What’s a Rick Owens hypebeast to do this side of Playboi Carti’s MUSIC? The gloriously messy rage-rap capstone could’ve brought a graceful conclusion to the era-defining breed of metallurgic trap that Carti popularized with 2020’s Whole Lotta Red. It was a full-circle finale that simultaneously celebrated and snuffed out its own generational sound. The neat critical narrative is that MUSIC’s untouchable extremity knocked rage unconscious, both with its glass-shattering production and zeitgeist-engulfing sprawl. The messier truth is that rage’s fanbase is still growing, even as the sound is trending toward a sharp creative decline. Second-wave ragers like Che and OsamaSon have cranked the subgenre’s decibels as loud as they can tolerably go, and formerly refreshing stars like Yeat and Ken Carson are beginning to feel like stewards of a stagnant sound.
Carson seems to realize that the expiration date has arrived for rage, a style typified by bludgeoning beats, spasmodic shout-raps, and nominally gothic all-black uniforms that belie the music’s widespread appeal among torqued-up suburban normies. “No matter what I make they gon’ call it rage,” Carson snips in “shadeson,” a pointedly un-moshable song from the Atlanta rapper’s fifth album, xperiment. Vaguely billed as an exploratory rebrand, xperiment is the follow-up to 2025’s underwhelming More Chaos, the looser and lesser sequel to Carson’s succinct and durable 2023 smash A Great Chaos, which established the now-26-year-old as Carti’s most gifted protégé. The central appeals of A Great Chaos—Future-istic vampire raps, nimble hooks dangling over world-class beats, and Carson’s boyish edgelord persona—were still present on More Chaos, just buried under stacks of faceless rage-bait for undiscriminating pit-starters.
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Despite the title, xperiment is more of the same. Carson makes no legible attempt at reorienting his sound, broadening his lyrical perspective, or recharging his creative battery. In fact, for the majority of this hour-long marathon, he seems like he’s running on power saving mode with only 2% left in the tank. He sounds painfully bored of his own voice, exhausted by the familiar thematic tropes, and indeed tired of the rage idiom he’s been pigeonholed into. However, nearly every choice on this record, from the arsenal of go-to rage producers (F1lthy, Lil 88, Art Dealer) to the Rogues’ gallery of predictable features—Carti, Uzi, Destroy Lonely, Young Thug, almost all of whom, like Carson himself, have faced allegations of domestic abuse—is chained to the very formula that xperiment purports to deviate from.
In theory, there’s nothing wrong with Carson doing what he’s known for. At his best, he’s an alluringly naughty hedonist dripping with personality and armed with the ability to make every line a memorable callout. That version of him pops out on xperiment songs like “deaf note,” where he quivers the bratty line, “Cover my ears when you talk/I ain’t hearin’ it,” over an acidic rage beat. In the joyously disorienting “possession,” he chants the morphine-mouthed hook, “rake that money like leaves,” while being trampled by his own ad-libs. It’s moments like those, when Carson sounds like his eyes are glowing red with toxic bravado, that xperiment could use more of. This is the rare streaming-era rap record that I actually wish had more features, because the presence of his heroes—Lil Uzi Vert on “ghost” and Young Thug on “drug kit,” especially—jolts him awake and yields the record’s best tracks.
