A frustrating project that falls short of its composer’s talent.

Whether or not listeners make it through all 24 tracks on Funeral, it’s easy to see what Wayne is definitely in his own world. His rhyming remains unlike anyone else in the entire genre and despite this album not being his strongest, you don’t have to go far to find a Wayne quotable that inherently makes one admire his seasoned lyrical dexterity.

This 25-song compilation renders itself as a gift to the die-hard X fans that are rightfully craving anything new from the late rapper – even if it’s simply lo-fi humming over baselines for a hot second.

Ultimately, 03 Greedo and Kenny Beats’ Netflix & Deal contains some exciting moments, but otherwise, the short-sighted project that relies too heavily on production and features instead of Greedo’s raw and unbridled ability to tell stories.

There is little here that challenges the listener — let alone Gucci himself. Your take away from it rests on how willing you are to listen to the ATL pillar cruise-control over particularly predictable soundscapes with lazy bars that make themselves malleable to mainstream playlists and simultaneously unworthy of multiple replays.

Common has been delivering solid material for three decades, but this album can be chalked up as a mediocre comeback, not for lyrical ability. Rather, it’s for the lack of soul “by the pound” in the album’s soundscapes. It just doesn’t hold as much weight in his discography.

Nobody expected Azalea to come back super talented and with an entirely new shtick. Nonetheless, In My Defense could have been a tad bit more introspective or at the very least, fun.

The fact that it’s 22 songs only highlights how disorganized the project is. There are some tracks that I actually like scattered throughout, but none that really compare to the best from his previous projects. His two mixtapes were also similarly eclectic, but these collaborations feel less exciting and more calculated. ... The Big Day will go down as one of the biggest disappointments in rap in recent memory, in no small part because Coloring Book was so great.

While there are plenty of people who are able to seamlessly blend their preferred musical genre with Hip Hop (Machine Gun Kelly, Travis Barker, Billy Ray Cyrus), Ed Sheeran isn’t one of them. And because he spent the whole album trying too hard, it falls flat, overall.

On the surface, it’s an overwhelmingly average album, and if you were to strip away all the unnecessary intermissions and segue ways, it’d probably venture into plus territory. As it is, however, it’s a futuristic skyscraper of an album that lacks the foundation to keep from collapsing, and the more you buy into his staggering concept, the more likely you are to come away disappointed.

Not only are the song structures disappointingly formulaic but the samples picked for the project rank as some of the laziest in recent Hip Hop Years.

Across the album, there’s a looming question--what makes any of these canned Confessions even remotely Dangerous? If Logic wants to be above commercial Hip Hop, he will have to try a lot harder than this. Scratch that, maybe he should stop trying this hard.

Free Spirit isn’t an outright failure. For it to be a failure, Khalid would have to at least take a few risks.

Although songs like “BEBE” kindly pay tribute to 6ix9ine’s Puerto Rican roots, his rapping quickly proves to be tolerable in tiny, almost microscopic doses, while the album closer “DUMMY” is like a carbon copy of the homogenized sound currently infiltrating mainstream rap.

By Quality Control’s standards, Nuthin’ 2 Prove is a brisk listen-through as it clocks in at just over 45 minutes, but it certainly feels as bloated as recent projects from Migos and Quavo’s solo album.

While she’s making a valiant effort to mimic a lot of the mainstream rap currently infiltrating the airwaves, it’s going to be challenging for people to not immediately dismiss her as an unwelcome gimmick. That’s not to say the 15-year-old doesn’t have an arsenal of slick jabs ready to go. Much like her fiery personality, Bhad Bhabie’s song lyrics exude healthy doses of attitude toward anyone who tries to stand in her way.

At the end of the day, Slime Language suffers from being predictable, which is the last thing you’d ever want or expect from a Young Thug-affiliated project. The lesser-known artists don’t make much of a mark, the more notorious features are the clear highlights, and the project, as a whole, offers nothing to compete with the highs of Beautiful Thugger Girls--let alone the hallucinatory string of releases from 2015.

Instead of creating a new wave, A$AP Rocky has drowned himself in his own ambitions and lost his identity along the way.

Through a more respectable body of work--is unlikely to win over any naysayers.

While the bulk of the songs can’t disguise their rush-job origins, tinges of Trap Boy Magic do spring up from time to time.

It’s disappointing no standalone soundbed reaches the hypnotic levels of Sean’s “Bounce Back” instant classic, but there’s still a tremendous amount of experimentation worth noting throughout the 10-song ultimate misfire. ... Sean spends a ridiculous amount of time skeeting on tracks with no filter on the filler.

Like most projects that get recorded without the guise of a meticulous A&R, Without Warning’s billing never exceeds the expectations of any artist--rapper or producer--let alone offer a glimpse of what allows these individuals to rank amongst 2017 Hip Hop’s most popular figures.

When Macklemore deviates from his familiar sound, he gets mixed results.

There’s not much range here, just an excess of swag, but it’s worth a listen solely for the moments where Carti seems to accidentally stumble upon a wild flow (“Dothatshit!”), or an irresistible infection (“Half & Half”)

Although he’s far from a punk, the caricature we’ve come to know as Gucci Mane has shed a chunk of his unrepentant hood mentality in favor of a wiser narrator of the trap. Once he fully discovers how to convincingly put that into the music, the world had better brace itself.

Drake feeds his own ego and starves his humility. There are engaging moments scattered throughout, such as the subtle outro to “9” or dvsn’s stellar turn on “Faithful,” but from the content to the execution, Views is strangled by the 6ix God’s own delusions.

As it stands, EVOL is nothing out of the ordinary from his past endeavors. With no measures in place preventing from Future releasing new full-length projects, this album could easily be surpassed in a month or two.

There’s no number of stars that can save this album from aiming high, falling short, and still somehow being quite entertaining at moments along the way.