Roddy Ricch’s Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial is Incredible (Album Review)
While waiting for new music to come out, I decided to go back and check out a few albums I’d missed out on in 2019. When Ricch released Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial, I had listened to it all the way through one time. I enjoyed it but I didn’t really listen to it thoroughly, as it was on during an overnight 8 hour drive. My experience with Ricch was very limited, only hearing his freestyle on the XXL 2019 class, and the single Ballin. Starting with the opening track on this album, simply titled “Intro”, I was expecting a pretty decent melodic trap album, but what I wasn’t expecting was to get an extremely cohesive and deep album.
Ricch goes into incredible depth on his rough upbringing in this project, included with his mental health issues. The album showcases how fame doesn’t just erase everything wrong in this world. Ricch mentions his brother multiple times across the album, who is in jail, and whom he feels like he’s failed to help. The title of Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial fits really well for the theme of this album, as multiple tracks focus on how Ricch often turns to drugs and partying to cope with his mental health issues. War Baby is an incredibly powerful song about his upbringing, which explains a lot of why he’s still the same person despite finding success with money and music. The track also features a beautiful choir chorus and wonderful instrumental.
What impresses me the most with this album is that, in a time where trap music is so over saturated and formulated, Ricch was able to deliver with a very well crafted debut album. Every song sounds different, and they all feel like they fit within the album’s theme. Every feature does a good job as well, with Meek Mill absolutely crushing his verse on Peta. Ricch’s songwriting talent is also impressive. Instead of creating repetitive party tracks, Ricch provides storytelling mixed with a trap style for his songs, and it works well.
My few gripes with the album do weigh it down slightly. My biggest complaint is how Ricch tends to borrow different rappers’ style on multiple tracks. I understand being inspired by certain styles, but the track Start With Me sounds like he was copying Lil Baby, and Boom Boom Room sounds like a carbon copy of Future. A few tracks on the album are also pretty forgettable. Roll Dice doesn’t do much to add to the storytelling on the project. I also find Gods Eyes to be a really boring track, but it’s probably the only track I would skip if I were to listen to this full project again.
The question I always like to ask when looking into an album critically is: regardless of the content, how does it actually sound when listening to it?. I’m very happy to say that this album is just one banger after another. With only 1 song on this project that I consider to be not good, it’s very easy to listen to this entire album with the intention of listening to a few songs. Roddy Ricch has something special that artists today seem to lack. He can take an incredibly generic beat, write a very catchy hook, and turn the song into a hit. This album is just absolutely loaded with songs that I guarantee will get stuck in your head.
I hope more upcoming artists can learn from Ricch-this is how you want a debut studio album to sound. While it suffers from biting other artists’ style a bit, “Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial” hits all the marks to make an amazing album. Ricch has an incredibly unique and smooth cadence on a majority of this album. Ricch has set the bar high for his future projects, which I fully believe he can achieve. If you’re looking for a new melodic rap album, you’d be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t check this project out.
