Album Review: Slime Cry by YoungBoy Never Broke Again
YoungBoy dropped thirty tracks about murders he can’t stop replaying and women he can’t stop losing. This bloated effort dilutes what the specifics earn.
A man who recorded through house arrest and federal custody, who kept dropping tracks while fighting gun charges in two states, who watched the courts and the memes present him like a punchline for years, then he walks out with a presidential pardon in May 2025 (ironically released MASA two months later) and immediately gets back to doing what he’s always done. The problem is that what he’s always done is right here on Slime Cry, for thirty songs, at full volume, and the album sounds like a mind that never learned how to turn off. If you think the record opens like a celebration of freedom, think again. It opens like a man still locked inside something.
One problem is that most of these songs say the same thing. Thirty tracks, and YoungBoy Never Broke Again spends at least twenty of them narrating walk-downs, threatening opps, and reminding you he’s killed people. “Mask and Gloves” does it. “Another Episode” does it. “Headtap” does it. “Good Dope” does it. “Bang Out” does it. The vocabulary compresses into a handful of masks, gloves, Glocks, walk-downs, “pin him to the pavement,” and recycles them until the threats stop registering. “Mask and Gloves” gives you “My sister say sometimes it’s frightenin’ look in my eyes/She pray for me at night, she know I murdered them guys.” That’s a sharp detail with his sister praying because she knows what he did. “Another Episode” gives you procedural narration: “Hit him in his leg, soon as he drop, that’s when you walk down on him/Hit him in his head, we skrrt off fast.” And then this: “I got plenty bodies, I like to rap about it.” He likes to rap about it. That’s the truest line on the album. Couple songs later, we have “Vendetta” in the back half, and you’ve heard the same bravado for an hour.
Another problem is that YoungBoy buries his best writing. “My Grave,” track twenty-two, contains the album’s sharpest details: “no AC, only North power,” cold showers, “one school outfit,” guns under the mattress and under the house. He talks about crying in his cell, checking the square footage on every room he enters now, missing his family. “Everything balanced, nothin’ wrong I see/I been missin’ my family, I wan’ go home for to speak.” The money here sounds suffocating. Success sounds like a prison he built himself. This is the song that justifies the album’s existence, and it arrives after twenty-one tracks of diminishing returns.
YoungBoy served twenty-three months on federal gun charges. He ran a prescription fraud ring out of his Utah house. He got pardoned by Trump in May last year and walked out with his probation lifted. The legal pressure shows up everywhere on Slime Cry—“Role Model” mentions profiling, “Another Episode” uses “no bond” language, the paranoia is constant, but the album never processes any of it. The freedom arrived. The music sounds the same.
The love songs carry the same desperation as the violence songs. “My Life I Apologize” opens with him seeing pain in someone’s eyes and apologizing; within the second verse he’s threatening to blow someone’s back off. The chorus toggles between “I’m gon’ pop, girl, if you leave, I die” and “Please don’t stop, I need you, get me right.” Need and threat, back to back, in the same breath. “Teary Eyes” features Burna Boy and gets closest to actual vulnerability (“She know she my life support, hope she don’t pull out on me”), but the pleading never settles into anything. “Leaving Me” states it plainest: “I need you, you don’t need me.” The women on this record exist to hold him together, make his bond, keep him from crashing out. “Badder Than Yours” brags about the woman who’ll “hold my choppas” and “make bond” when he gets locked up. That’s the job description. He writes these scenes the same way every time.
“For You” teaches someone to shoot in the first verse and offers a hundred thousand dollars to ease a baby-mama’s pain by the end. “Bruce Wayne” goes from “I need you, I need you, don’t forget about it” to “You wan’ be a joker, I tear up your body” inside the same song. “LO.V.E.H.A.T.E” spells it out: “A piece of shit, I hate myself/But make sure my wife want for nothin’.” These juxtapositions could hit as genuine self-exposure, though unfortunately, they don’t. They just repeat, song after song, until the shock dulls and you’re left with a pattern.
The loyalty songs (“My Brothers,” “Don’t Break”) talk about God and murder in the same breath. “I’ll be the reason the witness ain’t make it up in trial” is how he describes friendship. “Pain rulin’ all my days and I don’t feel safe, I need to get paid and get up out of here” is his summary of life. The slime talk of brotherhood, grief, and readiness to crash out runs through everything, yet the album never distinguishes loyalty from control. They blur together, stay blurred, and the rest recycles.
Slightly Below Average (★★½☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Don’t Break,” “Teary Eyes,” “My Grave”