Eight months after the release of “Mansion Musik,” Trippie Redd, the 24-year-old rapper from Ohio, released the fifth rendition of “A Love Letter To You.” The album features many well-known artists in the hip-hop and R&B landscape, such as Lil Wayne, Roddy Ricch, The Kid Laroi, Bryson Tiller and Tory Lanez.
After dropping a rap-based album earlier this year, this new R&B-like album places his skillset and variety on notice in the music industry for future and potential opportunities to work with other artists.
The album appears to target a younger demographic, as there’s a lot of enthusiastic singing but not much to be blown away by lyrically. Redd described the music’s theme as “Love, pain, sadness, rage, dark, beautiful and bliss.”
Redd expresses his emotions and continuously sings romantically towards an unnamed girl throughout the album. Redd opens up about her on the track “Thinking Bout you,” by saying “I love you” and follows it melodically with “I could probably have all of the women in the world, I promise I don’t want no other girl, all I want is you.” Redd appears to be heartbroken as he swore on “Reality” that he loves and trusts her. He also said his love, heart and soul belongs to her on “Romantic Fantasy.”
His latest album underwhelms by not fully committing itself to the romantic theme it aims for. The album lacks a memorable moment, as the songs lack creativity lyrically, and comes off as a second-tier R&B album. Trippie Redd is in a weird middle-ground, where he wants to be taken seriously as a rapper and has ties to the R&B genre, but lacks a specialty that separates him from other artists. Despite being one of his best pieces of music since his prime in 2017-2018, it doesn’t move the needle or make the mainstream media view Redd differently. Nowadays he is an afterthought in the rap community after starting out hot six years ago with the original “A Love Letter To You.”
In an interview with social-media music personality DJ Akademiks, Trippie Redd said this album was going to be his “best body of work,” describing it as the final entry in the “A Love Letter To You” series. He made this album a priority over the last three or four years.
“A Love Letter To You 5” debuted no. 13 on the US Billboard 200 and sold 38,000 copies in the first week.
This album put Redd back in the conversation of the hip-hop community. Redd is one of the last rappers making music from the late 2010s’ SoundCloud generation of rap, which included notable names such as Juice WRLD, Lil Uzi Vert, XXXTentaction and Lil Peep. What’s more, Redd is younger than most mainstream rappers, so he’s by no means close to done in terms of making music.
It will be interesting to see which route Redd takes after this album — if he continues the rap and R&B conjunction or commits to a genre and perfects his craft. At this point the media and fans know what type of artist Redd is: A romantic love artist filled with rage when he decides to rap.
But if Redd wants to get as high as he was six years ago, he’ll need to change his concepts. Artists frequently change their flows or beat concepts to stay relevant, and he might need to change his rap flow, as it’s not helping expand his growth or popularity.
