Lil Baby It’s Only Me Review: A Hauntingly Diaristic Effort

Those hoping that Lil Baby, whose real name is Dominique Armani Jones, would make an entire project that leaned into the skills he flexed on the surprisingly tender, novella-like “Emotionally Scarred,” a track from 2020’s My Turn, will be pleased with the rapper’s follow-up, It’s Only Me. Like that song, many moments on Jones’s third album sound as if they were ripped from his diary, confronting trust issues and the loss of friends. In fact, 10 songs go by before a true white-knuckle heater, “Not Finished,” pops up.

The ruminative “California Breeze” feels like the most blatant attempt to recapture the energy of “Emotionally Scarred,” especially in the way Jones begins the second verse with a moving admission of his internal distress: “I’m still out here, still don’t know how to feel about it.” The former song is also emblematic of the album’s sonic palette, which repeatedly returns to ghostly background vocals and dramatically fraught pianos or strings. On “Forever,” for example, Philadelphia singer Fridayy croons along with the reverberating echoes of a children’s choir.

In a similar vein as Metro Boomin, 21 Savage, and Offset’s Without Warning, several tracks invoke John Carpenter’s keyboard-driven scores to one of his films. “Stand on It” and “Danger” marry ’80s horror aesthetics with fat, squelching G-funk basslines, merging two sequential eras and affixing them to a contemporary trap approach. Jones directly tips his hat to the spooky seasonal trappings when he mentions All Hallow’s Eve on the undercooked “Stop Playin,” which is mostly just an unnecessary reiteration of “Forever.”

Fittingly, It’s Only Me’s guest spots sound less like obligatory big-name attractions or friends being handed favors than villains baring their teeth. Budding stars EST Gee, Nardo Wick, and Pooh Shiesty acquit themselves with effective menace, and we’re reminded that Jones shines when he’s pitted against a foil (this is sadly his first solo release in five years without a Gunna collaboration). He works well playing off others as a kind of straight man; he doesn’t embody different characters or try anything too outside of the box. On “FR,” he gets self-aware about his sturdy reliability when he states, “I’m the one that say what I’m gon’ do, and then, I do it.”

Jones’s consistency and steadfastness emerge as both the album’s strength and its weakness, as his prosaic talk-what-I-walk approach can feel staid and inelegant. This is true of various verses across the album and especially on “Waterfall Flow,” where Jones’s delivery is choppier and less fluid than it should be for a song whose title basically promises high-grade spitting.

For the most part, though, the album’s writing is filled with rich details, from Jones deciding to invest in crypto platform MoonPay to the multiple references to his associates’ street monikers. It’s also slyly funny, as when he mocks his own wardrobe (a refusal to wear his once trusty Polo t-shirts is the crux of “From Now On”) or goofs on his stage name (from “Cost to Be Alive”: “I’m Lil Baby, so it’s only right I got a lot of toys”). It’s these moments that distinguish It’s Only Me, as opposed to the rapper’s technical abilities or newfound deference to his softer side.