Nine Vicious blew up for a reason. Sure, the music has something to do with it: He’s unearthed some of the underground’s most precocious beatmakers (Patrick Garza, 406ahmad, R8) and shapeshifted 2010s radio hits into slimy, head-thumping bangers. But it’s deeper than that. The Georgia rapper is in love with fiasco. He might pose with his lips poking out, edges laid, and French tips on display before hopping on wax to throw homophobic slurs at you. He sparks beef as quickly as he squashes it and goes on all-caps rants dissing nondescript opps. Months after rapping he’s “finna turn to a Jew” ’cause his “bitch is a Jew” on “Listen Up Jews,” Nine Vicious threw on a big-ass Star of David chain for the newly released “Trevon O’Ryan Echols” music video.
This piano-laden number, named after himself, is track eight of 23 on Nine Vicious’ EMOTIONS, an album that doesn’t describe any of his emotions across its 71-minute runtime. On “Trevon,” he repeatedly shouts “So many emotions!” over the delicate keys to let you know what he’s been going through. “Being me, it ain’t easy,” he proclaims. Emotions, man. Shit is crazy. Maybe seeking depth here is unreasonable, but save for a few songs with good beats, EMOTIONS feels disingenuous: The professions of love and the assertions of gang ties get filtered through ragged melodies, half-baked flows, and words that mean less the more they’re repeated.
Five albums and several mini projects into his career, Nine’s corniest, most unimaginative tendencies have proven to be the exact attributes that have made him famous. On the surface, it’s pretty harmless. Samples and interpolations are easy to catch, bars are shallow enough to get a middle-school locker room turnt. Here, with vintage A$AP Rocky in mind, he reworks “Fashion Killa” on “Fashion Killa” and neuters “Purple Swag” on “Purple Swag.” Nine’s creaking, warbling cadence makes for a Thug/Carti hybrid that’s distinct but still close enough to be familiar and palatable. When it works, it works: “Vivienne Westwood / RIP,” the only truly addictive song on here, is the best example of how elastic his delivery can be when he’s up for it. He’s spry on “Posing Tonight,” too, lurching from gruff bellows to 645AR squeaks.
When he’s not gliding through a dynamic flow, something I wished happened more here, only two types of Nine Vicious bars stick with me: the ones that are cringily shallow (“My new bitch from UK, call her fakemink”; “Just like Breaking Bad, need my lawyer, I call Saul”) and the ones that are clearly tryna be incendiary. “She give that head like a MAGA hat,” he raps on “Molly Ecstasy.” Without Patrick’s beaming theremin swells (“Vivienne Westwood / RIP,” “Blowing Emotions”) or ahmad’s orchestral finesse (“Trevon O’Ryan Echols”), his limitations as a songwriter would be more distracting than they already are.
EMOTIONS is so concerned with meeting the moment that its flashes of intensity get bogged down to lethargy: Disjointed sequencing, random beat-switches, and rambling croons make up aimless tracks that drag out for way too long. On songs like “Rolling Loud,” he tries bringing real-life crowd control to the booth and ends up sounding ridiculous. “Orlando! What the fuck we doin’?!” he yells before counting down a beat drop. Elsewhere, the motifs of sex and celebrity and faux femininity he always retreads get wrung out to death. Listening to him call himself a bad bitch again on “Project4play/Svj” feels like he’s in the studio parodying himself.
Even worse is that the one coherent idea that shines through is the emphasis on songs depicting romance, an attempt that falls way short of the mark: the sterile dancehall of “Need,” the bone-dry Rihanna reprise of “Amazing,” and the pandering language of “Clock It” feel like they were force-fed from the label. The ironic thing about this album being called EMOTIONS is that every gesture toward affection feels manufactured. “I’ll give you my whole heart if you want it,” Nine guffaws on “My Whole Heart,” one song after he raps, “I tell all my bitches, ‘You better not tell on me.’”
In February 2025, a woman came forward with screenshots of Nine, at 19, allegedly trying to groom her into a sexual relationship when she was 16. He denied it at first but chalked it up to being “horny” weeks later. Today, Nine Vicious garners more streams and sells more tickets than most other rage and plugg rappers who blew up last year, but it’s really Nine’s perverse, red-pill adjacency that keeps his name hot. He’s found an audience that embraces him for it; maybe it’s what got him on the new Ye album. “She know that I’m rich, I beat this hoe because I can,” he trills on “Posing Tonight.” “I got the internet mad as fuck, niggas furious,” he raps later. Maybe there was a time in rap when shock value was a means to a productive end—challenging the status quo, unloading inner conflict, whatever. But if anyone can prove how little the messaging matters anymore, it’s Nine Vicious.
