Recorded 16 Jan 2018, just heard this for the first time and all the videos on YouTube have insanely low views. Version on SC only has 72K plays.
Perfect blend of Self Titled and WLR V1 sound to me.
Might be top 5 Carti to be honest. Dont really fw Pierres verse though
A lot of you guys might not like this (only if I’m right of course), because it would probably mean that Carti moves even further away from his best sound and maybe even from Hip Hop to some extent, but I feel like his next Album is gonna go in a much more melodic direction.
I have always wondered why artists like Carti or Young Thug dont use the popularity of their leaks as an indication of what people want from them. Not by releasing old leaks, but by making new music in that direction. Not Real (especially the "Molly" fan remix), Designer Shoes and Made It This Far seem to be Cartis most popular leaks right now, and all three are synth heave, atmospheric songs where hes basically singing. Carti posting himself listening to Designer Shoes several times in 2025 also means hes aware people still want that sound years later.
And thats already close to what hes doing with the Weeknd. Timeless and RATHER LIE use Carti more as a melody than as a rapper. Timeless has more Spotify streams than any song where Carti is the lead artist, RATHER LIE is the most streamed song from MUSIC and he has now spent two tour legs opening for the Weeknd. Location and Long Time also have more than 660 and 430 million streams, with only Sky and Magnolia above them among his lead songs. Carti has very few released songs in that melodic and synth heave direction, yet they are among his biggest. So whenever Carti makes a Synth heavy melodic sound, they get a lot of streams and he is on Tour with the Weeknd right now.
I still think Carti wants to be the "Travis Scott of Atlanta". Not by sounding like Travis, but by reaching an audience far beyond Hip Hop. MUSIC made him much bigger and its common knowledge by now that he was Grammy chasing. The BBYBOI leaks, which arent resonating anything like the WLR V1 leaks did also might indicate that he is not gonna go further down the deep voice once the album releases. As it wouldnt be unprecedented for those leaks to sound different from the finished Album. Thats what happened with WLR. The hate towards @ MEH and his Pain 1993 verse wasnt the only reason he abandoned V2, since Sosa dying also played a role, but he still switched sounds relatively late. If the deep voice leaks keep getting a bad reaction, he could do the same thing again.
I dont think every song is gonna sound like Made It This Far or that hes completely leaving Hip Hop. The melodic sound could just become the main direction instead of being limited to one or two songs. My only fear is AI. RATHER LIE and FINE SHIT were already accused of using AI vocals, and if Carti wants to sing outside his natural range, I could see him using somebody else’s reference vocals and turning them into his own voice with AI. But who knows.
So my theory is that he could be switching up the sound for the album release (like he did with WLR) going form a deep voice / ATL sound to a more synth-melodic / Weeknd sound to chase streaming numbers and a casual audience. What do you guys think?
Tried to only use full CDQ leaks. Means my favorite songs are left off (Talkative, In Line, Goin Outta Style, Breathing), but that makes it sound a lot more like a real Album
Also used versions of songs like Woah that were restructured by some guy on YouTube to sound like finished songs. Place is OG and U Kan Do It Too is with the Intro at the end instead of the beginning. Coupe/WLR is also edited and cut down.
Used Music Information Retrieval tools to find the ideal track ordering and it does flow really nicely. It was really hard to narrow down which tracks to use, there are so many good songs I had to leave off.
This isnt really what Carti wouldve released if the Album actually came out between April and July 2020, but it is pretty close. I dont think we would have gotton a purely V2 album by then, but a lot of songs that leaked in Late 2018 and throughout 2019 wouldve been left off the album. Cancun wouldnt have been on there, a few other songs as well. TGD, JOTC or XTC might have made the album instead of leaks. Carti doesnt really like putting leaked songs on Album, and if he does they are either very late in the tracklist or revised versions
The best V1 and V2 songs are likely still on some hardrive today, but I just wanted to Larp what it wouldve been like if WLR released before he worked on V3.
Maybe in a world where Sosa didnt die and he didnt release @ MEH but U Kan Do It Too as lead single instead.
Total length is 1h05m
From this tweet, we don't know if dancer refers to the song produced by TrapMoneyBenny, but there is no other carti song with that name. Just seems odd to me to include a 2016 produced song. Don't get me wrong, this is my third favorite carti song of all time, just don't get if it is a) a different song Von means here, or b) why Carti would want a 4 year old song (at that point).
I know it was a reply to the Carti "talk 2 me" post about deluxe songs, but given he named Gwapanese (which only just leaked this year) and dior chucks which we still haven't heard, he maybe knew what Carti wanted to include? Then again he called Trynna Get Down U Kan get it, so not sure.
I am just confused about Dancer
These are on the genius page for the WLR Deluxe, took the red Background from the promotional artwork that simply says "Red" and put it behind the pic of carti
Is it a stem edit? Its from 2023 so likely not AI vocals
Genius says 2025 but was it recorded before MUSIC release or after? I know its a stem edit but its the only non deep voice leak apart from withdrawels we have
I know its recording wasn't even close to happening to any MUSIC recording sessions and I know that it wasn't part of MUSIC V1 or V2, however, it was confirmed to not be a "scrapped" track by Digital Nas in April 2022.
But to me that means it must have been an Album Track and not a Single. Given that Carti and Izzo first recorded together in mid 2022 (Gettin Money), that either means that it was scrapped in the short window between April and May-August when the sound of the Album was reworked, or it was a part of the tracklist at some point while we already had part of the sound for MUSIC we would later get.
Does anyone have more information on this? I know strictly speaking its Narcissist era, but was there ever any overlap between the two eras?
V2 is my favorite era and I'm trying to find officially released songs that have that sound, lmk if you got any suggestions
