LIL UZI VERT
This Boy Is On Fire
An inevitable effect of COVID-19 is the disruption of your regularly scheduled programming. From summer blockbuster delays to late-night hosts and SNL broadcasting from home, one area the absence of new material affects is New Music Fridays. For the time being, it is on hold.
Just because we’re under quarantine doesn’t mean there is no new music, though. The Weeknd and Childish Gambino each dropped albums in early March and Drake just gave us Dark Lane Demo Tapes.
Yet perhaps nobody’s been quite as prolific during this lean release period than Lil Uzi Vert, who hasn’t let the virus stop him from putting out a new single, “Sasuke,” to close out the month of April. This track follows two March releases, Eternal Atake and its deluxe edition, Lil Uzi vs. the World 2, which dropped within a week of each other.
The latter extends Eternal Atake’s runtime by 14 tracks and shows just how much heat Uzi left on the cutting room floor. A month later, Sasuke arrived to remind us that he’s on the top of his game as if we’d forget.
Uzi is a major Naruto fan, and his new single gets its name from one of the anime show’s characters. The effect is fun, if underwhelming novelty cut. It doesn’t have the catchiness or staying power of Lo Mein or Silly Watch or You Better Move—an original itself, sampling classic Windows game 3D Pinball Space Cadet—but fans’ lukewarm reaction to the track comes from its hype backfiring.
Both Uzi and Playboi Carti, rumored to be beefing, announced new tracks a few days before Sasuke dropped. Fans across Twitter wondered whether these tracks would add context to the situation. Instead, Uzi shared his Naruto-referencing single. Considering the fictional Sasuke’s rivalry with the eponymous Naruto, it’s reasonable to assume that this could be a diss track, but Uzi shut down any speculation of that on Twitter. As for Carti’s next project? Forthcoming, shelter-in-place or no shelter-in-place.
In the meantime, with almost two hours worth of new music released in the last two months, it’s safe to say Uzi will be holding onto his quarantine crown a little while longer.
