Rod Wave new album 2022 Apple music

If he can help it, Rod Wave keeps himself out of the studio. It’s too busy, too impersonal—not the kind of place where you can open up. Which is kind of what Rod Wave does. So he vets the beats on headphones, rents a hotel room with his engineer, turns the lights off, and lets it go. “There’s people who could make a living getting in there and talking about they pain, they life, they story, they struggle,” he told Apple Music in 2020. “It kinda made me open up more. Like, it’s okay to be yourself; it’s okay to talk about what you go through, because ain’t nobody perfect. Everybody want to get on these songs and s**t and walk around like they perfect. That ain’t what it’s about. That’s just vampire. It don’t even exist.”

Born Rodarius Green in 1999 in St. Petersburg, Florida, Rod Wave is part of a pack of younger rappers—including YoungBoy Never Broke Again, NoCap, and Moneybagg Yo—taking the street confessionals of forebears like Boosie Badazz and Kevin Gates in new directions, broadening the emotional range of hip-hop with the vocal catharsis of classic soul and, in Wave’s case, even a touch of country. It can be ugly, it can be raw—he meditates on friends lost to violence (“PTSD”), he describes breaking into houses to help out his family (“Popular Loner”). But Wave’s music also has a quietly redemptive streak: His load might never be light, but at least he can leave some of it on record.

Fairly or unfairly, hip-hop fans have come to associate the music of Rod Wave with sadness. His catalog contains plenty of it, but the man who has “Hard Times” tattooed across his forearms sounds less sad on his fourth studio album Beautiful Mind than he does contented and hopeful about the future.

There are love songs on the project—and not just ones lamenting relationships gone cold or unrequited devotion. He’s got those, too—“Never Get Over Me,” “Sweet Little Lies,” “Everything”—but we meet Wave the hopeless romantic on tracks like “Forever,” “Never Find Us,” “Pieces,” and “Married Next Year.” He’s even made time for his friend December Joy to showcase his own lothario chops on “Quiet Storm.”

If there’s anything troubling Wave across Beautiful Mind, it’s his relationship with fame and what his increasing star status means for his peace of mind and safety. He’ll never again have to worry about where his next meal comes from or even about having the ability to help out his loved ones, but his life has changed significantly since “Heart on Ice,” and with great power, naturally, comes extra security. “I’m tryna ball, these n***as tryna take my life,” he sings on “No Deal.”

He sings of the fleeting nature of fame on “Fading” and how his grind can’t be stopped on “Keep Going,” but it’s a couplet from “Me vs. the World” that fully distills the pressures of his influence. “It ain’t easy being me/Will I see the penitentiary or will I stay free?” he wonders. “It ain’t easy having fans/Will I see, will I see my next birthday or will I see the grave?” Some fears you just can’t let go of.

Rod Wave knows exactly who he is. “I got skills in other things, but rich off rapping pain,” he admits in the title track from his third album, SoulFly. That title contains multitudes in that Wave’s music obviously comes from his soul, and he is objectively fly, and then there is the fact that he’s continuously singing about the time after his eventual passing when his soul can actually fly free. In fact, Wave is remarkably productive for someone who’d have you believe he’s constantly in the throes of anguish. (The singer has released at least one project a year since 2016’s Hunger Games, amassing a fanbase whose penchant for making jokes about the glumness of his music is dwarfed only by their dedication to streaming it.) “If you can’t feel my pain, this ain’t for you anyways,” Wave sings on “Don’t Forget.” You’d think that the hard times he saw as a child, the constant betrayals he’d know as an adult, or the pressure he’s under as his family’s breadwinner might actually come close to breaking him, but Wave sounds like he is in a better space than he’s been in a long time. “I just be telling ’bout my pain,” he says on “Calling.” “I just be thinking, reminiscing ’bout that shit/I numb the pain with the money/I don’t feel pain, too much money.”

Rod Wave brings every part of his personality to the mic, flipping between heart-on-sleeve soul man and hardened rapper—sometimes within the same verse. You’d think the St. Petersburg, Florida native had lived many lives, even as a fresh-faced teenager who began releasing mixtapes in 2017, straight out of high school. “Heart on Ice” helped push Wave into the limelight, with its candid raps slipped between the sheets of a silky melody. It’s a formula he would come to refine on his 2019 debut album, Ghetto Gospel, and 2020 follow-up Pray 4 Love, a heartfelt collection of confessions that reveal not only his anxieties, but all of ours.

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