lil yachty boat 2

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By Sheldon Pearce

Quality Control / Motown / Capitol

March 9, 2018

The reign of the self-proclaimed King of the Teens is over. At 20, Lil Yachty has aged-out of that constituency and there are a host of contenders already eager to replace him. In his quest to conquer the whole yung demo, he discovered teens are fickle and manifold, creatures of varying interests prone to unpredictable changes of heart. After being heralded as the harbinger of a new era in rap, the metrics didn’t bear out his impact. His debut, Teenage Emotions , was streamed considerably less in its first week (24,000) than records by the significantly less hyped a Boogie Wit da Hoodie ( 54,000 ), the younger XXXtentacion ( 67,000 ), or Yachty’s self-professed rival , Lil Uzi Vert (100,000). He reckoned with the unimpressive showing by saying, “I disconnected with my fans because I tried to do this other stuff,” the other stuff being his straight-faced struggle raps. Based on those comments, it seemed his next release would surely return to his original model of pure, unadulterated song.

At this point, with his royal status in question, Yachty is at a crossroads. His label, Quality Control, is quietly rebranding him as a Migos understudy, a bit player in their streaming rap empire. But Yachty has other ideas, and he plans to soak up as much bandwidth as possible by fanning his own flames. On Lil Boat 2 , it’s like he’s daring you not to like him. And so his sophomore album is a sequel in name only, a far cry from the candy-coated, bittersweet melodies that made him a viral sensation on the original. He’s a bruiser now, you see, trading in earworms and weightlessness for gravity and outlandish braggadocio. Maybe it’s a masterful troll that thrives off the misdirection. Maybe the most subversive thing he can do at this point is to dismantle his playhouse entirely, becoming the thing no one said he could be. It certainly is one of modern rap’s more bizarre, and fascinating, heel turns.

After opening with the on-brand crooner “Self-Made,” Lil Boat 2 becomes decidedly bar-heavy and grey. It’s made up of nearly 70 percent tuneless rap flexers with dark, creeping synths; “Boom!” embodies its title, and the Pi’erre Bourne -produced “Count Me In” is all muffled low end. This shift in tone is purposeful, almost forceful. It demands that the listener accept Yachty on his terms and shamelessly argues that he can be anything he wants to be.

The issue is that an album reliant on Yachty’s ability to rap can’t hold up to scrutiny. He is a rather spiritless writer. He only has a couple of rough song ideas. He is incapable of fitting his outsized personality into his pedestrian bars. But the sheer gall of this gambit is occasionally enough to tickle one’s curiosity: Attempted reinventions can be mesmerizing, even when they fail spectacularly. In this instance, he really goes for it. He does triplet flows. He splits punches. He packs cadences and stacks phonetic sounds. Take that, Funk Flex .

Yachty has definitely improved as a technician, making his raps more mobile and structurally sound, but most times the rhymes pass by as if on a conveyor belt. They seemingly have the same function, and the same constructions, and once they happen they’re forgotten almost instantly. His big, showy rap boasts are unimaginative, sometimes predictable, often bafflingly plain in their presentation: “Running to the money like I’m Frank Gore/This ring costs more than a Honda Accord.” He knows how to spend but not how to sell.

The central theme of Lil Boat 2 is simply how rich Yachty is and how broke you are by comparison. He is money-obsessed and really quite bratty about it. “These niggas hate ’cause I’m too rich,” he spits on “Mickey,” the implication being no one actually dislikes him or his music; they’re simply jealous. “I was buying diamonds, you was waiting for tax refunds,” he raps on “Flex,” a song that also works as a nominal diss of his longtime radio nemesis. “Tell your baby daddy I’m richer,” he raps on “Baby Daddy.” You can guess what “Whole Lotta Guap” is about. It isn’t even off-putting that he’s constantly haranguing you about the wealth gap; the real insult is that he flaunts his money in the most mundane of ways.

Duets with PnB Rock and Trippie Redd show that Yachty is still capable of flourishing in a more melodic space, but his refusal to lean into that mode is what makes Lil Boat 2 sound so leaden. Songwriting isn’t his strong suit, and while he’s taken great strides in that area, it was a mistake to build an album out of his raps. It can be entertaining to watch the gears turning, though. There aren’t any moments where he’s noticeably outpaced by his more gifted guests, as he holds his own with NBA YoungBoy , Tee Grizzley , 2 Chainz , and Offset . His best rapping gets packed into “FWM,” a free-flowing outlier that’s as natural and fun as the more whimsical songs in his catalog. His grill-bearing, chain-swinging performances on Lil Boat 2 make me a bit wistful for those—and maybe that was the point. We must suffer through the new Yachty to reassess the old one.

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Lil Yachty: Lil Boat 2 review – hip-hop's misunderstood upstart gets prickly

In trading his sunlit humour for tedious boasts, the rap star has only succeeded in giving more ammunition to his many critics

L il Yachty recently pronounced himself “devastated” by the lukewarm critical and commercial reaction to his 2017 debut album Teenage Emotions . You could see why its sales figures came as a disappointment. His was a very modern rise to fame – instead of hustling demos or carving out a name in rap battles and open mic nights, he came to prominence appearing in fashion influencers’s Instagram posts, while his music attracted notice on the soundtrack to a viral comedy video. It’s the kind of success that might struggle to translate into something more tangible, like lasting record sales – but, still, if you’ve got 4.9 million Instagram followers, you might expect more than 44,000 of them to buy your album in its week of release.

Equally, you could see why Teenage Emotions failed to get fans into shops. You didn’t have to be the kind of rap aficionado horrified by the self-styled King of Teens’s punkish refusal to pay due reverence to his forebears (he claimed he knew fewer than five songs by Biggie Smalls and Tupac combined) to think that, over 70 minutes, the album spread his oft-questioned talents quite thin. More interest was aroused by its cover – featuring a gay couple kissing – than its contents, which his detractors would say is Lil Yachty all over.

The rapper himself seems to have other ideas about its failure, variously claiming it was because people “don’t understand” him and because the music on Teenage Emotions was “ahead of my time”: Lil Boat 2’s title accordingly sets the album up as a sequel to his debut 2016 mixtape. But the sunlit, wilfully simplistic melodies and daffy sense of humour that gave the original its appeal are noticeable by their absence. Something of the rapper’s former self hangs around the tune of closer 66 and She Ready’s perky backing – daringly performed on that most abused of instruments, synthesised pan pipes – but there’s nothing here as charming as Minnesota ’s off-key falsetto chorus, no hook as engaging as the warped take on Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Forbidden Colours that drove Lil Boat’s Good Day . In fact, there’s not much in the way of hooks at all. Lil Boat 2’s main musical currency is a kind of frugal gloom, in which icy electronic drones waft over sparse beats.

Sometimes the musical scenery has a power of its own, as on the discordant two-chord throb of Pop Out, but mostly it seems its purpose is to be unobtrusive, so the listener is forced to concentrate on Lil Yachty’s rapping. This is a bold move that carries a hint of prickly defensiveness about it, as if, for all Lil Yachty’s blithe dismissals of the disparagement heaved his way by everyone from J Cole to Anderson Paak to Funkmaster Flex, something about it has stung him, and he’s determined to prove a point. There’s certainly a hint of prickliness about the subject of almost every track on Lil Boat 2: how much more rich and successful Lil’ Yachty is than everyone else. “I ain’t here to conversate if it ain’t about a dollar,” he drawls on Count Me In. You can say that again.

As a topic, there’s nothing wrong with this – if you’re averse to listening to people tell you how rich they are, hip-hop probably isn’t the genre for you – and at the very least, it’s an improvement on the other subject that seems to preoccupy him, which, alas, is vaginal hygiene (“That pussy pretty, but I still got to sniff it”, “hairy pussy give me allergies” and so on.) The big problem with Lil Boat 2 isn’t so much what Lil Yachty has to say as how he says it. Technically, he isn’t anywhere near as bad a rapper as some people would have you believe – certainly when 2 Chainz or Quavo from Migos appear as guests, they don’t show him up – but he’s by no stretch of the imagination a lyricist gifted enough to breathe new life into a well-worn topic. Oddly flat boasts of the “niggas hate me ‘cos I’m too rich” variety and a lot of extremely repetitious stuff about his fleet of cars are punctuated by lines that are actively clunky. “Bought a new crib,” he brags on NBAYOUNGBOAT, “it’s got several amenities.” Several amenities, eh? What else has your crib got – excellent public transport links?

There’s no great pleasure to be had from saying Lil Boat 2 isn’t very good: it would have been genuinely cheering if it had turned out to be a dexterous up-yours to the hip-hop establishment from a snotty young upstart. Instead you’re struck by the sense that Lil Yachty has let the criticism get to him so much that he’s forgotten where his actual strengths lie. The music that made him famous was lightweight but fun. This, by contrast, feels like a trudge.

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Lil Yachty Reveals The Release Date And Aquatic Artwork For ‘Lil Boat 2’

Lil Boat 2. March 9th. pic.twitter.com/MOIKPxtP9B — king of the youth (@lilyachty) February 21, 2018

A few months ago, Lil Yachty said that Lil Boat 2 , the sequel to his 2016 Lil Boat mixtape, would be out in December 2017. December came and Lil Boat 2 did not come with it, but we’ll still be getting it very soon: Yachty took to social media ( after taking a break from it ) to announce that Lil Boat 2 will be released on March 9th, the two-year anniversary of the original Lil Boat .

March 9th is the day Lil boat the mixtape turns 2. Btw. — king of the youth (@lilyachty) February 21, 2018

He also shared the artwork for the release, and it sticks with the aquatic theme of Lil Boat . This time, though, he’s not in a boat, but instead standing in the orange-hued water, shirtless and sporting a couple of big gold chains. Like on the cover for the original Lil Boat mixtape, Yachty also included “33.7550° N, 84.3900° W” on the bottom of the art, which are the coordinates for downtown Atlanta.

That’s about all the info Yachty has shared about Lil Boat 2 , as he hasn’t yet revealed the tracklist or any potential collaborators. Speaking of collaborators, though, Yachty has some non Lil Boat 2 joint efforts on the way, as he says he’s working on a collaborative project with Gucci Mane and Migos , as well as a collaboration with Lil Pump .

Check out the artwork for Lil Boat 2 above, and read our interview with Yachty and some of his collaborators here .

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Lil yachty raps much better when he's not trying to be everybody's friend.

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In the unpredictable rap landscape, few artists have shifted their musical personas as consistently as Lil Yachty. From his breakout platinum single “One Night,” he has navigated an unconventional path, characterized by daring explorations and stark transformations in his musical style. His discography, though varied, reflects a restless creativity that’s not afraid of challenge or change.

His debut album, Teenage Emotions , emerged as an enigmatic puzzle, an eclectic mix of tracks that straddled both the familiar territories of trap and the uncharted waters of ’80s synth pop. Yachty’s subsequent albums, Lil Boat 2 and Nuthin’ 2 Prove , unveiled a grittier sound, with the Quality Control artist straddling between his charming goofiness and a newfound aggressiveness.

By the time Lil Boat 3 arrived, Yachty’s musical maturity was apparent, as he skillfully maneuvered between his signature braggadocio and unexpected depths of darkness. Yet, even this evolution paled in comparison to the audacious shift the Mableton-born rapper unveiled with Let’s Start Here . Swapping his mumble rap hat for a psychedelic soul guise, Yachty presented an audacious project that underscored his artistic versatility and penchant for risk-taking.

So let’s get into it. From his 2017 debut album, Teenage Emotions , to his latest release, 2023’s psychedelic-rock experiment Let’s Start Here , we rank every Lil Yachty album, from worst to best.

Nuthin’ 2 Prove

Released: October 19, 2018

Label: Quality Control, Capitol, Motown

Singles: “Who Want the Smoke?”

Features: Playboi Carti, Juice Wrld, Lil Baby, Young Nudy, Cardi B, Offset, Trippie Redd, Kevin Gates, and Gunna.

Nuthin’ 2 Prove feels like a contradiction in its execution, an album split between rap and melodic pop vibes, where Yachty seems to be in search of his distinctive voice. The first half brims with a menacing production that underpins a series of boasts and threats, hinting at an unfinished evolution from Lil Boat 2 . “Who Want the Smoke?” stands out, but mainly for the guest verses from Cardi B and Offset. The album’s second half fares better, with the Quality Control rapper reverting to his signature goofy-vulgar observations and appealingly straightforward sentiments. Despite its inconsistencies, the album suggests Yachty’s willingness to explore different styles in his quest to continually push the boundaries of what rap looks like.

Released: March 9, 2018

Singles: N/A

Features: Quavo, Offset, Lil Baby, 2 Chainz, Trippie Redd, Lil Pump, YoungBoy Never Broke Again and Tee Grizzley.

Following the commercial disappointment of Teenage Emotions , Lil Boat 2 sees Yachty take a more aggressive stance. This album seems to be Yachty’s attempt to assert his position in the rap game, delivering a more raw and rap-focused sound. His technical skills as a rapper are evident, and he manages to hold his own amidst guest appearances from heavyweights like Quavo, Offset, Tee Grizzley, and 2 Chainz. However, lyrically, he falls short of delivering a memorable punch. The softer, melodic cuts like “She Ready” and “Love Me Forever” offer glimpses of the endearing goofiness that originally defined Yachty’s charm. The album, while showcasing his adaptability, also underscores the need for Yachty to refine his lyrical abilities and embrace his unique identity.

Teenage Emotions

Released: May 26, 2017

Singles: “Harley”, “Peek a Boo”, “Bring It Back”, “X Men”

Features: Migos, YG, Kamaiyah, Stefflon Don, Diplo, Grace, and Sonyae Elise.

Riding high from the platinum success of “One Night,” Lil Yachty’s debut album, Teenage Emotions , is a rollercoaster ride through the rapper’s psyche. He pushes the boundaries of his mirthful persona, sometimes stumbling into territories that evade binary characterizations. There are courageous, though uneven, ventures into ’80s synth pop with tracks like “Bring It Back” and “Better”. Despite the album’s 70-minute expanse, Yachty’s boasts often rest on nondescript trap beats, signifying a period of exploration rather than concrete artistic definition. The freshman album offers an intriguing, if raw, glimpse into the enigma that is Lil Yachty.

Released: May 29, 2020

Singles: “Oprah’s Bank Account”, “Split/Whole Time”, “Coffin”

Features: Tierra Whack, ASAP Rocky, Tyler, the Creator, Future, Draft Day, DaBaby, Drake, Lil Keed, Young Thug, and Lil Durk.

As the grand finale of Yachty’s mixtape trilogy, Lil Boat 3 embodies an evolution in the rapper’s musicality. He steps out from behind the generic trap production and Auto-Tuned vocals of his past work, putting his lyrical prowess front and center. Yachty shines solo, yet isn’t afraid to share the spotlight with fellow rappers like Tyler, The Creator and A$AP Rocky. The album navigates through Yachty’s signature goofy braggadocio to moments of experimental darkness, offering a refreshing dynamism. Though bogged down by redundant tracks, Lil Boat 3 signals a promising growth in Yachty’s creative direction.

Let’s Start Here

Released: January 27, 2023

Label: Concrete, Quality Control, Motown

Features: N/A

In an audacious left turn, Let’s Start Here sees Yachty trading in his mumble rap credentials for a psychedelic soul odyssey. This project takes listeners on an unexpected trip through jazzy guitars, boisterous drums, and otherworldly synths, fearlessly traversing from the grandiose heights of “The Black Seminole” to the smooth rhythms of “The Ride” and beyond. Despite its ambitious genre-crossing, Yachty’s bold personality threads the album together into a cohesive whole. This novel experimentation paints the artist not just as a veteran Quality Control rapper, but as a versatile artist unafraid of vulnerability and eager to challenge the boundaries of his own creativity.

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Lil Yachty - After Da Boat (DatPiff.com)

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