Even as he’s aged into the kind of rapper who invites his son (who has the amusingly redundant name Young Juve) to help him reflect on the passage of time in “Hot of the Hottest,” Juvenile’s defining interest has not changed. There is a lot of sex on Boiling Point, not all of it of the lazy Sunday variety. “You want a good fucker or you want a toe-licker,” he asks—not rhetorically—in “B.B.B.,” shrugging off four-wheeler-riding youngsters and big-upping himself as “a grown man who can drop pole in you.” His flow here is just as libidinous. He rumbles over a beat that jacks the piano bass notes of “HUMBLE.” and the twinkling of Danny Brown’s “Really Doe” with the same dexterity and breath control he brought to his bounce raps three decades ago; “Got your lipstick all over my Dior sweater,” he growls, and he sounds both annoyed and turned on. In “Pay Me,” he promises to bring the freak out of a partner (“and not in a perverted way”) after letting her drive his Bentley to the mall. “Pay me back in pussy,” he raps in the chorus, and while you can nearly hear him licking his lips, it comes off more as mutual exchange and worship than anything else. It’s less predatory than Klarna, anyway.
While the sense of gratitude Juvenile feels for his settled, drama-free life in the suburbs gives Boiling Point its easy charm, it also distances him from his past. It’s no surprise that he sounds sharpest and most focused when he’s joined by fellow Hot Boy BG (whose laser-drone voice remains unchanged after 12 years in prison) or rapping over a Mannie Fresh beat. Even Birdman, who continues to disprove Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours theory of expertise with his rapping, gets a rise out of him. Both “Pay Me” and “Hot Boy Summer” drape plaintive piano chords over the foundational Triggerman bounce beat. Neither reaches the transcendence of Flagboy Giz’s Mardi Gras Indian anthem “We Outside”—and the church chords of “Hot Boy Summer,” in particular, feel like a thematic mismatch for a song about fucking in the heat—but Juvenile still feels recognizably himself in these moments when his New Orleans heritage is closer to the surface.
For that reason, the album’s middle stretch can be a slog. There’s some post-Drake rap’n’b, some stock radio hip-hop. The salsa shuffle DJ Khaled dials up for “Fuego” betrays no knowledge of the “Oye Como Va”-sampling 400 Degreez standout “Follow Me Now” and is only notable for Juvie’s reference to late SportsCenter anchor Stuart Scott’s tendency to yell “boo-ya.” “One More Round,” maybe the worst song Juvenile has ever allowed himself to be associated with, shoots for the “I Gotta Feeling”-era Black Eyed Peas and ends up sounding like the kind of crossover hit that gets middle-aged rappers booked at country music festivals. Juvenile never quite loses his dignity in these songs—at worst, he sounds anonymous, not desperate—but it’s still disappointing considering the charisma he still shows when his old friends are around.
