For all the conspicuously expensive samples, the breathless reporting about a $3 million record deal, the Vogue shoots, the white women muttering slurs, the Spike Lee movies, the guns, the kids, the feuds with superstars, and the overtures from a president, A$AP Rocky has always been best when stripped down to core principles. The invocations of Houston rap on “Purple Swag” are secondary to how deliberate and direct Rocky is; this was true of “Peso,” of “Goldie,” of everything that made him click. All the supposed post-regionalism—the borrowing from Houston and Memphis and the jagged online underground—was simply the medium through which a new Harlem superstar had chosen to express himself, like Big L’s glossy hypertechnique or Cam’ron’s Giuliani-baiting absurdity.
Don’t Be Dumb, Rocky’s first album in almost eight years, arrives at a time and in a manner that seems to be staked entirely on celebrity meta-commentary. Yet while his media circus of a 2025 trial provided something of an organizing structure (last February, Rocky was acquitted in Los Angeles on two counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm, a felony for which he potentially faced more than 20 years in prison), and while he includes a mostly tepid response to Drake’s “Family Matters,” Rocky largely uses his fourth LP to narrow his focus. Though poorly sequenced and littered with duds, Don’t Be Dumb contains enough moments of ingenuity to argue that Rocky is still an essential part of the rap ecosystem
In some ways, the “almost eight years” timeline is misleading: The last Rocky album that felt like an event was 2015’s At.Long.Last.A$AP. Testing, his record from three years later, failed to make the same impact on the charts or in the world as all his work that came before. But while it’s derailed almost immediately by its second song, the T.I.-, Kid Cudi-, and Moby-featuring “A$AP Forever” remix—a near-perfect encapsulation of the baroque overproduction and preciousness that often drowned Rocky on 2013’s Long.Live.A$AP—Testing later reveals some of the rapper’s most interesting instincts. Songs like “Tony Tone,” “Praise the Lord (Da Shine),” “OG Beeper,” and “Hun43rd” are minimal, strange, and occasionally intricate—all staked on a vocal control that had emerged in the A.L.L.A. sessions but was not foregrounded on that album. For those who hung around long enough to hear it, the middle of Testing exhibits an A$AP Rocky who is no longer content to be just one instrument among many.
Don’t Be Dumb is not exactly Rocky’s rage-rap album, but the production is certainly informed by the quicker tempos that have come into vogue during his hiatus. The mix on early single “Helicopter” is busy, but the song is sharp and unidirectional; the album’s best beats (Clams Casino’s “Don’t Be Dumb,” Kelvin Krash, KayCyy, and SpaceGhostPurrp’s “Swat Team,” and Rocky’s own “No Trespassing” and “Air Force (Black Demarco)”) are defined by palpitating drums and a relentless forward motion. These underline—and in some cases are only navigable due to—that new vocal acuity. It’s difficult to imagine the Rocky from Live.Love.A$AP moving between modes as fluidly as he does on “Air Force,” or the Rocky from Long.Live being confident enough to treat his vocals like the song’s anchor.
Unfortunately, the energy flags: “Punk Rocky” is trite, the jazzy “Robbery” is hampered by an over-theatrical Doechii, and the Drake diss “Stole Ya Flow” is somehow emptier than Drake’s non-insults (You’re beautiful, I love your wife) from nearly two years ago. (The flaccidity of “Stole Ya Flow” is mitigated somewhat by Rocky’s inclusion of a truly show-stopping verse from Sauce Walka on “Stop Snitching,” author of one of the most scathing Drake disses ever.) But before too long, these blemishes are balanced out by irresistibly low-stakes records like “Whiskey (Release Me),” which makes as intuitive a use of Tennesseean triplicate flow as Rocky has since 2011. Don’t Be Dumb is not a blockbuster, and it’s all the better for it.
