Let's use our imagination real quick: it's 2060, your grandchild just took his first steps, and Playboi Carti finally released the follow-up album to Whole Lotta Red. While many fans hope that we get this new project in 2024 after relentless teases and promises, this future fantasy is the more likely outcome at this point. But that doesn't mean that we won't wait patiently as long as he keeps engaging with fans, as he recently did in electric fashion at Rolling Loud Vienna over the weekend. On Opium's Instagram page (or Carti's finsta, maybe? A promo account? Who knows?), a new picture appeared of the Atlanta rapper at the festival, and it's the clearest photo we've gotten of him in quite a while.
Furthermore, delusional fans online (don't worry, so are we) hope that this suggests the album is coming very soon, and that these new performances will fuel something greater. What's more is that producer Cardo recently spoke on "finishing up" Playboi Carti's new album very recently, adding fuel to that fire. "I don't know, man, it's been going crazy. That's all I know... In a good way. It's been crazy fun," he expressed in a new video.
Playboi Carti At Rolling Loud Vienna
In addition to all this, it's not like Playboi Carti stopped giving us song snippets previewing his work, as the most recent of these landed just a couple of weeks ago. Still, they did become much less frequent after the barrage of new tracks in late 2023 and early 2024. So no one really knows what's going on with this new album or why it hasn't dropped yet, whether because he's a perfectionist, leaks, label issues, and all those other speculative coping mechanisms. Maybe, just maybe, we'll get an answer to this soon.
Carti Performs "H00DBYAIR" For A Wild Crowd
Meanwhile, we know that as long as Playboi Carti continues to perform, he can maintain a whole lot of hype and excitement around him and his artistry regardless of new album drops. He ranked among the best sets at Summer Smash this year, a tall order with such a stacked lineup. Hopefully these festival sets and the like continue to build off one another and are contributing to upcoming releases. Also, with a lot of allegations emerging against him and Opium in the past few years, we can't imagine that this made things any easier.