Rio Da Yung OG is a rapper who truly lives up to his name. The Michigan-born, self-proclaimed shit-talker has seen more in 31 years than most will in their entire life. To return from federal prison after nearly half a decade without snitching or having a mental breakdown is akin to graduating with a PHD for a career criminal. Perhaps that’s why Rio has come back sounding like if Red from Shawshank Redemption started rapping, as if he were the wisest inmate in the prison, a young man unfortunate enough to have seen it all by age 30, sentenced to spend a lifetime doling out invaluable advice to some of the country’s slimiest crooks, couched between vulgar asides and gallows humor, just to make sure he doesn’t lose anybody’s attention.
F.L.I.N.T. (Feeling Like I’m Not Through) is Rio’s not-so-subtle way of bringing some positive attention to his hometown of Flint, MI, a city most people outside of the state only know about because of its infamous water crisis in 2014. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finally lifted its emergency order on Flint's lead-laden drinking water in May 2025, but many residents remain skeptical. Rio’s pre-prison 2020 mixtape, City on My Back, implied his mission to carry his beleaguered hometown out of the mud and back onto the field. F.L.I.N.T., which was released on the city’s annual 810 Day, named after the region's area code, is an acknowledgment to just how far he’s carried it, becoming the first rapper in the city with a platinum record. “I’m just a little dirty kid from Flint, I never seen nothing,” he says on album-opener, “Different Music.”
Rio’s long been an artist best consumed via YouTube loosies and one-off singles. Past projects feel like they were put together as an afterthought, but never in a way that harmed the product much. The cobbled-together feel actually added to his shit-talking, “I am not a rapper” mythos. Even more recent projects like the understandably hurried Rio Free feel like a string of random songs. F.L.I.N.T., on the other hand, is Rio’s most complete body of work to date. It maintains a novel-like quality, filled with poetic irony and literary repetition. “Another Story” is a masterclass in storytelling, a Tarantino-esque tale told brilliantly with little context, as if Rio were regaling us with his life story from the bottom bunk of a two-man cell. He uses humor not just for laughs, but as a weapon to expose and process the pain, absurdity, and contradictions of his environments. He manages to squeeze in phrases like “butt-napkin” next to lines like “Pulled up to my granny’s house and I just bust’ out crying, she said ‘you know how the streets go, old folks don’t be lying.’”
F.L.I.N.T. is a modest attempt at making something cohesive and thoughtful, not easy for a rapper who has prided himself on effortlessness. Songs like “Back Rubbed,” and “Sneaky B” have Rio switching up his flow for beats he probably wouldn’t have touched five years ago. Longtime collaborators and fellow architects of Flint’s signature tombstone-bell, looped-beats sound, like Wayne616, BEATSBYSAV, and Danny G Beats, more than rise to the occasion, providing the canvas for which Rio paints irreducible observations from his life like, “the first time I shot a gun, I was a sixth grader,” on “Great Day.” Another standout is “Big Ben,” where Rio says plainly, “I miss my cousin, but I miss my brother more, crib so big it got 100 doors.” It’s hard to pick just one bar to quote when every line feels strong enough to stand on its own, while at the same time building on what's come before.
Luckily, Rio never strays too far from his roots. The nearly 6-minute-long “AGGRESSIVE FLOW” is a hookless onslaught of wicked one-liners, in the spirit of Rio and RMC Mike’s trunk-rattling Dum and Dumber mixtape series. RMC Mike even shows up a few songs later on “Dumb N Dumber Flo,” where he says apropos of nothing “$3,200 for some flip-flops,” as if he just excitedly remembered a new way to waste money. F.L.I.N.T. winds up showcasing all the technical strengths that originally put Rio and his crew on the map, while also successfully expanding his sound to fit larger stages. It’s a meditation on the joys of being a big fish in a little pond, moments before being moved to the ocean.
