Genre: Badalbum

Genre: Sadboy is a collaborative album/EP from former rapper and pop-punk fraudster Machine Gun Kelly (now known as just MGK), and rapper/singer Trippie Redd, and Jesus Christ this may be one of the worst pieces of music I have ever listened to. At the very least, the worst of this year. I struggle to find even one redeeming part of this 27 minute mess of a collaboration, with both artists sinking to new lows for their already far from stellar careers. While there is a handful of Trippie Redd music that I have enjoyed in the past, namely his mixtape A Love Letter To You 3 and the album Life’s A Trip, his last handful of projects have been falling flat. Deciding to bloat his projects with 20+ songs at a time instead of whittling it down to the best tracks, along with pushing out as many projects a year as he possibly can, it has been a remarkable fall from grace. And then there is MGK, who in my humble opinion, has always been pretty terrible. As a rapper he always came across incredibly boring and annoying to me, but both of those facets were cranked to the max when he made the transition to pop-punk slog. 

Now, this is not to detract from either the genre of pop-punk or emo rap, as there’s tons within the genres I enjoy: artists like Pup and Lil Peep still regularly feature in my rotation to this day. But whatever has been done in the making of this album is a bastardization, an absolute joke in the face of the actually good projects that preceded it within the genre (pretty in-line with MGK’s general pop-punk career, actually). With Trippie lacking any of the passion and energy that buoyed his best moments, he sounds bored as hell aside from a merely-passable first appearance on the album. MGK on the other hand sounds very much here and present, and we are left off all the worse for it. The numerous layers of autotune strip away any sincerity you could possibly try to take away from this, and grates against your ears. And speaking again of Lil Peep, who’s music I love dearly, MGK makes a few attempts at doing an impression of the Castles era, particularly on the track “time travel”, which seems to even reference Peep lyrically. The lyrics “Yeah, when I die, leave my chains on” immediately reminded me of a worse version of Peep’s lyric “When I die, bury me with all my ice on” from his classic track “Witchblades”, which paints MGK in an even less flattering light.

Let’s talk about some of the lyrics on this album, because oh my god they are so awful. Along with the previously mentioned one that just sounded like a shitty rip-off, we have such tone-deaf classics like “have you ever fuckin’ cried in a limousine” from Trippie on the track “suddenly”, which just spits in the face of anyone who is dealing with any of the issues that they are singing about (if you can even be so generous to call it singing). This is not to detract from the fact that MGK or Trippie Redd may actually be struggling with their mental health, as there is no way for me to truly know; it is just that the way they portray it is so glaringly shallow and unsympathetic, and comes across as disingenuous purely due to how they chose to deliver it across this project. Another all-time awful lyric comes from the song “half dead”, when Trippie Redd comes up with this incredibly astute and philosophical lyric “woke up sad than a fuck”. What the hell does this mean? Is there any meaning at all to really be taken from this bar? Or, more likely, are they both just trying to fill up the time on this incredibly rushed album for the sake of releasing it and making some more money, profiting off of a scene that: in MGK’s case, he is attempting to piggyback on for relevance; or in Trippie’s case, a genre he formerly belonged to that he no longer has the spark or passion to be able to stand out in. The lyrics on this album overall just hurt to listen to, and came across completely hollow. The only ones that stuck with me at all were just due to how laughably bad they were. Also a quick shoutout to the JID feature on “who do i call”, which manages to take one of the best rappers of the current generation and bring him down to the level of the lead artists on this project. What in the world made them think of bringing him of all people onto this? Just an absolute disgrace.

The production on this album does not make it hurt any less. Each track is an incredibly overproduced and bland composition (outside of one notable example) that seems to blend together completely; I struggle to find anything distinct about most of these tracks, and even though I finished listening to it very recently, I could not tell you what any of the songs sound like, or what separates them from each other. A majority of the production here was handled by SlimXX and Charlie Handsome. Slim is best known for his work on other MGK music so I cannot say I am too surprised by his contributions, but Handsome has had his hands on some very good tracks in the past (“Drugs You Should Try It” by Travis Scott, “Righteous” by Juice Wrld, “Weekend” by Mac Miller are some examples) so I am more than a little disappointed by how lazy the production on here sounds. The only song on here that deviates from the norm is the second track “beauty” which samples from the track “Let Go” by Frou Frou. With this song being a recent favourite of mine, it hurt to hear the sample be butchered completely here, paling in comparison to another recent usage of the sample by Maxo Kream for the track “Bang the Bus”. It’s like MGK and Trippie came together just to make the worst album for me specifically to listen to. 

I did not expect to enjoy this album by any stretch when I went into it, and yet I somehow walked away even worse off than I expected. From the incredibly boring cover art, to the painfully cringey album title, to everything that happens from the time you hit play to the minute you uninstall Spotify, I can’t believe some executive at Interscope heard this and decided it was a good idea to release it. I want that 27 minutes of my life back please.