Now that it's been a few days for MUSIC by Playboi Carti to marinate, the reviews are starting to roll in. Namely, Anthony Fantano (aka theneedledrop on YouTube) and Pitchfork have published their scores and overall thoughts. In comparing both breakdowns, we caught one glaring similarity. They both think it's quite a messy record. Even their short blurbs before their full analyses are effectively the same. Pitchfork writes, "Carti’s long-awaited third official album is a blockbuster event that synthesizes all of his impulses—good and bad—into a dizzying, inspired, vibes-driven, 30-track flood of everything."
Anthony Fantano says, "It's a whole lotta music, and some of it's not the best music." While the former's does sound fairly positive on its face, the article doesn't entirely reflect the introduction. "A decent chunk of the album feels rushed, bringing in ideas almost as fast as it scraps them," one sentence reads. "There are tracks that feel like they were uploaded to the album by accident, like "Twin Trim." They continue, "Which is, for whatever reason, a 90-second solo Lil Uzi song that might’ve been collecting dust on Carti’s hard drive for years."
Playboi Carti MUSIC Sales Projections
As for some notable quotes from Fantano, he explains, "Despite there having been so much time this project to incubate effectively, it still sounds so rushed and inconsistent." He later adds, "[The] worst moments sound near effortless and pretty thrown together." All in all, the scores do mirror what each entity has to say. For Anthony, he gave it a "strong three to a light four," and Pitchfork concluded that it was a 7.7/10.
The reactions to these reviews have been just as mixed as the overall reception to MUSIC. However, it seems that enough fans love it. Because Playboi Carti is trending towards having a major first week sales wise. As it stands, his third studio album is projected to move around 250,000 equivalent units. In comparison to his previous commercial outings, it's a major step up. The closest project to this early figure is Whole Lotta Red which moved 100,000 copies. Die Lit did 61,000 and his self-titled LP peaked at 28,000.
