As a young rapper with a fresh record deal, there are a few ways to navigate your first formal release. You can sidestep hype and release a juiced-up approximation of your pre-album mixtapes, as Young Thug did this year on Barter 6, a stunning but low-stakes offer that didn't seek new listeners so much as drag them in with sheer oddball magnetism. You can play ball with terrestrial radio, genuflecting to popular regional sounds and shopping for chart-topping guests with label money but also running the risk of losing sight of what made you intriguing in the first place. This is a well-trodden path littered with experiments too awkward to fly but too funded to fail, ill-remembered debut albums by Wale, Meek Mill, B.o.B, and the like that it would take dedicated stylistic retrenchments to undo. Another strategy is to forsake fan and label expectations to charge full bore into something scary and new. Vince Staples and No I.D.'s anemic, apocalyptic dance party Summertime '06 was a challenging, unexpected gear shift, jarring and immediate as shin splints.
Yung Rich Nation, the debut album from Atlanta's Migos, toys with a few of these methodologies. Throughout, the group leverages a further push toward pop sounds initiated on last fall's Rich Nigga Timeline with the harder edged meat-and-potatoes street rap of last spring's No Label 2. But what's missing is a lot of the goofy spirit and momentum of 2013's Young Rich Niggas, which drilled the group into the national consciousness with the madcap "Hannah Montana" and "Versace". The first five songs on the new album establish a plodding brutality, thanks in large part to darkly cinematic production from the Honorable C.N.O.T.E.; the lyricism is sharp and the cadences more varied than usual, but grim early album autobiographical cuts like "Migos Origin" and "Street Nigga Sacrifice" will likely scare off a casual listener drawn to the group by a "Fight Night" or "Handsome and Wealthy". These are all solid album cuts, but laid out in a row at the top of the tracklist, they're uninviting.
The album opens up around "Highway 85", a white-knuckle cop chase sequence on the interstate highway that runs from Virginia through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama aided by a C.N.O.T.E. production mining the sparse, Moogy funk Dr. Dre hasn't made much since the second N.W.A. album. Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff's tales of cruising out of run-ins with the law are gripping exercises in verse-length storytelling from a group whose lyrics tend to get absorbed line by outrageous line as humor. This classic gangsta rap sound is Yung Rich Nation's most intriguing fit; "85", along with "Gangsta Rap" and "Street Nigga Sacrifice", serves up a poignant reminder that Southern rap and West Coast rap have commonalities that stretch back decades before Jeezy and 2 Chainz hopped on DJ Mustard beats. They also prove that the Migos don't need a big ugly trap beat to get busy. (See also: Social Experiment's "Familiar".)
Lead single "One Time" pops up in the middle of the album suggesting that Yung Rich Nation could've been sleek and mercenarily hooky if the group wanted, but then the Chris-Brown-by-numbers rap&B collaboration "Just for Tonight" follows, illuminating what happens when an impressionable act courts spotlight too openly. The one is effortless and fun-loving; the other, labored and unnatural, like Migos guesting on someone else's album instead of the other way around. Neither one carries that feeling, which was so palpable on their early mixtape hits, that the Migos had arrived at radio thanks to a magical collusion of undeniable skill and personality. They feel like concessions.
Yung Rich Nation avoids many pitfalls that render major label rap debuts forgettable or else regrettable but sacrifices a world of possible intrigue in sticking to its guns. It hints at weirder records it could've been but, in choosing the sampler platter over a more brash dish, ultimately comes across as safe. Peppering what seems to want to be a street album with quirky little singles that jut out perpendicularly from the rest of it makes for a record unsure of whether it should shirk commercialism or embrace it. In a time where we're keen on young Atlanta talent but casually disinterested at the first indication the hit parade's about to subside, there's not much room left for the Migos to keep figuring out how to present themselves in a mainstream field of play. The rhyme skills and lurid way with imagery that first brought the group to national attention remain on display throughout the album, but YRN's warring agendas suggest a few more tries are in order for the Migos to get their formula sorted.
