The fact that the rappers’ voices default to similar registers but are used in such different ways means they often weave in and out of each other’s territory on one song, Durk will ground Baby, and on the next song, the roles will be reversed. Baby, by contrast, raps in a rolling, post-Thug legato-a flatter affect punctuated by brief moments of musicality. While much has been made of the way Future uses Auto-Tune’s eerie technological aftertaste to accentuate human pain, Durk is due credit for being one of the effect’s most nimble users, deploying it to keep the listener at arm’s length or to lure them in, underscoring melodies or cutting atonally against them. Lil Baby and Durk’s new joint album, The Voice of the Heroes, is not quite a marquee work for either artist, though it is reliably consistent and casts them as a natural pair-near-ideal complements to one another in writing and execution.Īs a vocalist, Durk is more broadly emotive and consistently animated than Baby.
Last year, his phenomenally engrossing album My Turn and the Grammy-nominated protest single “ The Bigger Picture” made him perhaps the hottest rapper alive.
When he did commit to music, it was an onslaught: Baby dropped five solo records in 19 months, an instant favorite of fans, and then critics. He was also poised and preternaturally cool-which might explain why his longtime friend, Young Thug, would pay Baby whatever money he might make during a day in the streets to come to the studio instead. While Durk was hopping across the country and trying to refine his commercial approach, Lil Baby, a native Atlantan, was in and out of jail on a series of drug charges. It was around this time that Lil Baby had finally entered the picture. In 2017, six years after his breakthrough with I’m a Hitta, he moved again-this time to Atlanta, which had become the unquestionable center of the hip-hop industry. He moved to Los Angeles, he cut a better album for Def Jam, and he doubled down on the mixtape ethos that drove his career in its early stages. Instead of disappearing from the pop charts or from rap’s stylistic cutting edge, Durk gritted his teeth and kept working. When he was still a teenager in the early 2010s, Durk recorded many of the songs that would make drill music a phenomenon in Chicago and then nationwide Def Jam signed him, intent on packaging the sound for a mass audience, then botched his debut. At 28, Lil Durk is only two years older than Lil Baby, though he comes from another era entirely.
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