Juice WRLD - Legends Never Die

Pitchfork 71

The Chicago artist’s first posthumous release doesn’t feel like a final goodbye, but instead a continued look inside his world. It’s bleak and beautiful.

The Guardian 60

The rapper’s posthumous album opens up to tackle his own legacy, as demons lurk around every corner

Juice WRLD’s posthumous album opens with the devil closing in. On Conversations, the rapper is avoiding a tête-à-tête with the arch fiend himself, a manifestation of sin and lurking temptation. Across a four-song suite that sets the tone of Legends Never Die, imagery of demons and hell are persistent. Drugs are presented as a means to self-medicate and keep these terrors at bay, but they linger in the margins. Throughout the record, the Illinois rapper, who overdosed on oxycodone and codeine last December, is clearly searching for an escape. He never found what he was looking for.

The burden thus falls on this album, allegedly the first of many planned for release, to not only assess Juice’s vulnerable and enchantingly accessible music and chart a trajectory left unrealised, but also to dissuade his audience from following a similar path. Rapper Lil Bibby, head of Juice’s Grade A label and steward of his catalogue, said the album would be representative of “somebody that was fighting addiction, anxiety, detachment” and hoped those listeners who saw their struggles reflected in the songs might seek help. The album itself mines the topics for which Juice became known, namely emptiness and its many side-effects: substance abuse, destructive co-dependence, fear of self-sabotage, and, of course, fear of death, which looms around every corner. As with his previous album, 2019’s Death Race for Love, it is overstuffed, sometimes underwritten and often puerile, but there he was finding his voice. These songs open up beyond his internal monologue to reckon with his public –and by extension, his legacy.

Related: ‘I never got to thank him’: fans mourn a generation of rappers dying young