Lil Durk Almost Healed Review: A Jarring Flip of the Script for a Skilled MC

For Lil Durk, Almost Healed is yet another slick collection of sticky trap melodies set to piano-and-808 beats, but, perhaps more importantly, it also aims to showcase a more meditative side to the customarily libertine Chicago rapper. The album’s first track, a spoken-word interlude titled “Therapy Session,” features Alicia Keys playing Durk’s therapist as she goes through a laundry list of recent tragedies that have befallen the rapper. “Wow…that must have been incredibly devastating,” she muses at one point after evoking the murder of his friend King Von, followed by the loss of his brother a mere half a year later. From the jump, the album effectively cultivates a weighty atmosphere.

It’s admirable that an artist of Durk’s popularity is willing to rap about topics such as generational trauma and structural violence on tracks like the well-meaning, if suffocatingly sappy, “All My Life.” And while the authenticity of his verses is bolstered by the vivid details he peppers throughout, like seeing blood from a miscarriage in the toilet on “Sad Songs,” it’s also a little off-putting to then hear him threatening to “pull up with a stick” on “Big Dawg.”

Humans are complicated, contradictory beings, but there’s an almost jarring disconnect on Almost Healed given how quickly and brazenly Durk flips the script. More disappointingly, it results in a return to the same creative terrain for Durk, who also abandons the earlier tracks’ cleaner-sounding production and focused songwriting in the process.

Much like last year’s 7220, Almost Healed works best when considered on a track-by-track basis, which is a better context within which to assess Durk’s seemingly assembly-line methodology for crafting memorable hooks and sneaking in some of most graphic sex brags in mainstream rap. The animated “You Got Em’,” which includes a ridiculously catchy refrain about popping too many muscle relaxers, also features a spit-take of a line about how “When I fuck from the back, I be grabbin’ her throat” that he barrels through with total nonchalance.

As opposed to other fellow straight-faced rappers like the similarly no-nonsense Lil Baby, Durk sometimes adds weird dashes of humor to his vocal inflections, like an oddball country-esque intonation to add emphasis to certain rhyme patterns. In the opening section of “Pelle Coat,” he strings along two nondescript sentences—“On my back is a burden, bro in the car and I did it on purposе” and “They in Suburbans, bro in the Track and he hoppеd on the curb then”—while also stressing each line’s final syllable with a Southern accent to make each phrase pop.

It’s those sorts of vocal acrobatics that make one wish that Durk chose a more exciting production palette, and considering that he does seem willing to experiment—primarily on the cerebral “B12,” whose beat is composed of shuttering snares, rapid bass distortions, and what sounds like a squeaky bed spring—it only amplifies the overall humdrum nature of Almost Healed. Save for “Grandson” and “War Bout It,” there’s seldom a track here that sounds truly suitable for, as Durk brands himself on “Belt 2 Ass,” a “rockstar from the trenches.”