Metro Boomin - Not All Heroes Wear Capes

Metro Boomin
Not All Heroes Wear Capes
2018
Spotify

The past couple of years have been the highlight of the super trap producer. From the beginning however Metro Boomin has been doing things a bit differently. His tagline, now infamous on almost every Metro Boomin track, made it almost a necessity for all producers going forward. 19 & Boomin in 2013 burst him onto the scene meaning up until December 2017 you got some new song from Metro Boomin almost every month. In December after producing an album for Big Sean Boomin announced He was retiring, but as is the case with all hip hop artists that was not the case. You would expect the time off to perhaps put Metro out of touch or have him losing a step but the opposite is the case on this new record. It doesn't hurt that Not All Heroes Wear Capes is filled with some of the biggest names in hip hop today. Gucci Mane, Young Thug, Swae Lee, 21 Savage and Drake are just a few of the absolutely major names that populate this record. Boomin makes moves to set this record apart from the rest of the trap crowd with interesting avante garde production. He pulls the absolute best out of each one of his features making Not All Heroes Wear Capes feel like a greatest hits record. That is the benefit of being one of these super producers in 2018, you can pull in all your friends who happen to be the biggest names in the game.

All that is well and good, but the album does have a few rough spots. Those pieces however have nothing to do with Metro Boomin, they have to do with Trap in general. Trap is now coming around to about five years of steadily gaining popularity. Drake makes some of the biggest hits in history using trap drums and beats, but now it is starting to feel like they are running out of ideas. Trap is a genre that gets derided for artists repeating themselves, but it's starting to extend to the whole genre in general. Young Thug sounds absolutely defeated on this album, while others like Offset try to venture into more R&B styled singing, but it doesn't always work. It's not enough to put a wild beat with trap drums over someone saying "yeah" three hundred times. The biggest stars are still doing it, but the world is slowly turning against those kinds of sounds. Not All Heroes Wear Capes is trap at it's most refined, and it sounds excellent, but it just doesn't give you that newness feeling anymore. Still this album has all the bangers you could ask for and should be the talk of the town, I just don't know if it will be.

8.1 out of 10