Baby Keem is back, and he wants you to hear what he was doing during the five-year gap. Ca$ino, his second album and the follow-up to 2021’s The Melodic Blue, arrived at midnight on Friday (Feb. 20), and it’s a much more personal record than a title like that suggests.
The Las Vegas rapper has been blunt about the break. At a recent Los Angeles show, he said he wasn’t “trying to be elusive,” but was dealing with family trauma, per The FADER: the loss of his grandmother, an eviction and his mother’s gambling debts. Billboard calls the album “super-personal,” a bit of a heavy swing for a sophomore LP, and he says as much on the intro, “No Security,” where he’s been in the lab “switchin’ up the category.”
The record that’s getting talked about first is “Good Flirts,” where Kendrick Lamar, three weeks removed from a five-Grammy night, trades verses with New York singer Momo Boyd. Pitchfork heard a downtempo Motown beat “so FM-radio-ready it would bring a tear to Berry Gordy’s eye” and called the cousins’ chemistry their most fun work. Kendrick also interpolates Common’s “The Light” on his verse, Complex noted, just weeks after J. Cole did the same on The Fall-Off.
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Elsewhere, “$ex Appeal” brings in Too $hort over a strip-club beat, and “Birds & the Bees” leans on a pitched-up Feist sample. “I am not a Lyricist” is the heavy one, where Keem details his mother’s battle with addiction and a bad move from Long Beach to Vegas. The FADER staff said they thought for a moment they were hearing an André 3000 feature.
The album had a documentary rollout. Keem put out three parts of Booman, and in one, Kendrick described the family’s “warfare, psychologically, to try and change our generational curses,” per Pitchfork. After the record dropped, Boyd thanked the pair on X: “What an honor to stand next to you three and feel so much love and respect.”
Billboard speculated that the 2024 Drake and Kendrick fight “might’ve affected pgLang’s release schedule a bit.” If so, Keem’s answer is a record that doesn’t sound rushed.
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