Lil Uzi Vert is having an identity crisis. Their last year or so has been spent just spinning the wheel and praying they land on a jackpot. In 2023, there was Pink Tape, an album I sometimes mistake as a false memory implant, like Arnold’s marriage in Total Recall. But no, Uzi really sang over Deftones-ish nu-metal and rapped on a flip of Shinsuke Nakamura’s WWE theme song and did a dumpster fire cover of System of a Down’s “Chop Suey!” That experiment ultimately fell flat but the project has its moments—the anguished scream at the beginning of “Spin Again”; the vulnerability of “Rehab.” There was also the long-teased mixtape Barter 16, Uzi’s purported all-out Young Thug cosplay, which was supposedly scrapped (I still kind of want to hear the full thing). Now, with Eternal Atake 2, Uzi’s next spin lands on a retreat into their own past, and a whole lot of fan service.
In a recent sit-down with Complex, Uzi revealed the fan reactions they prefer their music to get: “50/50…I don’t like when everyone says it’s good. I feel like it’s going to die out fast.” Then, on Eternal Atake 2’s “Goddard Song”—named after their robot dog, of course—the track opens with a clip from a decade-old Kitty interview where she tries to brush the online critics off by saying, “If you put it on the internet, someone’s gonna hate it, like, no matter what…But it’s fine, like, I get to have fun…So I don’t care, they’re on the internet, doesn’t matter.” Uzi’s message seems to be: They definitely do not care at all if you hate EA2. Actually, you’re supposed to hate it. This seems to be their self-defense mode after Pink Tape was shit on even by the diehards in their subreddit, because if you listen to EA2 it seems like the goal isn’t for the album to be divisive or even loved—just for it not to be hated.
All the boxes are checked. Box 1: For the fans incredibly nostalgic for the moody melodies of the LUV Is Rage series. On the intro “We Good,” which nicely interpolates a sample of Alvvays’ “Very Online Guy,” Uzi’s hybrid of pop-punk shrieks and zigzagging flows aim to bring you back to the days of “XO Tour Lif3.” Except it’s not nearly as heartfelt as their older songs, which managed to be melancholic and euphoric at the same time. It feels copy and pasted from that era, only now they’re rapping about Galaxy Gas. “The Rush”—with an intro from the Nickelodeon boy band Big Time Rush that sounds like it was purchased on Cameo—fits the criteria, too, as Uzi lifelessly runs through all their signature ad-libs (“Huh?”,“Yeah!”) like an old wrestler who pops up at SummerSlam to say their catchphrase.
Box 2: Run back the explosive fast raps memorably done on Eternal Atake. While on the first EA Uzi seemed hungry to prove that they deserved to be in the lineage of all the great punchline rappers that have come out of Philly, now that style is used like a safety net. Similar to the original, the beats veer between maximalist rage and softer pop-rap—done by Working on Dying’s Brandon Finessin, Cashmere Cat, and countless other producers—that won’t blow you away, which was fine on EA when Uzi was blacking out and is a slog on EA2 when Uzi is going through the motions. Take “Not An Option,” which is like a disappointing firework show, weighed down by too many duds for punchlines to have any chance to blast off: “I don’t do good with cheese, do it worst like Veeze.” (Get it: Veeze’s IG username is VeezeWorst) Or, “Paars in the Mars,” where Uzi gets through their boredom by altering their pitch and trying to capture the magic of Chief Keef at his most faded by repeating the word “Wock” almost 100 times.
Plopped in the middle of all their bullshitting are three vintage Chicago drill-adjacent tracks that actually feel like they took some effort. The beats by Brandon Finessin and company sound like glitzed-up DJ L, as the horns roar on “Mr Chow” and the cymbals of “Lyft Em Up” echo like church bells. And on the gunshot-riddled sprint “Chips and Dips,” Uzi comes up with about a dozen different one-liners to say they’re rich as hell (my favorite: “Pockets strong like some arms, look like Bobby Lashley”) in a heart-racing verse that has the rowdy spirit of arguably their greatest feature on Shabazz PBG’s “Shells.”
Too bad that moment doesn’t last very long. Elsewhere, they link back up with Jersey club producer MCVertt, after last year’s TikTok anthem “Just Wanna Rock” (Box 3), for a knockoff “Bent” that only made me want to fire up the original. (They could have at least thrown the Brownsville trio 41 on the track like NLE Choppa did.) At the end of the album, there’s a random-ass pop-R&B section with a few writing and production credits from Charlie Puth (I wonder what Charlie contributed to “PerkySex”?) that had me triple-checking if I accidentally threw on The Kid Laroi. It’s extremely confusing how we got here; the original EA seems so far away. Back then, Uzi was a genuinely polarizing figure in hip-hop culture who with each release was shifting the sound of rap. Now, with EA2, they’re just hoping not to scare anyone off.
