There’s no collective in America commanding the youth like Opium is right now. Somewhere between cold nonchalance and masochistic vitriol lies the Atlanta-based neo-punk brigade, a coven of rappers and producers who mold piercing distortion into organized bedlam. When Playboi Carti launched the label with the release of 2020’s Whole Lotta Red, he was already readying his first protégé.
Allow me to reintroduce Ken Carson, patient zero of the Opium Plan, one of the world’s biggest rappers born in the 21st century. Ascending from Carti fan to Carti confidant, the diamond-grilled ruffian dethroned bars and rhyme schemes in favor of bludgeoning skulls with his bloodshot delivery. He’s an avatar for Opium’s dark, irreligious imagery, often seen with a St. Peter’s cross around his neck. Last year, he tatted a pentagram on his chest and commissioned cover art of a buck 50 scar on his face. As his embrace of the macabre has grown tighter, Ken Carson’s headstrong synthplay has become bitterly malevolent. It’s a mutated extension of Red’s vampiric lure that Opium stans can’t get enough of: The Brooklyn listening party for his 2023 opus, A Great Chaos, was packed with disciples howling newly released songs word for word. “Opium aesthetic, yuh, type shit,” Ken boldly remarked on that album.
More Chaos is Ken Carson’s affirmation of his influence. He is aware of his standing in rap culture now, almost to the point of spoofing the demon he’s posturing as. “I’m the lord of chaos/I got the moshpit in control,” he declares after an alarming techno breakdown splits the album open. For better or for worse, he’s right. Opium’s lurid approach to sound and aesthetics has the kids in a headlock; at any rap festival in the past five years, you’d find fans draped in all black with painted nails and pants so baggy they can’t see their shoes. They’re rowdy and inconsolable at Opium sets, flailing and shoving even before a DJ takes the stage. It’s all by design—Carti, Ken, Destroy Lonely, and company have distilled the symbolism of metal and the ethos of punk into an apolitical soup. There is no underlying message—this is rebellion just for the sake of saying “Fuck 12.” These are our Sex Pistols: The music at its best is rabid and freakishly exhilarating. At its worst, it exposes the empty core of its depravity. An environment that cultivates something like More Chaos is one where drug binges and violent misogyny go unchecked.
“How you mourn? What you gon’ do when that pain hit?” Ken Carson asks on “Xposed,” the album’s second track. “I been rockin’, I been ravin’, I been ragin’.” The scope of Ken’s catalog can be summed up by these words alone. With each new album (More Chaos is his fourth), the hedonistic impulses reach new extremes. It’s reflected in the lyricism, but it’s the sound palette that really gets pushed to the brink. The trench warfare of 2023’s “Hardcore” and “Lose It” are superseded by the hellish whir of “Xposed” and the double-sided clamor of “LiveLeak.” Hall-of-fame snippet-turned-banger “Money Spread” warbles like a spaceship with a corrupted motherboard. Ken’s best work relies on this kind of raw urgency and Migos-level repetition that I wish this album had more of. “LiveLeak” is nearly as addictive, translating the crunchy, lo-fi elements of the snippet to the final mix: Mangled synths and snares, Mario Kart trills, and gruff 808s rumble like Goliath’s footsteps. Egged on by a calamitous beat switch, Ken raps like he’s a button-press away from a tectonic shift. When the mood softens later in the album, he loses the edge that makes these tracks so enticing.
“Dismantled” is another standout, for the right and wrong reasons. Sonically, it’s a quintessential Ken Carson song: Its choppy blips of machinery are constantly in motion, grounded by a thick bassline that hums like a generator. He raps with the same conviction that dominated A Great Chaos, a presence that feels inconsistent on this album—extended verses on “K Hole” and “Evolution” show flashes but are too long-winded. (Not every song is “Me N My Kup.”) But “Dismantled” starts to get startling when you realize he’s putting a woman through brutal sex: “Rip this bitch apart/When I get to the hotel, she gettin’ dismantled,” he raps on the hook. It’s easy to shrug off Ken’s jarring one-liners when you can’t help but laugh at them, but this isn’t that. On “Root of All Evil,” he brags, “I go Chris Brown, wall to wall/She know how it get,” like that doesn’t read as a grim double entendre in 2025. Add in the fact that Ken and Opium’s own allegations) of domestic abuse are public knowledge and these lyrics become nauseating. Even would-be romantic songs like “Kryptonite” talk about women like they’re concubines.
One of the strangest songs of the bunch, final track “Off the Meter,” features Destroy Lonely and Playboi Carti—after half a decade, Carti has finally consummated his role as label boss by acknowledging his signees on wax. What’s funny is how much it sounds like Carti found a random .wav file from 2022 and just threw a verse and some Swamp Izzo tags on it. It’s a fun track, but Ken and Lone sound damn near pre-pubescent compared to the muddier cadences they’ve honed since, while Carti taps into a level of dynamism that Ken barely touches across More Chaos. Listen to Ken nodding off at the end of his “Confetti” verse, or flatlining through most of “2000,” and then listen to Carti stretching his vocal cords like putty, inflecting with reckless abandon. Even after all this time, it’s still the teacher and the student.
All things considered, it’s comfort at the top that holds Ken Carson back. It’s why the back half of More Chaos drags; he’s going through familiar motions in hopes of making lightning strike twice. Just like A Great Chaos, More Chaos offsets its aggressive first half with bubblier textures and candied Auto-Tune on side two, but sometimes Ken sounds so bored when he’s not trying to jump out his body. “200 Kash” is delightfully sludgy, but the hollow, lust-driven relationships he croons about on “Down2Earth” and “Kryptonite” are tedious reminders of X, even if the beats are half-decent. By the time he claims that “Pat Bateman ain’t got nothing on me” on “Psycho,” I start to wonder if this is just the equivalent of clocking in for him.
If lyrical density is a concern, you’re missing the point of More Chaos, but Ken Carson’s emphasis on vibes and pointed aggression can only take him so far. A Great Chaos separated him from his peers, demonstrating how much ground he could take up outside of Playboi Carti’s shadow. A similar formula suffices here, thanks to a masterful crop of producers: Opium’s usual suspects (F1lthy, star boy, Outtatown), DRACO.FM standouts (skai, legion), and SoundCloud veterans like 16yrold. But as a whole, More Chaos is a lateral move, not a step up. It doesn’t help when you consider the chameleonic depth and firepower of last month’s MUSIC, an even longer saga of postmodern trap. Carti’s album left no room for his flow or cadence to get stale, shapeshifting in tight spaces like Orochimaru. Is it flawed? Definitely. But it thrives on the scathing unpredictability that More Chaos can’t quite pull off.
