In front of a 20-year-old LUCKI as he sits across from No Jumper host Adam22 is a podcast mic, obviously, but also a few building blocks for a sedated mindstate: a lighter, some weed and some Fronto leaf, a pint of codeine and an A&W cream soda, a blunt that’s already been lit mad times. His dreads do not yet snake down his spine, but instead fray around his skull in uneven strands. He compares his recent adolescence to Larry Clark’s Kids and reflects on an addiction to xans that led to moments of him not knowing if he was awake or dreaming. “I’m the wrong nigga to bring home,” he rapped to a love interest around that time; “I’ma fall asleep at the dinner table.” Years later, naming the biggest album of his career Dr*gs R Bad makes a lot of sense. LUCKI is a walking testimony.
Substance abuse has colored LUCKI’s music since he was 16 and rapping about doing pills he would sell to classmates. He was adored for it, pampered and paraded around, and then he spiraled: Twinkly-eyed mischief gave way to “black[ing] out with some lowlifes”; trust in himself turned into trust in Wockhardt. Nearly 10 years on since that No Jumper interview, the storied Chicago rapper has evolved into a major cult hero—the type with a good handful of RIAA plaques, but who’d still cause your mom to ask “Who is that?” if she saw him on TV. Somehow, as he wrote the book on drug-induced detachment, he put himself back together in time to make a bag off of it. Now at 29, getting too fried is a formality of celebration; he’s being a little facetious with the album title. “I’m on drugs, you already knew it, but sayin’ it fun,” LUCKI raps on Dr*gs R Bad’s “NUPPY INTRO.” More than ever, he sounds comfy, like the diaristic motifs of his career have turned into bullet points to check off when he’s in album mode.
Spiritually, DRB is an extension of the promethazine showers that popped off with 2022’s FLAWLESS LIKE ME, but mainly because its club-friendly rhythms, victory horns, and gold-plated ambiance feel refurbished from that period. A solid core of the producers he arrived with then is still here now. This time around, a polished, more traditional rap sound peeks through—the “Bound” sample on “Gemini Dramatics,” the Mary J. keys and harmonies on “No Stars in Maybachs”—but the general feeling is still run of the mill. It’s the price that’s paid for commercialism: Spurred on from “New Drank” taking off over four years ago, LUCKI has reshaped his elusive, hypnagogic sound to feel more widely accessible.
On Dr*gs R Bad, that mainly means two things. On one hand, instrumental progressions often feel one-dimensional, like everything was designed to be inoffensively clean. That tendency especially flattens tracks like “WAYBetter Dayz” and “Keep It 1000, Plz” where LUCKI lands on slinky flows and taps into guttural pitches that his voice doesn’t typically reach. More notably, LUCKI loses a bit of the edge that made his writing so potent. Some of that has to do with certain phrases and settings feeling overly familiar—city girls and Trackhawks, spaceships and Barbies—but it’s more about how plainly he relays his debauchery now.
One of LUCKI’s greatest assets has always been his ability to balance his sins and losses with the payoff of what he loved: Percs and lean, sure, but also kinship and love itself. Whether it was through artful metaphor or raw concision, these experiences never felt inconsequential. It’s not the same on DRB. On the Lil Yachty-assisted “I Don’t Care…,” LUCKI kicks his verse off with a bland summation of basically everything he’s penned to date: “I got money, I got bitches that’ll kill for me/I got high and said I miss her, she said, ‘Nigga, please.’” Encouraging the pain that informed an artist’s previous, more evocative work—something LUCKI gets from his fans a lot—is corny and reductive. This isn’t that. But when he brags about making a girl cry to his mom, and tells another, “Cut you from the knees, you can cry from down there,” it feels strangely hollow and remorseless. The weighty emotional duality of his past work is replaced by holier-than-thou machismo.
That said, Dr*gs R Bad is full of transactional romance, druggy pomposity, and the in-love-with-the-chase-but-not-commitment subtext of a Future record. “Tryna do everything I say, so you can’t blame the drank,” he raps on “Picky Demons :)” like he’s winning points in an argument. It always feels honest, and sometimes it’s a lil funny, like when LUCKI’s so excited about tricking he lets Run-DMC say it for him. “She ain’t got nun to say, she text me ’bout a Bears game,” he quips later on “rookie 2 barbie.” But he mostly sounds like he’s going through the motions. When he isn’t tinkering with melody, like on “AllWay2Space,” his flows and themes tend to meander.
Everything that’s made LUCKI’s catalog worthwhile starts with unbridled curiosity: His ability to find patience in different pockets, to discover new ways to describe the same yearning or choose indelible beats to match that feeling. Those moments are limited on Dr*gs R Bad, but still present: the Auto-Tuned elasticism of “Stupid Prizes” and “Yesterday On My Face,” the bionic cadence on “Can’t B Trusted,” with Lil Baby. “mdnt series” feels like a vintage cut that could’ve dropped at least five years ago. But ultimately, in trying to sound cleaner and be more aspirational, LUCKI loses sight of the humility that made his work resonant and relatable. He’s evolving, but he’s also a victim of his own standards.
