What does freedom sound like for YoungBoy Never Broke Again—the youthful cult of personality that seems as though he could have the rap industry in the palm of his hands? The 25-year-old Baton Rouge rapper has been living in Utah under government surveillance since 2021, moving between house arrest, jail, and prison for a myriad of well-documented legal troubles, the latest of which is a 23-month prison sentence for a federal gun case. This constant churn at the mercy of the legal system (partly due to his own doing), has underscored a furious run of releases that have ranged from underwhelming (2022’s The Last Slimeto) to haphazardly thrown together (2025’s More Leaks) to startlingly brilliant (2022’s 3800 Degrees), maintaining his stature as a viral figure who’s almost unreasonably popular. All the while, YoungBoy, who told Billboard in 2023 that his compulsion to create and drop projects is a “disease,” has only burrowed deeper into his pain-filled minefield of memories while keeping up his tireless pace. He’s at his best when he’s erratic, contorting his melodies with croons and yelps, as if his morbid emotions were escaping from his throat under their own volition.
YoungBoy’s latest release, MASA (“Make America Slime Again,” for the uninitiated), is the first release for the beleaguered rapper since receiving a full pardon from president Donald Trump in May. In the immediate aftermath, he shared a statement rife with hope for what’s to come for his family and himself. “It opens the door to a future I’ve worked hard for and I am fully prepared to step into this,” Youngboy said. “I’m grateful. I’m Focused. I’m Ready.” With its sprawling 30-song tracklist, MASA is a hyper-emotive data dump in which YoungBoy oscillates through hunger, bitterness, boasts, and torment at breakneck speeds, treating the booth like an echo chamber to process the future and past at the same time. But the moments of sustained brilliance scattered across a largely mundane landscape feel too stifled to stack up to his best work.
With a runtime just north of 90 minutes, MASA is practically sliced into two distinct portions, settling into a predictable tenor that almost cheapens the experience when listened to in one sitting. The opening stretch is laced with such fury it could almost appear on AI YoungBoy 2: His shrieking titular hook on “My Shit” and the blaring drumline horn arrangement of “Games of War” feel as though they might spark a riot in your eardrums. Pretty quickly, the record shifts to a more morose and restrained tone, preferring familiar iterations of YoungBoy’s favorite production styles over more extraordinary approaches. Save for a few intriguing interludes—the hypnotic whirring that feels like a sound effect from the Space Cadet pinball game on “Fire Your Manager,” or “Diesel,” with its mutated Bay Area G-funk bounce, or his blistering flow over crescendoing horns on “Kickboxer”—straitlaced piano chords and droning 808s are standard fare. It’s as though YoungBoy raided Rod Wave’s hard drive and called it a day.
Instead of choosing more innovative beats, YoungBoy places the onus on his vulnerability and spontaneity to keep MASA from being a chore. Sometimes he’ll run directly opposite to a track’s energy in one breath, then slide along the beat in the next, like when his yelps and ad-libs burst through the gates of heaven on “Slimretta.” And his forthcoming nature can lead to chilling juxtapositions. Though “BIG” largely exists as an opportunity to flex about his riches, YoungBoy’s singular admissions stop you in your tracks: “Trailblazer, my daddy gifted/It broke down on me, I was takin’ Brianna to school and I had one strap up in it/Run down on him, he a nail, we hammer the fool and then we keep it kickin’,” he raps with a ho-hum disposition, as if were recounting his day to his wife. YoungBoy’s allure has always been in the elements that link him to Southern rappers before him and the Delta bluesmen before them, filtering his pain and paranoia through strained melodies. He croons about being “fucked up and strapped” while feeling alone on “I’m Ready,” or the walls closing in on “Finest,” pushed to the point of tears due to anxiety and desperation, haunted by the surroundings that have shaped him.
I’d understand the impulse to chalk up “XXX” as a glaring misstep—a truncated, abrasive mess featuring a sample of Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock “Star Spangled Banner,” a chorus ripped from Scottish punk band the Exploited’s 1981 single “Sex and Violence,” and a line where YoungBoy says, “Whatever Trump doin’, bitch, it’s good for the youngins.” But its presence at least makes a little sense on MASA (and its disturbingly accurate homonym of “massa”)—a record that’s also colored by fits of religiosity (“Alter”), and remorse and heartbreak (“Burn” and “Cold Ward,” the stellar collaboration with the alto-voiced Mellow Rackz), in between reminders of how dangerous and volatile the Baton Rouge rapper can be. Being pulled each way by the government, the people around him, and himself since his teenage years has YoungBoy grasping for control in any form. MASA manifests YoungBoy’s musical impulses in the only way he knows how—raw and intimate—using them as a compass to survey the newly expanded borders of his world.
