On the standout “Fast,” Juice’s smoothly lackadaisical flow and whisper-singing transitions to the tropics of “Hear Me Calling.” Late in the album, the stellar “ON GOD” - essentially a Young Thug song, featuring Juice WRLD - sees Juice trading flows with Thug with an easy and buoyant chemistry. Light instrumental touches - the piano on “Robbery,” a xylophone underpinning “Feeling” - diversify the usual trap hi-hats, and most surprisingly, Juice showcase a relatively diverse palette of styles. Lines are delivered awkwardly, then become earworms: “Your scars are so gorgeous / Ain’t that a weird way to give compliments?” Juice twangs on the guitar-laden “Flaws and Sins.” And yet, “Death Race” still shines beyond these moments. The persistent irony is that these distractingly bad bars come from a rapper who has proven to be such a skilled and quick-witted freestyler. He wails infectiously, over beautifully tender piano, but with lines that elicit hard eye-rolls: “My world revolves around a black hole, the same black hole that’s in place of my soul.” Here, depression is less about suffering than about empty affectation and aesthetic on “Goodbye,” it at least had a source, if naive and arguable on-the-surface. Rather, it’s translated at times into some vague tortured soul character, as on “Empty,” the album’s opener, where Juice proclaims, “I was put here to lead the lost souls / Exhale depression as the wind blows.” The song’s cringe-y lyrics again bog down what Juice does best. The agony and drug-love is still there, but is not as heightened or as clearly connected to a breakup.
Indeed, Juice even throws in a tired dancehall-tinged pop track with “Hear Me Calling,” along with a serviceable Travis Scott imitation on “Big” - which squanders a delicious sample and beat switch in the middle - to cover all his bases. On “Death Race,” his strongest, most polished melodies are on display, and the record does feel manufactured to chart as high as possible - and, with a bloated 22 songs, no less. Juice leans heavily into pop-punk with elongated moans of misery while a gorgeous piano tune separates the track from practically all of “Goodbye & Good Riddance.” This evolution-in-miniature was teased on “Robbery,” the album’s lead single (which leaked months ago). But on his second album, “Death Race for Love,” Juice returns in some ways to his brand of sad rap, with all its strengths and weaknesses, while graduating effectively toward some sonic versatility and playfulness. Juice seemed to shift away from this schtick on last fall’s collab record with Future on “WRLD ON DRUGS,” a forgettable and somewhat inexplicable - save for the pair’s shared thirst for the numbing balm of addiction - link-up. But the simplicity of his hooks, while petulant, was also part of what made them undeniably catchy. Standouts on the album were lost among this repetitive aura. Yet Juice’s penchant for ear-worm melodies was burdened throughout by often laughably lovelorn lyrics that resembled the angsty, diaristic scrawl of a teen whose heartache over a months-long relationship’s demise is perceived as the end of the universe. When the Chicago rapper broke into the mainstream seemingly out of nowhere in 2018, he efficiently distilled emo rap - one of the Soundcloud generation’s iterations of trap, infused with the moody melodrama of self-pitying anguish - into memorable hooks, particularly on his chart-topping breakout single, “Lucid Dreams.” Elsewhere on “Goodbye & Good Riddance,” listeners found the soundtrack to a breakup made up of largely monotonous trap production buoyed by keen pop-punk sensibilities. The 19-year-old who was drowning young heartbreak in the palliative haze of drugs on “Goodbye & Good Riddance,” his debut album? That was so last summer.