The Daily Spin II
Lil Baby | WHAM
Welcome back to the Daily Spin. For the uninitiated, this is the series in which I review an album every day of 2025.
As was the case two years ago, my favorite song from each album can be found at the playlist linked here.
Album: WHAM (2025)
Artist: Lil Baby
Link:
With WHAM, it appears that Lil Baby aims to continue his streak of defying standards and breaking records. From his astronomical rise under the guidance of Young Thug, Gunna, and other Atlanta-area rap aficionados to the current state of the land, where he sits on a throne all his own near the peak, his career has been marked by consistent and oft-overwhelming growth - features with Drake, Nicki Minaj, Lil Durk, a headline appearance at a J. Cole-sponsored festival. It’s enough to make anyone a little crazy.
Lil Baby - Dominique Jones - seems to have let it get to him a little bit with WHAM, short for Who Hard As Me. It’s not that people are harder, necessarily, but there’s a point where such braggadocio requires something to back it up. The beats are solid, as is to be expected for someone who’s been in the trap scene for the better part of a decade, but there’s nothing here to delineate Jones from any of the other artists trying to do this exact same thing.
It becomes most clear when placed against the features Jones folds into this album - it’s done well, but it becomes clear that what 21 Savage, Travis Scott, Future, and Rod Wave bring to the table are things that elude Baby, that little extra bit of oomph that can carry someone into true superstardom. Lil Baby appears a little more human, a little more average - the question of ‘who hard as me’ is given the resounding answer of ‘the people I surround myself with’ - a lovely message of collaboration, but not exactly maybe the chest-thumping anthemic declaration that the album’s title was supposed to be.
This is an album for some people, I’m sure of that, but it’s not one for me.
Rating: 5/10
Best Tracks: Dum, Dumb, and Dumber
Worst Tracks: Say Twin, F U 2x