Detroit legend Eminem recently released his tenth studio album, “Kamikaze," which was a surprise to a lot of people. With "Revival" receiving horrible reviews, he’s barely released any songs since, only doing features on certain albums. Now his surprise releases "Kamikaze," a solid piece of work with some horrible songs.
“Nice Guy," “Good Guy," “Venom” and “Stepping Stone”. These “main stream” songs are horrible and sound too similar to the ones he’s made before. “Venom”, the title track for the upcoming film, has a decent beat to it but the song overall is average.
“Good Guy” and “Nice Guy” sound the same far as production and the featured artist, Jessie Reyez, doesn’t mesh well with songs at all. Eminem’s lyrics also aren’t as impressive as in his other songs. However, the rest of the album is really good and delivered some extraordinary performances.
In the opening track, “The Ringer," Eminem touches on topics like Donald Trump, the BET Awards, Cypher and mumble rappers such as Lil Xan and Lil Pump. The production on this track was well thought out, with the first thing heard being a plane crashing like the album cover and its title.
Then the beat comes in hot with Eminem delivering some clever lines such as “full magazine could take staples out savage but ain’t thinkin’ ‘bout no bank account” and “billions of views, you ten cents are two skim through the music to give shit reviews."
The album then immediately goes into “The Greatest," which was a good track as well. This song is a braggadocios track from Eminem where he uses different flows to prove his worth as the greatest.
He pokes fun at rappers with saying “So you sold 10 million albums, eh? (What?) / Only problem is, you put out 10 million albums, eh? (ha-ha)." Eminem also joked on South African group Die Antwood by mispronouncing their name.
“Legend” overall is a good track that transitioned into “Lucky You” which was an absolute banger. “Lucky You” comes with a nice trap beat and exceptional lyricism from both Joyner Lucas and Eminem.
Joyner Lucas is phenomenal on this track, providing a verse and the song’s hook. Joyner Lucas talks about how he has no awards from the music industry but is steadily becoming popular by releasing singles like “I’m Not Racist."
Eminem, on the other hand, talks about how he’s on top of the rap game as far as awards but is still being overlooked as a popular rapper today. The way they bounce off each other is impressive since this is their first track together.
“Not Alike” is an interesting track on this album with the beat coming from the BlocBoy JB and Drake’s single “Look Alive."
Eminem and Royce da 5’9" have a lot tracks together and it definitely shows on this track with both of the artists having good performances. Royce and Eminem take a similar approach by again dissing mumble rappers and talking about how they differ from them. One artist that was heavily dissed was Machine Gun Kelly who recently released a diss track about Eminem called “Rap Devil."
Eminem definitely had something to prove on this album and he did however, towards the end the album takes a huge nose dive off a cliff. 3/5
