “16 YEAR OLD DRANK” beat, Cardo Got Wings and SADPONY did “COPY, OK COOL,” Boi-1da took “RACE TO AN M.” These names usually work with Playboi Carti, Drake, and Kendrick Lamar. Bigger boards don’t fix the fact that several of these songs say the same things the previous song said, just with a different member stepping to the mic.
Yachty himself remains a complicated figure to build a rap squad around. This is the man who called Notorious B.I.G. “overrated” at nineteen, took death threats for it, softened the position years later only to admit he’d listened to Biggie’s music “for about thirty seconds,” and then, on the same press run promoting this album, clowned Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” as “weak as hell” on The Bootleg Kev Show, imitating the cadence and dismissing the first rap single to crack the Billboard Top 40. He did a rough freestyle on Power 106 days before the release. In 2023 he put out Let’s Start Here, a psychedelic rock album with no rapping that debuted at number nine on the Billboard 200. Questlove called it the most surprising artistic transition he’d seen in hip-hop. Then Yachty came back to rap, opened for Tyler on the Chromakopia tour, and refocused entirely on this roster.
On “COPY, OK COOL,” he sounds the angriest he gets all record. “I’m tired of bein’ nice, I’m tired of bein’ quiet, these niggas copyin’ me.” He drops “Queen Latifah little bitch, ate that,” tells someone to get a face tattoo if they love him, and the aggression briefly gives him an edge that most of Vol. 2 rounds off. The LP closes with “MILLIONAIRE,” where DJ Rio Amor opens with a monologue about how the average person won’t gross a million dollars in a lifetime, and neither will their family tree. “Thank God we’re not average.” Draft Day accepts his flaws, promises to stand tall, tells the listener time waits for nobody. Camo! asks what you’d do if you had it all and answers that he’d be the same without it. DC2Trill and Yachty trade the final bars, calling this “the best yet.” It might be better than Vol. 1. But “better than autopilot” is a low bar for a crew with these resources and this much to prove, and too many of these seventeen songs clear it only by inches.
Above Average (★★★☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “ALL THE SAME,” “PUSH IT,” “RACE TO AN M’