Ever since he was released from prison last winter after serving two years on a drug charge, Lil Baby has been making up for lost time. The 22-year-old only began rapping in February, but he already has four mixtapes, the backing of the taste-making Atlanta incubator Quality Control, and a major street hit, “My Dawg,” that just got the star remix treatment with verses from Quavo and Kodak Black. By March, Gucci Mane was already trying to sign him. Even in a city that breeds overnight successes faster than any other, Baby’s ascent has looked almost too easy.
Credit Young Thug for fast-tracking Baby to the city’s inner circle. An old friend from the neighborhood, Thug cosigned the melodic rapper right out of the gate and appeared on some of his earliest tracks. As Baby tells it, even before he began rapping, he spent days in the studio watching Thug do his thing, internalizing his work ethic. Inevitably, he picked up a little bit of Thug’s singsong lilt, too, but his own delivery is considerably more subdued than the typical Thug performance. He sings in a slack, Auto-Tuned murmur, with an intrinsic tunefulness that suggests he could probably be a decent R&B singer if he put the work in. Despite his embrace of the word “hard” on the titles of his last solo mixtape, Harder Than Hard, and his latest, Too Hard, his voice is soft around the edges, almost pretty.
Most of Too Hard finds Baby in a contemplative mood, still processing his sudden good fortune. “I went to prison, it made me a better me,” he croons on “Money Forever,” opposite Gunna, another singing rapper specializing in florid trap serenades. There are a lot of them right now. This is one of the most crowded lanes in rap, but Lil Baby distinguishes himself with a rare command over his voice. The quieter he goes, the more emotion he conveys.
That delivery heightens his already-sharp storytelling. On the tape’s most vividly written track, “Best of Me,” he relays a close call. “Remember that shootout we had that time we thought a kid died?/Only thing I know is when we pulled up, everybody hopped out fine/I remember on the way back, everybody in the car quiet,” he raps somberly. He goes on to recall watching news coverage of the shooting and hoping the kid survived, knowing the ramifications if he didn’t. The chorus’ assurance that he isn’t embellishing—”Ain’t no facade, no cap in my raps, everything that I say is the real me”—is almost redundant. His voice is so sullen, so shaken, that there’s never any doubt whether he’s making any of it up.
Tracks like that make it almost impossible to believe Baby’s been at this for less than a year. He’s got clear talent, and considering how much he’s improved just in the months since his first mixtape, Perfect Timing, his ceiling is potentially massive (even Young Thug’s earliest projects weren’t nearly this assured). Too Hard also has a potential hit in “All of a Sudden,” where Baby and an electric Moneybagg Yo ping-pong speedy bars off of one another, putting maximum spin on each. It’s one of the tape’s few outright bangers.
What Baby still lacks, though, is an original vision—he’s skilled at parroting popular styles, but hasn’t yet honed his own. He isn’t helped in that regarded by Too Hard’s production, which is as refined and professional as you’d expect from the Quality Control stable, but also completely undistinguished, almost stubborn in its refusal to deviate from the most established sounds. He’s got time to figure it out, but for now Baby faces the same problem as many of his peers in Atlanta’s overcrowded rap scene: Talent can only take you so far when you sound so much like everybody else.
