He sounds utterly unlikeable through it all. On “Blah Blah Blah” Gotti casts himself as a petty asshole over an eerie banger, taunting an ex while turning his attention elsewhere. Tracks like “Off da Top (3am)” don’t fare as well, and scan instead like generically manufactured trap. “Biggest year of my career and I could feel the pressure, gotta follow-up,” he snips on “81,” a slapper of an intro and fine microcosm of Gotti’s honed simplicity. He isn’t known for clever lyricism, but Gotti can make a straightforward phrase sound agile. This new project’s bookends are the most explicitly self-referential of the rapper’s big 2016, and he grapples aloud with his come up. The Art of Hustle, Gotti’s last album, saw him overextended, trying to frame himself in with a single statement-worthy piece of work *CM9 *instead is a snapshot of Gotti in stride.

To be sure, Gotti has a better track record as a mixtape slinger than he does as a major-label rap album artist, and *CM9 *benefits from a low-stakes formula that’s less concerned with stringing together a narrative than it is with song-by-song quality control. Gotti’s latest seems to be billed as an album first, White Friday, and mixtape second, CM9, but he’s clearly folding his long-running *Cocaine Muzik *mixtape series into a newfound industry prominence, serving up his usual street fare with a bit more polish.

New yo gotti mixtape 2015