Written Before Listen
Juice WRLD was an American hip-hop artist known for his emo-influenced style of rap music. His melodic approach to music plus his guitar-driven beats made a lot of artists carry along with his style. It also reached a high recognition for pop music as a lot of Juice WRLD’s chord progressions are pretty poppy. With that being said, I was never the biggest fan of his music but I was sad to hear about his passing over 2 years ago. He was a solid freestyler and seemed to have a passion for music but a lot of his songs just weren’t for me. With that being said I’m reviewing his second posthumous album Fighting Demons and without further ado, let’s get right into it.
Subject Matter
My problem with this album is that it promotes the death of Juice WRLD more than celebrating his life of him. 2 years after his death, they think it’s a good idea to have a majority of these tracks talk about all of the drugs and alcohol he has taken in the past few years? I don’t think so. In my opinion, the best posthumous albums take the artist and try their best to predict their future artistic direction. They did that with Jimi Hendrix, they did that with Mac Miller, they did that with Biggie, but they certainly didn’t do that with Juice WRLD on this record.
Production
Another problem I have with this album is something that I usually have a problem with on all Juice WRLD releases, The production. A lot of the production is pretty lifeless as a lot of the chord progressions and instrumental choices are nothing more than predictable. The redeeming quality of the best songs is mainly the engineering but even then, tracks like “Wandered To LA” and “Go Hard” show that The engineers didn’t want to focus on Juice WRLDs vocals that much as he sounds buried. Overall, the beats are very underwhelming and there’s nothing more to it.
Features
I’m surprised that didn’t stack this album with features, but they did the right thing and dumbed it down with the features. We have Justin Bieber, Suga of BTS fame as well as Polo G and Trippie Redd on the track “Feline”. Unfortunately, none of these features stand out to me. Trippie Redd has a couple of flows here and there on his feature but other than that, they don’t contribute that much to this album.
Redundancy
My third big problem with this album is that there is only one style shown on this album. Don’t get me wrong, Juice WRLD could be considered a one-trick pony but I’ve heard tracks and features from him that are rawer or go in a hardcore direction. Every track on this thing usually tends more to the Emo Rap formula with similar subject matters. It gets boring once the halfway point is reached
Favorite Tracks
I wouldn’t say that there was a track I enjoyed, but I don’t. The tracks “Burn” and “Until The Plug Comes Back Around” are good enough but the subject matter problem does come to mind. Other than that, they do the highly possible and exploit Juice’s death on this one.
Verdict
As expected, this album just falls miserably deep in my chance of enjoyment. It makes me uncomfortable to even listen to the highlights. It’s one thing to focus on the concept of drugs on this album, but it’s another thing for him to say over and over again on this thing that “drugs won’t hurt me”, “drugs keep me living” because we all know that it didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, his death was sad but having this music released won’t help with drug abuse, it might just hurt it.
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