It’s one of the tape’s few outright bangers. Too Hard also has a potential hit in “All of a Sudden,” where Baby and an electric Moneybagg Yo ping-pong speedy bars off of one another, putting maximum spin on each. He’s got clear talent, and considering how much he’s improved just in the months since his first mixtape, Perfect Timing, his ceiling is potentially massive (even Young Thug’s earliest projects weren’t nearly this assured). Tracks like that make it almost impossible to believe Baby’s been at this for less than a year. His voice is so sullen, so shaken, that there’s never any doubt whether he’s making any of it up. The chorus’ assurance that he isn’t embellishing-”Ain’t no facade, no cap in my raps, everything that I say is the real me”-is almost redundant. He goes on to recall watching news coverage of the shooting and hoping the kid survived, knowing the ramifications if he didn’t. “Remember that shootout we had that time we thought a kid died?/Only thing I know is when we pulled up, everybody hopped out fine/I remember on the way back, everybody in the car quiet,” he raps somberly. On the tape’s most vividly written track, “Best of Me,” he relays a close call. That delivery heightens his already-sharp storytelling. The quieter he goes, the more emotion he conveys. This is one of the most crowded lanes in rap, but Lil Baby distinguishes himself with a rare command over his voice. “I went to prison, it made me a better me,” he croons on “Money Forever,” opposite Gunna, another singing rapper specializing in florid trap serenades. Most of Too Hard finds Baby in a contemplative mood, still processing his sudden good fortune.
Despite his embrace of the word “hard” on the titles of his last solo mixtape, Harder Than Hard, and his latest, Too Hard, his voice is soft around the edges, almost pretty. He sings in a slack, Auto-Tuned murmur, with an intrinsic tunefulness that suggests he could probably be a decent R&B singer if he put the work in. Inevitably, he picked up a little bit of Thug’s singsong lilt, too, but his own delivery is considerably more subdued than the typical Thug performance.
As Baby tells it, even before he began rapping, he spent days in the studio watching Thug do his thing, internalizing his work ethic. An old friend from the neighborhood, Thug cosigned the melodic rapper right out of the gate and appeared on some of his earliest tracks.
Even in a city that breeds overnight successes faster than any other, Baby’s ascent has looked almost too easy.Ĭredit Young Thug for fast-tracking Baby to the city’s inner circle. By March, Gucci Mane was already trying to sign him. The 22-year-old only began rapping in February, but he already has four mixtapes, the backing of the taste-making Atlanta incubator Quality Control, and a major street hit, “ My Dawg,” that just got the star remix treatment with verses from Quavo and Kodak Black. Ever since he was released from prison last winter after serving two years on a drug charge, Lil Baby has been making up for lost time.
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