Freshly 30, G Herbo keeps on growing along with his music on Lil Herb, a loose concept album, mostly recorded in Chicago, that reflects on the original era of drill with a level of clarity that no other rapper has yet. Herb goes about that by tweaking the heat-of-the-moment POV of classic drill for one that puts him back in the shoes of his teenage self. It’s almost like hearing the narrator of The Sandlot flash back to the summer that shaped his life.
Herb’s storytelling is vivid and lived-in, oscillating between wistfulness for simpler times when he was hustling to get fly and all his friends were still alive and the anxiety of living through violence and disarray with a deep focus on the hard-earned lessons along the way. On “Give It All,” backdropped by a dreamy piano riff, he takes us through his entire childhood in two and a half minutes: From the days when he was a broke kid hooping, riding the bus, and hitting on girls at juke parties to losing his innocence with guns, beefs, and orgies. The pained inner monologue of the soulful “Fallen Soldiers” has a novelistic level of detail—you get the names, the locations, the conflicted emotions—as he struggles with how to respond to all the death around him. Sharpest of all is “Blitz,” where the hunger bursts from him like Dreamchasers 2-era Meek over a beat that smashes together ballistic drums and nonstop gunshots. The choice to rap over spraying bullets is as mesmerizingly cool as it is eerie, like it’s a memory he can’t shake.
The knock I have on almost all of G Herbo’s studio albums, though, is that they take the idea of being an album too seriously, meaning there’s notes hit for no reason except that’s what big albums are supposed to do. On Lil Herb, it’s stuff like “Every Night,” the sweeping choir intro that flat-out explains all of the emotions he’ll be dealing with on the record. I’d much rather listen to “Radar,” which has writing that ties those feelings to specific scenes: “You ever lived through a nightmare?/Look death in the face, he might stare/Somebody try and kill you right there/You can’t depend on nothin’ but Nike Airs.” Then there’s the obligatory radio cuts like the Jeremih-assisted ode to his girl “Whatever U Want” and “Thank Me,” with Anderson .Paak, which has the cutesiness of Coloring Book. His heart doesn’t seem in them, which is not the case with the two-hander he pulls off with Wyclef Jean by just rapping hard as fuck like he normally does.
