Someone’s first piano lesson underneath someone else’s first hit, then.
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[3.86]
John Seroff: Lord knows I’m not the target audience, but I am an old enough head to remember when Gucci did this same conversational flow in the aughties. I didn’t care for it then either, but at least Zaytoven was around to provide something more exciting than a drum preset and a looped piano scale exercise.
[2]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: At first I thought “Back in Blood” was going to do something with its slow creep, the horror movie pianos and Pooh Shiesty’s preternatural calm. It doesn’t really — it stays in the gear of low menace for its entire run-time, with Lil Durk’s frenzied intensity sounding less like a change of pace than a misaligned organ graft. Yet all of these misfit toys come together for one line — that gang-vocaled “Pooh Shiesty, that’s my dawg, but Pooh, you know I’m really shiesty” — so good and pure in its joy that it makes up for an otherwise mediocre piece.
[5]
Oliver Maier: Pooh Sheisty has a good flow — conversational, a little gruff — but neither he nor the manic Durk can make anything worthwhile of this pitiful beat.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: Aims for menacing, achieves only unpleasant.
[1]
Julian Axelrod: Pooh Shiesty is all cold-blooded menace, a hard-nosed pragmatist somewhere between 21 Savage and Gordon Gekko. Lil Durk, meanwhile, sounds like he’s about to rip open the beat with his bare teeth. While Pooh may lack the vocal pyrotechnics of his live-wire guest, that’s the kind of growl you just can’t buy. (But if you’re Gucci Mane, you can sign it for an undisclosed sum.)
[7]
Andrew Karpan: Sheisty modulates the rasp of his voice just so in order to bring to mind Gucci Mane — the young Memphis rapper netted no fewer than nine features on last year’s Gucci crew tape So Icy Summer, where he struggled to lift himself outside the pool of imitators. But the first few seconds of his first hit single have a kind of confidence that I could listen to for hours, a strutting powerful sound. The production then chops it up into nice Zaytoven-sized chunks which sound curiously clean and sleek, almost as if they had been fashioned anew.
[7]
Samson Savill de Jong: Of all the artforms, I think it’s hardest for music to do “so bad it’s good”. But this gets very close. Nearly everything about this is absolutely terrible and made me have a very good time. The piano beat that’s literally someone who has seen a piano for the first time and is playing 5 notes up and down. The rapping that just about manages to stay on tempo. That the rapper’s name, no matter how unfair a reading this is, just looks to me like it means shit shit. But the absolute cream is the fucking “brr” sound effects. I have no idea if Pooh Sheisty meant this to be intimidating, but he sounds like a fucking cat delightedly purring at you. Lil Durk kinda ruins it by having a basically competent feature. It ruins it because up until that point I could believe this was intentionally goofy (I genuinely googled to see if Pooh was taking the piss), but he gives away that this is genuinely trying to be hard. Fundamentally this just isn’t a very good song, but not a lot of other songs with this score will have given me the smile this one did.
[2]