The Bronx MC’s long-awaited sophomore effort, with features from Summer Walker, Kehlani, and Lizzo, shows timing is everything.
We should be celebrating Cardi B for taking seven years between her debut album, Invasion of Privacy, and 2025’s AM I THE DRAMA? Sure, the success of that first album made her so big that she’d never truly ever be out of the spotlight, and this is a method smaller artists can rarely afford to follow. For most songwriters, two years out of the spotlight is asking for trouble; seven years is a death sentence. But Cardi isn’t like most songwriters. “WAP” sustained her for multiple years, a single so big, so powerful, so culturally impactful that it served as an unintentional bridge from the Invasion era to whatever would come next. Cardi, through her basically unmatched success in the pop-rap landscape, was allowed to do something largely forbidden for anyone beholden to the major label system: she waited.
To hear Cardi explain it, though, this hiatus wasn’t one she ever planned on. In fact, in an interview with Zane Lowe that ran last Thursday, she suggested her fans will never have to wait this long again. But her decision to figure out what, exactly, she wanted to say before recording an album took longer than anticipated. It’s a choice that’s paid dividends, and pretty much the exact opposite situation many big artists find themselves in.
Last week, Halsey made waves when she said she’s not allowed to make an album right now because the label wasn’t happy with how her last album performed. Cardi— if she was just a little less famous, a little less powerful, and struck something other than gold (and diamond) with “WAP” and “Up”—would have been forced to drop an album before she was ready. “Nothing was pleasing me,” she explained to Lowe. “I got like 80 songs that I did…these past seven years…Three weeks later, it’s like, ‘I don’t love it, I don’t want it, I feel stupid, it sounds dumb…Even when people come and try to help me, I still don’t like it.” After Lowe suggested she was experiencing something akin to writer’s block, she said: “I just wasn’t liking nothing. I felt like I was going crazy.”
Now that Cardi has made and released an album she’s happy with, the success or failure of it is almost besides the point. After all, because “WAP” and “Up” are both on the album, it was certified Platinum back in June. The stakes are non-existent, Cardi is basically too big to fail. What does a flop even look like? Regardless, I don’t think she has much to worry about. “Outside,” released in June, has already racked up 30 million streams on Spotify. “Imaginary Playerz,” a nod to Hova’s 1997 “Imaginary Players,” dropped on August 15 and is nearing five million streams.
AM I THE DRAMA? is loosely tied around a concept, one that isn’t much more fleshed out than “Cardi B is so good she kills other rappers.” The opener, “Dead,” features Summer Walker and begins with faux news snippets: “International rap superstar is on the run after being linked to a series of brutal killings.” She’s saying to everyone else: “I hope you enjoyed the limelight while it lasted, because I’m back and I’m not going anywhere.” The scariest thing for her peers? Cardi can still rap her ass off. On that first track, she cooks up one of her hardest lines to date when she declares: “I’m collecting body bags like they purses/ I don’t even rap no more, I drive hearses.”
Other capital-B Big moments on the album include the Selena Gomez-assisted “Pick It Up,” a relatively tame crossover attempt that will probably make some noise on radio but scans more as a Selena track featuring a verse from Cardi.
Subscribe for the biggest stories in the business of sports and entertainment, daily.
As expected, it doesn’t take long for Cardi to go after her ex-husband, Offset. On the album’s third track, “Magnet,” she raps: “Got my baby daddy actin’ like my baby mama.” Elsewhere, the Lizzo-featuring “What’s Goin On” features a sample of 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?,” and delicately walks a fine line between corny and cathartic. “Principal” features Janet Jackson and includes a flip of her iconic 1986 single “The Pleasure Principl.” The DJ SwanQo
-produced “Pretty & Petty” is a genuinely scathing diss aimed at BIA, which kicks off with an “Ether”-level assault: “Name five BIA songs, gun pointing to your head/ Baow, I’m dead.”
It’s hard to predict whether these songs will go on to achieve some of the success Cardi’s hits have had in the past, but it’s already a win that there are no cynical, obvious grabs at radio concocted in a lab. Outside of “WAP” and “Up” giving the album its Platinum status three months before it was released, there’s not much gamesmanship in terms of its commercial reach. Cardi knows her return is powerful enough. AM IN THE DRAMA? was worth the wait, because Cardi B has yet to operate without clarity or care. We’ll stick with her as long as that’s the case.
Read More:
Daniel Jones Is Playing His Way Into Another Massive Contract
Could Brandon Aubrey Become the NFL’s First $10 Million Kicker?
Why ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ Is the Defining YA Hit of the Streaming Era
How WWE’s International Expansion Strategy Sidelines Its Core Market
Juan Soto: The Domino Effect
