Album Review: Migos - 'Culture II'

By Max Smith

After Migos’ 2017 RIAA certified platinum album, Culture, Quavo, Offset and Takeoff had a lot of success to live up to in their latest album release, Culture II. The album featured two singles that went gold: “Slippery” and “Get Right Witcha”, and two more that went platinum: “T-Shirt” and “Bad and Boujee”. The Atlanta-based rap trio took their time with this album, as it was released nearly one year after their last album release. With all of this in mind, I had high expectations for the album’s release and was hoping for something exceptional in return for the community’s long wait for this project. My expectations were met, to an extent.

When the album first came out, I scrolled through the tracklist and was extremely excited. Some of my favorite artists such as Drake, Post Malone, Travis Scott and 21 Savage are all featured on Culture II. I was also thrilled when I saw the various big name producers featured on the album, such as Metro Boomin, Murda Beats, Pharrell and Zaytoven. Then I realized the length of the album. Culture II is a staggering 24 tracks, lasting an hour and 45 minutes. At first, I was excited by this--there can never be too much Migos, I thought.

As I started to make my way through the album, I found a lot of repetition and similarities in the songs. These songs featured boring trap beats, with no stunning verses throughout the track and weak hooks. I could count at least eight songs that I would put in this category. This is the main downfall of Culture II. On any given album, you are probably not going to enjoy every track, but on an album of this length, they could have definitely cut a few of those tracks from the final product to make a more concise, perfected project. With this said, there are a lot of good, and some great, songs within the album.

In this album, Migos spread their wings on a few tracks. They distanced themselves from strict trap music, which I really enjoyed, but I would have liked a few more that weren’t so trap-centered. Some of these tracks include, “Stir Fry”, which features a funky Pharrell beat, “Gang Gang”, which is much more slow-paced than any other Migos song I’ve heard and “Made Men”, which is soothing and very relaxed. Migos are extremely talented artists and I would like to see this flexibility more from them, as they are clearly capable of it. This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy any of the classic trap tracks on the album. Tracks such as “Supastars”, “Walk It Talk It” and “Open It Up” are exactly what I expected from Migos and were great. Migos’s patented ad-libs are on point; Offset and Takeoff deliver great verses while Quavo drops strong hooks. This is the formula that made Migos what they are, and it is still great to listen to.

Overall, Culture II delivers on what was expected. It has multiple hits and a lot of solid tracks, but it could have been a better collective album with harsher editing and a shorter tracklist. I recommend this album if you are a fan of Migos because they mostly stick to what has made them global “Supastars”.