Album Review: ML2 by YoungBoy Never Broke Again
Across 20 tracks of one heavy trap mode and a sequel to his last year’s compilation, YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s love songs and his street songs keep turning out to be the same song.
At some point in the great cascade of releases, the search for new spaces to track was papered over. It has a setting now: low and dark and stifled, more bottom than top, constructed to hold you in one emotion, not carry into the next. Everything that shifts on top of it. YoungBoy Never Broke Again has never isolated the desire, the pain and the killing in different songs, and on ML2, the love songs and the murder songs breathe so unitedly that they stop being different things.
Start with the ones that resemble love songs: the hook on “Over” goes bland after a wild thought, a drink and a memory of riding shotgun with a friend who is now past tense, giving way to “In the streets, you look in those eyes/You‘ll see that ain‘t no lover.” Everything‘s tenderest moment is followed by who must then be killed in the scuffle. He‘s most honest of longing on “Searching for You,” with all idolatry and dependence wrapped in dope, yet even here, “Slipped up and she took my soul” hits. Falling out of lust, lust songs. A woman is at the smushed center of “Out the Window,” and then he can‘t help but leave her behind to throw B‘s in the crib; on “Highly,” devotion and codeine then overlap so much that “please be quiet” becomes something both pleading and threatening. He can‘t keep a girl out of song without the street moving on behind her.
The smoke and lean on “Ganja” last a bar or two before he coldly states, “Lost my head when grandma died, I sat and cried,” and the numbing gets removed from the moment. “Hold It” covers “Big Dump, he fuckin’ died for this” in the middle of Bankstown guns and drop-offs of bodies on named Streets. Neither are they built up to. They arrive, and they‘re covered back up.
Very deep bass and dirty, round drums with the top end taken off turn “Switches” into almost pure pressure, and “So Not Sorry” finds itself in the same low, compressed territory that feels mixed for a full car, not a pair of cans. “Shark” plunges further, the bass eating whatever melody forms in the upper registers, and “BossManeDlow,” the shortest text piece here, compresses down to a near-subwoofer chant that manages to say one thing intensely and then stop. A couple of shorts allow a little bit of light. “Green Boy” joins in for a little while, starting off sparse and bright until the low end drops in and alters its proportions, and “One Night Later” maintains a tighter, wide-open surface that allows him to sound like he‘s talking, not buried underneath it. When the darkness lasts this long without a break like this, the gunplay goes dull and subdued, with only his vocal strings glopping along.
YoungBoy‘s most vicious on “Zero IQ Freestyle,” where “I‘m him” presses on to roll over the fucking edge of a boast to sound like a threat before getting derailed in the last verse with “Baby girl, I‘m sorry, I got a low IQ.” “Nussie” has the same teeth without nearly as much life behind them; even if it doesn‘t make the song any better, there‘s the probation bit where the PO orders a piss test and he “shitted in a cup.” “Creep on ya” is first-person stalking, a little brother saunters out to shoot over some shit somebody said, and if you listen to back-to-back, you can‘t tell you just heard the killings stop separating out. One trigger pull sounds like the last. The cruelty is real, and it‘s not even all about anything.
He prays, threatens and leaves both lines kicking. Both standing. Just like “I Forgive Them” presses a cry for forgiveness against a blunt narration that all the people he knows sell coke. The peak of both is a memory of a time someone “drove to bring me and my first chill’ food.” “With It” is labeled a “YoungBoy church service” before the tray fills up with Dracos and Glocks. Speaking comfortable about his bread, it admits on “Calling from Rio” to claiming he‘s broke while his wife got “too much money” and it drops its daughter Moo Moo, who calls him Honey, into that same bar with a stolen MAC-11. Then, “On a Jet,” the mentality of an ex convict, whose flex is “I done walked out the cell, I’m the man,” his neighbor who just cleaned the RICO, and there’s just a little bit more: his kids.
One image lingers longer than the others. Seconds away from “Highlights,” one of the heaviest, darkest things he‘s put down, he‘s home, wealthy, witnessing a woman “playin’ with her highlights while she playin’ my songs,” a girl who refuses to bear the scars of her operation with the lights on. Cash, suspicion, affection, and self-mutilation all in the same dim room, and he allows them to exist. That is where YoungBoy is at his most. Not in all the threats he can deliver in his sleep, but when the armor finally falls away, and the longing can breathe.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Over,” “I Forgive Them,” “Highlights”