First & Fifteenth is a column by the Los Angeles-based critic Paul Thompson, who reviews new and notable rap music twice a month for Audiomack World.

Lil Poppa — HEAVY IS THE HEAD

When Polo G vaulted from relative obscurity to national fame with 2019’s Die a Legend, he did so by stuffing that album full of songs that would usually be the lone, introspective cut meant to balance an otherwise aggressive drill record toward its back end. Lil Poppa, a Jacksonville native, moves through a different milieu but is similarly freed from conventional album structures. This is evident near the beginning of his excellent new record HEAVY IS THE HEAD, whose second track, the searching “GET IT DONE,” is the point at which even the most committed rappers would only hope to arrive by the end of 12 songs.

This spring, Poppa signed to Yo Gotti’s CMG; though plausible as either a crossover star or the type of YouTube-native phenomenon who prints money beneath the Mason-Dixon line, Poppa has little in common with the sly, careening rappers who dominate that imprint’s roster. His music is marked by a disarming tonal straightforwardness. When he croons, as on “GET IT DONE,” about buying new dracos and a sort of self-actualized individuality, it’s not the arch juxtaposition that less sincere writers lean on. Those parts of Poppa’s life simply commingle; at times they undercut or qualify one another, but more often they deepen each feeling, the joy found in difficult times and paranoia in the seeming calm.

None of which is to cast HEAVY IS THE HEAD as dour or humorless. It’s shot through with major keys and, in its most inspired moments, gleeful cartoon imagery that recalls W. Bush-era Young Dro (from “MONEY CALL”: “Different colors swinging in the chains look like toucans”). At every turn, the album sounds as if Poppa has finally broken through to a moment of pure catharsis, victory over whatever dogs his psyche. The prevalence of these seeming breakthroughs, though, serves to underline how elusive any sort of true equilibrium is.

Trapland Pat — “Z Land”

Trapland Pat sounds like a Kodak Black who grew up listening to even more turn-of-the-century Cash Money than the real Kodak Black did. (His breakout hit, 2020’s “Big Business,” could very easily be a Mannie Fresh solo record.) The South Florida native, a former football prospect-turned-hustler-turned-MC—in a banner era for those; see former Winnipeg Blue Bomber EST Gee—raps conspiratorially, as if he’s letting you in on a secret. His bursts of mob-life intimation are delivered as sharp barbs or bits of sing-song.

“I’m a real drug dealer,” Pat raps during his poised but sinister new single, “Z Land.” “Don’t mistake me for no runner.” But how much weight should be given to the threat is an open question. Elsewhere in the song violence is presented, alternately, as an abstracted digital process (a delete button is invoked), and as one yanked from that realm into the corporeal (“All that cappin’ on the gram? I can’t wait until we see ‘em”). He seems to revel in these contradictions, an instantly recognizable young man who was seemingly dropped in a vat of charisma as a child who brags about an ability to “blend in like a chameleon.” Boring as it is to play industry prospector, Pat has the combination of pop instincts and inscrutability that could help him cross over to audiences who need the Goodfellas anchor to the more cryptic tales of Haitian diaspora plotting.

Lil Poppa

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