Album Review: Zavier by Fetty Wap
Fetty Wap’s first album after federal prison leans hard into romance and old loyalties. It’s slight and comfortable when it should be reckoning with the decade that almost swallowed him.
Eleven months early, thanks to the First Step Act, Willie Maxwell II walked out of FCI Sandstone in January 2026 weighing eighty-five pounds more than when he went in. He had a GED he got for his kids and a sentence for conspiracy to distribute cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl that had cost him the better part of three years. His brother Twyshon was dead. His four-year-old daughter Lauren was dead. The name on his supervised release paperwork was not the one most people knew him by, and in a VIBE interview one week after his release, he said the distinction mattered. “People call me Fetty, but the people who know me call me Zavier.” He finished the album in thirteen days.
Thirteen days is about right for a record this breezy. Zavier leans almost entirely on romance. Drunk-outside-your-house romance, Superman-and-Lois-Lane romance, shopping-spree-and-Bentley-Flying-Spur romance, explicit-by-verse-three romance. Out of seventeen cuts, at least ten run variations on wanting a woman, missing a woman, or asking a woman if she’s with it or not. “Right Back to You” opens with Fetty tipsy and sentimental, calling her wavy while he wonders if it’s the liquor talking. “Say When” promises devotion from her toes to her hair. “Favorite Girl” starts as a love ballad and ends with butter pecan ice cream and Polo draws. “N LUV,” with longtime Remy Boyz affiliate Monty, splits the difference between affection and transaction—Kelly bags, Chanel, a Bentley with new wings, and the confession that the only reason he puts up with her mood swings is that he likes her. The melodies across these songs still carry. Fetty’s nasal sing-rap, that wobbly pitch-bent croon that made “Trap Queen” inescapable, remains distinct enough to make even thin material lodge in your ear for an afternoon.
Nearly every guest on Zavier comes from New Jersey. Monty, Albee Al, Harrd Luck, Honey Bxby, Rob McCoy, and Oskama Esteban all hail from the same stretch of the state, and the local casting gives the whole thing the feel of a block reunion more than a sequenced effort. Three songs break from the love-song pattern. “Never Tell” is the most direct prison cut here: Fetty in the courtroom, prosecutors painting pictures, his admission that he was moving cocaine and fentanyl scares him, the refrain that he’d rather die or rot than cooperate. “Eastside Mz” is chest-pounding mob talk over Sez on the Beat, Fetty throwing up M’s and rattling off Hermès, Balenciaga, Glock .40s, and a Five-seveN with a green beam. And “Real Ones” drops the temperature entirely. Albee Al raps about bulletproofing his Cadillac, shooting people for fun, and promising violence against anyone who cooperates with police. Harrd Luck names dead friends—TeFee, Gree, Millie—and closes his verse with a kid eating chopped cheese when he got Swiss-cheesed.
Only two songs on Zavier carry enough weight to anchor the whole thing, and they sit at opposite ends of the tracklist. “White Roses,” which Fetty wrote during six and a half months in solitary, is the only love song on the record that justifies its length. His sisters Divinity Maxwell-Butts and YMANIE sing background, the doo-wop “shoo-doo” refrains giving the track a closeness that none of the Hitmaka- or Peoples-produced cuts replicate. Fetty catalogs images in the bridge: French tips on toenails, a white silk robe after a shower, a white dress matching new heels. He compares himself to Icarus flying too close to the sun while admitting that she feels his love comes with conditions even when he insists it doesn’t.
Then “I Remember/Dear Zavier,” the seven-minute closer with G Herbo, opens the LP’s only real window into the life behind the name. Fetty lists memories in rapid fire: counting a million in his Mercedes, corner days on 12th and 22nd, Perion giving him his first strap, Kadrique, the day he fell in love with Kevona, the first million-dollar check he gave to someone he’ll probably never speak to again, grabbing thirty bricks when he felt drained. G Herbo matches him bar for bar from Chicago—G-Fazo dying, sneaking out as a kid, buying his first gun at fourteen, closing his eyes the first time he shot. The second half, “Dear Zavier,” addresses himself directly, asking those who left him at his lowest how it feels to know he came up, repeating “I think everybody forgot my name” until it stops sounding defiant and starts sounding like a man trying to convince himself. These two songs prove Fetty can write with real detail and real weight when he’s willing to sit with something longer than a hook.
Between those peaks and the rest of Zavier sits a gulf the melodies alone can’t bridge. Fetty told the AP he didn’t want an emotional record. “Where’s the fun Fetty?” he asked. Fair enough. Nobody owes the public a prison LP. But the fun Fetty on display here recycles the same romantic scenario with diminishing returns. “Spot Back,” “LYG,” “With It or What,” and “Like a Taylor” (a Wiz Khalifa stoner track where both rappers name-check strains and cars without a memorable bar between them) blur together because the hooks, strong as they are melodically, don’t attach to anything specific enough to separate one from the next. The thirteen-day timeline shows in the material’s sameness. “BossDon” is a partial exception. Max B, barely a month out of his own sixteen years in Northern State Prison, raps about his girl standing by him inside and tells her to release her mind, and the shared gravity of two men fresh from incarceration singing about loyalty gives the track a punch the other duets can’t touch. But one Max B verse can’t redeem a middle stretch that needed fewer songs and sharper ones.
Zavier is a homecoming party that only occasionally remembers why the guest of honor was away. Fetty goes to specific places on this record—a solitary cell, a courtroom, the corner of 12th and 22nd, a memory of Kevona—and those are the moments the LP justifies itself. The rest is pleasant, forgettable, and for a man with this much life behind him, a waste of a good voice.
Slightly Below Average (★★½☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “White Roses,” “I Remember/Dear Zavier”