While Trippie Redd may have started the year on a rather dubious note with the rigidly single-minded Mansion Musik, A Love Letter to You 5 finds the Ohio rapper largely leaning into his previously established strengths. The mixtape is far more rewarding on a track-by-track basis, even if the best songs here still don’t come close to the highs of 2021’s (still uneven) Trip at Knight. Although this isn’t a particularly noteworthy entry in Trippie’s emo-laden mixtape series, it’s unhurried and likable enough.
As its title vaguely suggests, A Love Letter to You 5 is defined by Trippie’s never-ending quest to woo what seem to be the most callous and inconsiderate of lovers. Of course, he never places the blame for his brokenheartedness on himself: On “Thinking Bout You,” he reminds a former squeeze how “I could probably have all of the women in the world/I promise I don’t want no other girl,” a shaming tactic straight out of the incel playbook. But he croons out these lyrics with a broken and brittle battle cry, and often sounds like he’s just finished bawling his eyes out.
Which is to say that there’s something undeniably cathartic to Trippie’s emotional distress, a visceral vortex consisting of anger and despair. If you can get past the fact that the broody “Left 4 Dead” is lyrically circling the drain—it’s a song about, you guessed it, how someone has stomped on Trippie’s heart and left him “for dead”—the track’s curtness serves as its biggest strength, diving head first into feelings of abandonment instead of tip-toeing around them.
Unlike Mansion Musik, A Love Letter to You 5 does find time to switch things up from all the two-to-three-minute, acoustic guitar-driven sad-boy anthems, albeit those end up being the set’s weakest offerings. Closer “Trip McKnight” is relatively tame compared to most hyperpop-adjacent hip-hop and, outside of a few leftfield bars where Trippie compares himself to characters from the Japanese manga One Piece, doesn’t even feature that many memorable lines from the usually outlandish rapper. Elsewhere, a collaboration with Lil Wayne, “I’m Mad at Me,” is ultimately ruined by turgid production choices. It’s a 2000s-era, New York-style braggadocio cut that feels outdated compared to the rest of the material here.
Redd’s projects have never been known for their concise or cohesive nature, habitually indulging in his outré interests even if it really makes no sense for him to do so at a given time (see the colossal swing and miss from 2020 that was the pop punk-flavored Neon Shark vs Pegasus). At 19 tracks, A Love Letter to You 5 follows a similarly meandering path, yet, as far as these types of releases go, you could certainly do much worse.
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