The late rapper’s essential posthumous LP, with visual aids

Surfacing seven months after his tragic passing, Juice WRLD’s 2020 LP, Legends Never Die, is the rare posthumous release to feel like one of an artist’s major statements. The project is indicative of the exciting and fresh direction in which Juice’s music might have headed if he were alive. In both music and lyrics, it stands as the most varied Juice WRLD release, finding him breaking out of his more broad-strokes treatises on romantic angst, drug abuse and other dark themes, instead turning toward clearer, detail-oriented autobiography. The video version of the LP includes videos featuring animation, archival footage and more, providing an epilogue to the music that celebrates Juice’s life and examines his legacy.

Hauntingly, the lyrics on Legends Never Die feel more prescient than anything released before his death. On the mournful “Wishing Well”, Juice sings: “Let’s be for real/If it wasn’t for the pills, I wouldn’t be here/But if I keep taking these pills, I won’t be here, yeah/I just told y’all my secret, yeah.” In the computer-animated video for the song—included in this release—the rapper battles his way through a hallucinatory minefield of a world where gravity is suspended and threatening emojis chase and crowd him. The uncanny clarity of lyrics in songs like these points up the major difference between Legends Never Die and Juice’s formative releases: having developed his character based on himself, he is often reacting to fame directly on these songs, sketching out an explicit road map for his anxiety and existential despair. (See also his snapshot of a self-destructive night in London on the explicit emo homage “Man of The Year”).

As on the previous Juice WRLD release, 2019’s Death Race For Love, the young star also carves out a fair amount of new musical ground for himself in these songs, seemingly pushing away from being pigeonholed merely as a rapper. Amid the expected emo-trap anthems, the record’s singles find him venturing into more explicitly Top 40-oriented territory than ever before—specifically, the inspirational, Marshmello-featuring EDM-rock track “Come & Go”. There is also a bittersweet trap-pop ballad with Halsey, “Life’s a Mess”, dramatising two flawed people attempting to find common ground to support each other.