Five years after the death of emo-rap sensation Jarad Higgins, known by his stage name Juice WRLD, Grade A Productions and Interscope Records released his final studio album “The Party Never Ends.” The project, which came out last Friday, is Juice WRLD’s fifth album overall and his third released posthumously. If only to avoid staining such a tragic anniversary, this album might’ve been better off left in the vault.
Before Juice WRLD’s career was cut short, he managed to cultivate a massive following through low-budget songs released on the streaming platform SoundCloud. His style, along with music by contemporaries like Lil Peep and XXXTentacion, formed the foundation of a burgeoning emo-rap genre that soon dominated the mainstream landscape.
Catapulted into fame by the success of his multi-platinum single “Lucid Dreams,” Juice WRLD defied hip-hop norms with his depressive lyrics, distinctly melodic delivery, and beats that favored acoustic guitars and pianos over electronic hi-hats and 808s. While his debut album, “Goodbye & Good Riddance,” was criticized for being juvenile and messy, his melodramatic lyrics masked genuine talent.
Juice WRLD was famously dedicated to his craft and amassed an archive of 3,000 tracks over four years, an improbable feat were it not for his freestyle prowess. He famously recorded the entirety of his sophomore record “Death Race For Love” in four days, improvising all but a handful of the album’s 22 tracks. In a 2018 radio session with Tim Westwood, Juice WRLD freestyled nonstop for over 70 minutes.
His performance caught the attention of rap patriarch Eminem, who in a 2020 interview with Crook’s Corner said, “That kid was so talented … to be so young and to master it so quickly. His potential was off-the-charts.”
All this makes “The Party Never Ends” even more upsetting, not only as a work of art but as a tangible piece of a legacy now entirely out of Juice WRLD’s control.
The best posthumous albums are guided, at least in part, by the artist’s living intention. “The Party Never Ends,” however, is full of throwaways and half-baked ideas. It showcases none of his talents and emphasizes nearly all of his flaws.
The introductory track, “The Party Never Ends,” kicks off this wholesale disaster by establishing the project’s two main throughlines: trying to mimic a live concert, and glorifying drug abuse. The former theme, while decent in concept, is poorly executed, filling songs with pointless interludes and random, canned applause. The latter is especially disrespectful given that Juice WRLD died of an overdose, and much of his previous work hinged on the nadirs of addiction.
The next song, “Misfit,” is arguably even worse. The beat sounds like a low-budget GarageBand creation and is littered with clipping, distortion caused by producers cranking up the volume too high. Outside of the generally weak lyrics, the tasteless inclusion of Juice WRLD’s reference to overdosing on a plane is an ominous reminder of his death and a prime reason to have left this track shelved.
Two singles — “AGATS 2 (Insecure),” featuring Nicki Minaj, and “Lace It,” featuring Eminem — mar this album as well. “AGATS 2 (Insecure)” is a needless retread of Juice WRLD’s song “All Girls Are The Same” from 2017, this time flaunting a phoned-in feature from Minaj. Meanwhile, “Lace It” is a wannabe club anthem featuring a druggy chorus from Juice WRLD, ineffectively countered by a hilariously preachy Eminem verse about not doing drugs.
Strangely, the album also features a song without Juice WRLD. “Goodbye,” performed solely by The Kid LAROI, is one of the best songs on this project, if only because it actually sounds finished. While it doesn’t sufficiently memorialize Juice WRLD’s death, by this point in the album the expectations are plenty low.
Even stranger, one of the lone highlights on this album is the single “Empty Out Your Pockets,” which was added retroactively to the tracklist after it premiered in a live Fortnite event. Juice WRLD’s verses on the song are complete, and the distorted piano that underscores the beat is hauntingly beautiful. Another standout is “Barbarian,” a bumping track with a great flow that is only let down by lackluster production.
Unfortunately, these two songs are the only functional parts of this album, which is full of further questionable decisions, like haphazardly cramming Fall Out Boy into the song “Best Friend.” This stylistic mismatch, the clash between corporate mandates and Juice WRLD’s dwindling material, is a microcosm of this project as a whole.
As an album, “The Party Never Ends” is an irredeemable and overlong exercise in laziness and greed that insults Juice WRLD’s work. It’s a patchwork of unrelated verses melted into an amalgam of avarice, designed to turn the most profit in the least time. For anyone aside from the most diehard Juice WRLD fans, and maybe even for them, this album is a tough listen.
