Gucci Mane’s latest album, Episodes, begins on a tempered, practically restrained note. He calls out “It’s Gucci!” in the negative space between acoustic strums and keyboard effects, with his signature ad-lib fading into the ether like a distant recollection. It leads into a verse that lands like a confessional, as Gucci recounts how he did stupid shit like “kick hoes out of cars” and racked up federal charge after federal charge, his voice weary with the weight of introspection. But before the track gets bogged down by nostalgia, the hook interrupts to return us to the hard-nosed version of the iconoclast—he’s back to boasting about $980,000 watches and offering only “dick and bubble gum” to all his groupies.
That oscillation in his focus is representative of the high points of Gucci Mane’s latest era. Since his 2016 release from federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., emerging clean and sober, his creative output has largely served to maintain the momentum of his Obama-era explosion in profile. His pen and personality have remained staunchly intact—abundantly clear with his 2024 Gangsta Grillz tape that landed like an iced out, diamond-encrusted time capsule from 2011—but too often, large swaths of his post-COVID projects feel like vestigial organs. Episodes is similarly plagued by stretches of indistinct writing and sanded-down production that feels indistinguishable from his recent work; its sheer length—clocking in at just over an hour—means the more stock trap motifs in the back half start to feel anonymous. But when Gucci breaks out of the malaise, drilling into his morbid humor with self-awareness and clarity and settling into Episodes’ understated beats, his magnetic pull is as potent as ever.
The topical crux of Episodes coincides with Gucci’s latest book, a memoir that details his struggles with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and addiction, as well as his eventual (and ongoing) recovery. That lens gives Gucci the freedom to sprinkle in uncomfortably dark tidbits, melding vulnerability with humor. “Voices” is laced with paranoid musings on the hook, spitting, “I keep hearing this voice in my head/‘Fuck them niggas, they left you for dead,’” with quiet fury. While the titular hook on “Psycho” is a tad repetitive, Gucci’s vocal tics over the Scooby Doo-esque beat are dazzling: after utilizing a gruff register on the first verse, he tries to break through the gates of heaven with his crooning line, “They say my mental health is declinin’/Is they tellin’ the truth or is they lyin’?” Even when Gucci skews back towards the general in his lyrical focus, like on “Gucci Special,” where he likens himself to an exterminator of snitches and the Terminator consecutive breaths, he tweaks his voice to make it feel like he’s rapping with his eyes rolled back in his head.
