On December 10th, 2021. Deceased rapper Juice WRLD had his fourth studio album, “Fighting Demons”, released just over 2 years after his death. This album however exceeded my rather low expectations of what I thought this album was going to be. Because I really think they are scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of playable and shareable songs.  

As we dive into the beginning of the album, the song “Wandered to LA” features Justin Bieber. I never expected collaboration between the two artists, but the clean chorus and catchy verses from Juice pair perfectly with JB’S segment. 

Near the middle of this project, you will see features from both Polo G and Trippie Redd on the song “Feline”. The vocals and beat production are decent but the chorus is way too repetitive for me. 

Something interesting that they added to the album is where they added excerpts from interviews with Eminem, this is found in the track, “Eminem Speaks”.  These specific excerpts are from a 2007 Rolling Stone interview where Eminem talks about his close call with death due to his chronic drug issue. This foreshadows the next track that is played, “Rockstar In His Prime”. In this track, Juice WRLD talks about the drugs that later will lead to his passing. 

Unfortunately,  this project has many songs that fall victim to my main issue with this album. There is no variety throughout the whole album. Every song bleeds together with the late 80’s guitar loops that don’t match the beat. Another issue I have would be the features.   The Justin Bieber feature is good but it is very easy to forget.  Even with all of these different big-name artists featured on this project,  BTS and Polo G, the songs are lackluster. BTS’s features are difficult to comprehend due to the language barrier. And “Feline”, the song with Polo G, just blends in with every other song and it doesn’t have much meaning to it. 

Even with all these flaws, I think this project is pretty solid but doesn’t hold a candle to  Juice WRLD’s first posthumously released album  “Legends Never Die”. 

After factoring in all of these pros and cons I would give this album a 6 out of 10.