It’s a good time to be a talented young man in rap and YBN Cordae is as talented (and as young) as they come. The Lost Boy is the natural next step for him and it’s a very promising debut. YBN Cordae is already one of the more skilled rappers making music and that skill is more than enough to carry the album.
However, if you take the skill away, it’s hard to really see the point of the album. You would expect to see a lot of filler in a debut of this style and while it’s true here, that’s not too major a complaint to lodge against it. My real issue is that I just don’t really know what YBN Cordae is.
His claim to be a mix of the old and new school doesn’t really come through in the album. “Have Mercy” might have something like a trap beat, but it hasn’t internalized trap and nothing else feels even close to a fusion.
This doesn’t keep the music from being good though. The man is very talented. “Broke As Fuck” borrows very heavily from “HUMBLE”, but does it well and we can always use more music mined from that vein. “Family Matters” goes old-school instead and reminds me of Blueprint-era Jay-Z and Cordae’s lines about his family hit hard.
Where the flaw is most evident though is in the Chance and Anderson .Paak features. Both are excellent songs, but the Chance song feels like a Chance song and the .Paak one feels like a .Paak one. Both of these artists are well established by now and that clear definition lets them completely overshadow the voice of the still hazy Cordae.
This is still a debut worth checking out though. YBN Cordae’s potential is already clear, but future considerations aside, there’s enough very good music here to warrant your attention now.
– @murthynikhil
Top Five Records 
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