Trap crooner Juice WRLD dropped his second studio album on March 8, which shows some significant growth from the artist, in both good and bad ways. “Death Race for Love” shows development in Juice WRLD’s style and ability, however, it is over 70 minutes which makes the 22-song tracklist reminiscent of Drake’s “Scorpion;” bloated run time with little substance.

While Juice WRLD has more consistent quality in this album than his first, “Goodbye and Good Riddance,” this long and drawn out playlist waters down his raw emotion. The song “Robbery” stands out as the song with the most replay value, however, the few songs before and after make it less appealing to continue listening.

There is a clear attempt from Juice WRLD to show more variety than his typical “I’m sad so I do drugs and I’m still sad,” formula. However, for each song that isn’t just about a sad addict, there is still about three or four times as many songs about a heartbroken guy trying to heal himself with the miraculous powers of codeine and Sprite.

The songs “Syphilis”, “Out My Way”, “The Bees Knees” and “ON GOD” are some examples of the more energetic, less emotional songs on the album and reflect the varying success of Juice WRLD’s style outside of his comfort zone. While “the Bees Knees” is one of the better songs on the album, “Syphilis” sounds like his attempt to resemble the styles of his lookalike Ski Mask the Slump God and the late XXXTENTACION. In addition, “ON GOD” is an enjoyable and entertaining track, however, the beat is more representative of Young Thug, whose feature dominates the song.

Overall, my biggest issue with this album is how unnecessarily long it is. Juice WRLD could have cut five to eight songs from the tracklist and the album probably would be better. However, I think the underlying problem is that Juice WRLD doesn’t fully know what his audience wants.

It can be appreciated that he strayed outside his comfort zone, and definitely has the capability to do so. His hour-long tracklist more than proves his capabilities as a rapper, however, I think he needs to find a way to apply his skill in a way that gives some variety from his crooning but doesn’t catch us completely off-guard.

I think this album is about a 3/5 and could be a 4 with a limited tracklist. However, the long repetitive songs between the higher quality ones make it hard to listen to the album as a whole instead of making a playlist with the best few and moving on from the project.

Mitchell Kret can be reached at [email protected] or @mkret222 on Twitter.