Pop quiz— how many posthumous albums can a music label release before they start receiving criticism for profiting off a dead man?
Three, apparently. On Saturday, Nov. 30, Juice WRLD’s third posthumous and fifth overall album, “The Party Never Ends,” was released. The tracks are a bittersweet time capsule of the late 2010s, filled with hallmarks of Juice’s signature SoundCloud-emo rap style. However, the creative direction of the album is lackluster and gauche, which is surprising considering the laundry list of producers and musicians it features.
Maybe the overabundance of collaborators here is precisely the problem (too many cooks in the kitchen, right?). Including Juice, there were 17 musicians involved in the album’s creation and 17 other people on the technical side. Seriously, this thing was a class project. The differences in artistic vision made the album feel incredibly disjointed and awkward. This is especially apparent in tracks like “Lace It ft. Eminem & Benny Blanco.”
The lyrics are catchy and the melody is a real earworm. It’s a refreshing, bass-filled jam that feels sonically cohesive with the rest of the album, yet it still has its own distinct identity. Kudos to Blanco for the better-than-average production, because if it weren’t for Eminem’s feature, this would’ve been my favorite song on the album.
Eminem’s verse is pure tonal whiplash. I get his intentions— the lyrics of “Lace It,” like many of Juice’s other songs, focus on drug usage. Featuring a song like that on a posthumous album by an artist who passed away from a drug overdose? It’s something that certainly needs to be handled with care and tact.
Yet despite whatever Eminem wanted to achieve with his verse, the preachy, over-the-top, just-say-no-esque lyrics simply don’t work as a sincere tribute to a late artist. Lyrics like “to the younger generation/I ain’t lecturing you, but man, just be careful” don’t feel meaningful when they’re immediately followed up by “roll it up, lace it, pop a few to chase it/I’m in my own Matrix.”
A far better tribute song on the album is “Goodbye” by The Kid LAROI. The lyrics are simple and sincere, and I can’t help but feel a little watery at the tear ducts every time I listen to it. There’s a real vulnerability in the raspy timbre of LAROI’s voice, and though I’ve never had strong opinions on his singing before, his vocal style really works in this piece, emphasizing the depth of his pain over losing his friend.
However, the fact that there are whole songs by other artists on Juice’s album begs the question— “How much of the album is his voice and how much of the album is other people’s voices?” Take “AGATS2 (Insecure) ft. Nicki Minaj” for example. Minaj acts not as a featured artist, but as a vocal fill-in for Juice, finishing a sentence here or providing an ad-lib there. It gets the job done, but the end product is awkward and sacrifices both Minaj and Juice’s artistry. I’m left with questions like “Would Juice have emphasized the words Minaj did?” and “Is Minaj copying Juice’s flow, or is this her own?”
Juice died tragically young, and despite being prolific in the studio, the majority of his songs were never published in his lifetime. Out of his five albums, only two were released while he was still alive. His “new songs” are simply unpolished vault tracks from five or six years ago, Frankenstein together by a producer team. With every new release, it feels like we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel more and more. “The Party Never Ends” doesn’t read like an encouraging promise, but rather a threat. Let’s let the man’s legacy rest in peace.
