Do you remember the days when Destroy Lonely drops felt like certified moments, when his vocals rippled across beats as regal and shimmery as stained glass? Now he’s tossing out barely baked tapes and getting caught up in Twitter beefs. Among Playboi Carti’s Opium label roster, the inventive and goofy Ken Carson increasingly overshadows him. Worst of all, an ex-girlfriend has accused him of physical assault—an allegation he’s denied. At a moment when stars are crashing out every week, Lone’s fall from grace feels particularly precipitous. His new album ditches the dirgelike guitar vibe of last year’s overlong debut, which triggered a tsunami of scorn. It feels like an attempt to reclaim his spot as a cult favorite.
LOVE LASTS FOREVER is all flashy beats and sugary vocal sprees. But instead of reviving golden-era Lone, the tape is overloaded with flamboyant flex-rap tropes, as though he’d SparkNoted himself. No song is downright awful; equally, no lyric or hook or vocal run leaves much of an impression. Imagine a Travis Scott album with no features—it’s an airless vault full of the best brags ChatGPT can generate and anonymously elegant instrumentals that shine like knockoff jewelry.
The emptiness is frustrating, because Lone clearly wants to create an immersive world for his music. His cover art is always sleekly designed. He directed a short film for his last project. He conceptualizes distinct personas for new albums, assigning himself a nickname for each. On If Looks Could Kill, he was Look Killa; now he’s Baby Money. Yet that’s about as far as his creativity extends—as a branding exercise to make himself appear cool, mysterious, and vaguely artsy. He has the Swiftian impulse to self-mythologize, but his storytelling misses the mark. There’s something almost impressive about the way Lone makes luxury and hedonism sound dreary through repetition. It’s an endless excess-athon of getting head, sipping drank, flying to L.A., popping fits, making million after million after million. Even the title—LOVE LASTS FOREVER—feels pointless, having nothing to do with 95 percent of the album. There are no lovesick croons, no yearning synth flutters, no romantic insights.
The beats, almost exclusively produced by Lil 88, are richly textured yet hollow, like royalty-free trap beats gussied up with a blockbuster budget. Even after a dozen listens, you’d still strain to pick any of them out of a lineup. The few that stick in the memory are hypnotic and cosmically uneasy, like “LUV 4 YA,” which has the glacial breeze of an experimental bass tune. It’s one of only a handful that mutates as the track goes on, with drones and keys that mirror the drunken vocals in the bridge. Icy synth slivers tingle the brain on “LOVE HURTS,” which could soundtrack Lone and Lil Uzi Vert catwalking across Pluto in all-black Rick Owens space suits. When Lone boasts, “This ain’t a lifestyle, this just life,” over the madly lurching underworld merry-go-round of “SAY THAT,” you’re almost convinced he has control over the carnival. But then the power cuts out, and it’s back to type beats.
When he feels like trying, swift flow shifts and the rare goofy bar liven things up. Yet even his more erratic and energized tonal spasms—the “woo woo” on “SYRUP SIPPIN,” the gruff freakout on “HONESTLY”—feel like ripoffs of Carti and Travis vocal tics. Some of the most thrilling new rappers, like che, make up for feeble writing with constantly morphing, freakily zonked beats. That was once the case for Lone. This time, it feels like he and Lil 88 were cooped up in the studio until they lost all perspective. Does Love Last Forever? is a question Lone could soon be asking his most faithful fans, whose patience may be tested by an album this flat and flavorless.
