Album Review: Same Difference by Swae Lee
Pop-rap’s best hired voice finally gets a proper solo album. Most of it sounds like the songs he used to give away.
Swae Lee co-wrote “Formation.” He sang the hook on “Sicko Mode” without getting credited. He made “Unforgettable” and then handed it to French Montana like spare change. That somebody also owns the first double-diamond single in RIAA history (“Sunflower”), a song so inescapable it played in grocery stores for two consecutive calendar years. And after all of that, he is only now, at 32 years old, getting around to releasing a real solo album. Swaecation existed in 2018, technically, but it was stapled inside a triple-disc Rae Sremmurd package, and nobody treated it as a standalone statement. He promised Billboard a solo album called Human Nature back in 2020. Then 2021 passed. Then 2022. He kept popping up on other people’s records (a Post Malone song here, an Alicia Keys feature there) while the solo album stayed hypothetical. Six years of hypothetical, and the title changed, and finally, Same Difference showed up.
You’d think eight years of material would give Swae something to talk about. On most of Same Difference, he talks about the same three things: bragging about cars, chains, and women he barely seems interested in. “The Gospel” has him bragging about Frosted Flakes chains and Alexander McQueen shoes, then saying he’s on “autopilot.” He sounds like it. “Everyone Wants” rhymes “loner” with “loner” with “zoner” with “stroller,” which is the kind of thing you write when you’re freestyling in the booth and nobody tells you to come back with a second draft. The title track rattles off Bill Clinton, Tom Brady, Thanos, Johnny Bravo, and Kurt Angle in under three minutes, and not a single one of those references connects to anything. On “Sneaker”, he says, “I cheat but never cheated her,” and then two bars later, he’s asking for a foursome. On “E Off Emotion,” he told the Morning Hustle he took the E off “emotion,” which is a fun title and a completely empty song. “Presidents on presidents/and shawty be all the way turnt up” is about as far as the idea goes. He mentions Alexander McQueen again on “Flammable,” like he forgot he already brought it up.
The features don’t help. NAV sleepwalks through “No Call No Show” talking about his orange Ferrari and popping pills, indistinguishable from any NAV verse released since 2018. French Montana’s contribution to “Suitcase” is a list of Goyard bags, gold medallions, LV suitcases, and three-quarter mink coats. Rich the Kid shows up on “Don’t Even Call” to rhyme about Patek Philippes and balloons at the crib, which is the exact verse Rich the Kid has been writing since The World Is Yours. None of these guests had anything at stake, and you can hear it. Even Slim Jxmmi, Swae’s actual brother, mostly just talks about checking bags on planes and wanting a Rolex on “Working Remote.”
Four songs deep into the back half, “Violet” arrives and the temperature drops. Swae sings about walking away from somebody for his own mental health, and for once the words match the hurt in his upper register:
“I wish I could buy more time
I wish I could settle down
I had to work some things out with myself.”
The second verse is even better (“Breaking each other’s hearts, we can just take turns”) and he’s talking to a specific person in a specific room, somebody with a name he’ll never say on wax (“How come everyone can see it but the one that you really need to?”). “Raising Awareness,” produced by London On da Track, goes to the same place. “I wanna die with memories, not dreams/We all had our fair share of things that never came to be” is the sharpest writing Swae has delivered here, and the line about social batteries being drained has a plainspoken honesty that the preliminary flex songs never touch. Jhené Aiko gives “Mural” a sweetness that Swae can’t quite generate alone—her line about bad women needing forehead kisses is disarming and funny and the song is better for her being on it. And “Take My Heart” with Post Malone carries a specific dread: “These feet have walked over a few graves/I can’t see you walkin’ away ‘cause in my world, oh, everyone stays.” Swae’s stepfather was shot and killed in Tupelo in 2020; his younger half-brother was charged.
If Same Difference were just those four songs, Swae would have a proper debut worth bragging about. Instead they’re scattered across an album padded with luxury-rap filler backed by serviceable beats that his voice can only do so much to save. And that voice—the high pitch, the wobbly runs, the way he can bend a note sideways until it’s practically melting—is still unlike anybody else in pop-rap. He could sing the phonebook and you’d probably add it to a playlist. Which is exactly the problem with the other twelve songs: the voice papers over thin material so well that you can listen to “Flammable” or “E Off Emotion” three times before realizing neither one said anything you’ll remember tomorrow. When you’ve waited eight years for an artist to tell you who he is without Rae Sremmurd and without a feature credit, “I feel like Michael Phelps” and “Alexander McQueen keep me fresher than an Altoid” aren’t the answer.
Slightly Below Average (★★½☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Raising Awareness,” “Violet”