The ATL spitter reclaims his spot as one of rap’s most exciting MCs

If we’re comparing it to the year prior, 2019 was something of a quiet one for Atlanta MC Lil Baby. Sure, he featured on singles by DaBaby, Lykke Li and Yo Gotti, among others, but ever since 2018’s Street Gossip, Lil Baby seemed content simply to share the sauce with collaborators. With the release of My Turn, however, Baby has declared that he’s finished letting anyone else spread their wings and is ready to reclaim his spot atop hip-hop’s throne.

My Turn is of course built on Lil Baby’s verbose and ever formidable bar construction and under-heralded wordplay. Songs like “Grace” and “No Sucker” find him in fine form, rapping, as he admits outright on track 13, that he’s still got “Sum 2 Prove”. Guests on the project lean towards animated yet high-calibre MCs like Future, Lil Uzi Vert and Lil Wayne, while frequent collaborators Quay Global, Twysted Genius and Tay Keith hold down the production. Songs like “Emotionally Scarred” and “Hurtin” show a more vulnerable side of the MC, but their respective follow-ups “Commercial” and “Forget That” show us that the turn-up is never far. “Woah”, the 2019 hit that gave an already popular dance a proper anthem, is here, as is the Hit-Boy-produced “Catch the Sun”, which first appeared on Queen & Slim: The Soundtrack—two songs Lil Baby may have included to remind us that we’ve always gotten the best of him, even when we’ve wanted more.