Isaiah Rashad’s new album title is hardly subtle: ‘It’s Been Awful’. Then again, his records have always been frank about life’s tough moments. From acclaimed 2016 debut ‘The Sun’s Tirade’ to 2021’s ‘The House Is Burning’, Rashad has long been the quiet outlier of Top Dawg Entertainment: woozy, moody and unwaveringly introspective, blending laidback Southern rap with neo-soul and jazz while continuously mining introspective terrain his labelmates only occasionally touched.
His last album followed a tumultuous stretch of homelessness and rehab, and after another five-year wait, Rashad’s third full-length arrives out of an equally bruising period: relapses, family fractures and an abrupt loss of privacy after a 2022 sex tape leak. Opening track ‘The New Sublime’ addresses all of this headfirst: “Feel afflicted, falling over / Ask me who I’m fucking, I been fucking up”. It goes on to detail anxieties around sobriety and his sister’s return to prison, and the ripple effect felt by everyone around him.
Throughout the record, Rashad’s continued struggles with addiction run deep. “The pills, the blow, the ‘yac, the top,” he raps on the A$AP Rocky and Skepta-indebted standout ‘Same Sh!t’, flipping classic Lil Jon bars. ‘M.O.M’ sees him telling himself to not do a line, only to “pop two” pills instead. Elsewhere, he lays bare the physical toll of substance abuse with unflinching honesty: “The doctor say that shit been fucking with my heart / but I can’t barely sleep / chasing money, love and all of the amphetamines.”
‘Act Normal’ opens an entirely different wound, tracing cycles of inherited pain through family lines (“Acquired secrets / Learned to be the best at it”), while ‘Do I Look High?’ pulls back the curtain even further: “Last time that I told you that I was clean, I was lying / I’m praying that my sister makes it home by Christmas morning.” Some may find the emotional unburdening heavy going, but it’s Rashad’s stark specificity that makes the lyrics cut through.
It’s not all darkness, though. Rashad has prefaced the album with the idea that music holds a transcendent power, and he seems unwilling to be buried by his burdens. Citing Prince and OutKast as touchstones, the record has a sun-damaged feel that envelopes the darker material without washing it out. ‘Supaficial’ bursts with trumpet flourishes as Rashad drawls: “Where you going? You a junkie, you been way outside.” On ‘Happy Hour’, he makes a singalong out of lines like “My side giving up on love / I want some more drank”, delivered over a tranquilised piano line. When it lands – and it often does – it sounds like Southern rap filtered through a roof-down, summer-drive R&B haze.
On penultimate track ‘Superpwrs’, Rashad laments: “How I get sober, fucked up, then clean again, I don’t know”, before adding, with a wry self-awareness, “How you be rapping circles around n****s, but you don’t drop, I don’t know.” His talents have never been in question, life has simply, repeatedly, gotten in the way. On the evidence of ‘It’s Been Awful’, nobody should be sleeping on Isaiah Rashad any longer.
Details
- Record label: Loma Vista Recordings
- Release date: October 17, 2025