YoungBoy Never Broke Again has no shortage of things to celebrate. On the heels of his latest album, Slime Cry, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced that he’d earned more certifications than any other rapper ever — meaning he’s made more Gold and Platinum songs and albums than Kanye West, Drake, Jay-Z, and anyone else in the genre.
Slime Cry, released Jan. 16, is YoungBoy’s eighth studio album and follows his August 2025 mixtape Deshawn, hosted by DJ Khaled. YoungBoy is known for dropping new music at breakneck speed, having put out at least 29 other bodies of work (mostly mixtapes) and 102 singles.
Rolling Stone named his 2025 hit, “Shot Callin,” the third best hip-hop song of the year and seventh best overall. “In May, NBA YoungBoy dropped ‘Shot Callin,’ part of his comeback campaign after he spent most of 2024 in prison on gun charges,” wrote Rolling Stone senior editor Jeff Ihaza. “It was the sound of NBA YoungBoy reclaiming his place in the rap game — and became the statement song of 2025.”
Slime Cry marks the rapper’s first album since wrapping his massive Make America Slime Again arena tour in November. Though marked by a few instances of controversy, including cancellations in Chicago and Atlanta, as well as an assault in the audience, the run was wildly popular and widely celebrated, with Billboard reporting it earned $28.3 million dollars, selling 231,000 tickets across 17 shows.
“You might feel a sensory overload, but you will never be bored by the Baton Rouge rapper’s compulsion, appetites, or his enduring melancholy that exist in the fog of the music, even when he is being violent, even when he is an egotistical maximalist,” wrote Rolling Stone contributor Jason Buford in a review of YoungBoy’s Newark, New Jersey stop. “At that show, he let adults into his web that the youth currently find irresistible. Packed in an area with people I might have babysat five years ago, YoungBoy was the 2Pac for his generation.”
Along the way, YoungBoy made several donations of tens of thousands of dollars to anti-violence organizations across the country, including Atlanta’s YouthSpark and Dallas’s Manifest Freedom and Urban Specialists.
