Hi, everyone. Hotthony Sweattano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of this new Lil Tecca album, Dopamine.

Here we have the newest full-length LP from New York rapper, Lil Tecca, which, believe it or not, is his fifth full-length commercial album. And his catalog is even larger when you take into account his breakout mixtape in 2019, the EP run he had in 2020s...

I'll be honest, if you dig into my Tecca reviews up until this point, I have not had had a lot of glowing stuff to say about his music. He's just always come across to me as an artist who generates a lot of generic pop rap and trap, leaning heavily into autotune, too, which is not inherently a terrible thing, but I think continuously he has shown to lack the voice, the lyricism, and the style to truly make himself stand out or outdo many of his contemporaries who make similar music, even if he does manage to eke out a playlist possible hit or two with each record.

But even though I'm not massively impressed with Tecca's output or abilities up until this point, I do have to give some credit where it's due because Tecca has been nothing if not consistent up until this point. He's also outlasted many of his peers who had viral blowups around the same time as him. It's commendable that he's been able to navigate the music industry so successfully over the past five years, even though he broke through it at such a young age. Again, Tecca is currently five albums into his career, and he's only 22.

After so much time, we are actually beginning on this new album to hear some notable development outside of simply just making forgettable music you can passively vibe to. Because Tecca does actually hit us with a few interesting surprises off the bat with this record. For one, you have the song "Dark Thoughts", which, yeah, is not exactly a surprise, considering it was a single and a hit. But I didn't really foresee Tecca dropping in on an instrumental that's this glitzy smooth pop rap blend from the 2000s that sounds like something maybe Timbaland would have put together back in the day. This thing is ready for the club, and it's actually got some catchy refrains on it, too.

Then we have the second track on the record, "Owa Owa", which features a very prominent "Video Killed the Radio Star" sample. It's a dreamy psych trap piece with some very chill flows that I would usually tune out, but I do think the sample goes quite a long way in terms of making the instrumental a little bit more of an ear worm.

There are also some deep cuts on the record that took me by surprise a little bit, like the late night drive synth funk grooves of "Favorite Lie", which Tecca's autotuned leads work on top of better than expected. We also have the heavy horn-backed, aggressive trap instrumental that's on "Boys Don't Cry", which is definitely a welcome change of pace from the much sleepier songs surrounding this track.

But outside of cuts like these, I feel like for the rest of this record, Tecca is coming up short once again, either with meandering songs where it feels like he's just ripping his way through the instrumental for two minutes and change until it just ends, like on "Half the Plot" or "X Factor", which has no X Factor to it at all. Tecca even sounds like he's on autopilot on "Irish Goodbye", despite me liking the very funky instrumental that one is attached to.

Even when Tecca is singing his heart out on this record, like on "Sure of It", he's doing it over what sounds like a boneless Travis Scott leftover with all these spacy beats and derivative, moaning autotune background vocals.

So yeah, the thrills on this record, sadly, drop off pretty quick. And we once again find Tecca hopping on instrumentals and musical trends that he fails to spin into anything personal or specific or interesting. Most notably, the rage type cuts on here, like "One Night", as well as "Tick Tack Toe", which features Ken Carson, who I actually thought was like a Playboi Carti using AI maybe on his voice until I actually heard who was on the song.

So yeah, not only does Lil Tecca fail to do anything interesting with these sounds, with these ideas, but there's so little focus and direction and style to this album overall. It's just like a compilation of random things that Tecca does to varying degrees of quality. I mean, he even fails to follow through on peppering the entire album with these interesting tongue-in-cheek deep-voiced radio drops where you're hearing the title of the album announced, and maybe there's a comedic riff or a one-liner in there. Which reads a lot of such instances in recent years from the likes of Tyler, the Creator, or even Playboi Carti, where you have a DJ or somebody just screaming in the background, like you're just hearing a raw wild mix tape or something like that.

But again, even though that does happen at a few spots on this record, Tecca doesn't really follow through well enough on even this idea to make it feel like a consistent thing across the album.

So yeah, while I found a few more bright spots on this record than I expected going into it, a majority of this album still sees Tecca producing this very wash, rinse, repeat algorithm rap with no flavor, no personality, no soul, no standout formula, no nothing, which is why I'm feeling a strong 3 to a light 4 on this thing.

Anthony Fantano, Lil Tecca, Forever.