Isaiah Rashad took five years to make an album called It’s Been Awful, and the first thing it does is pray. On the opener, “The New Sublime,” he asks for prayers for his sister, his mother and himself, worried that he might “relapse again.” It is the kind of start that tells you not to expect a victory lap. The record, his third and first since 2021’s The House Is Burning, came out on Friday (May 1) on Top Dawg Entertainment.
The sound is the same slow-burning Rashad as ever, only more settled. Pitchfork calls it “hazy and sample-driven, with pitched-down, syrupy percussion slinking around warm electric piano and brass,” made mostly by producers Keem the Cipher and Julian Sintonia. Rolling Stone hears the muddy, melancholy Southern sound of mid-’90s rap, from UGK to Scarface, plus nods to OutKast’s ATLiens and Aquemini. The album runs 16 tracks and 54 minutes, and almost none of them rush.
Watch the video for lead single “Same Sh!t” above. The rest of the album, per Pitchfork, “maintains a patient and shuffling pace.” The big exception is “Boy in Red,” a duet with labelmate SZA, with whom Rashad has long had one of rap’s best chemistries. Its chorus plays with gender in a way Rolling Stone ties to Prince’s “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” a song Rashad told Vice he had “on repeat for 2-3 months” while making the album. Other influences he named: Fousheé and the Atlanta artists Pluto and Bunna B.
The song at the center
If the album has a hinge, Rolling Stone says, it is “Act Normal,” which addresses a viral 2022 incident when tapes of Rashad leaked online. In a later interview he said, “I’d say I’m sexually fluid. I’m still learning about it myself.” On the song, Rashad returns to a childhood in a house full of secrets and a life of feeling “at war with” himself. He refuses to tie it up neatly. Pitchfork calls the lack of resolution the point: “the openness and personal excavation, he seems to be saying, is the point.”
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Rolling Stone goes further, saying the track is “as concise a statement about men in rap struggling with their sexuality as has ever been made.” The song sits next to others about addiction, family and being a father who misses his children, and it never tips into a headline.
An influence in plain sight
Rashad has always been more admired than crowned. Rolling Stone points out that Billie Eilish has said her hit “Bad Guy” was inspired by Rashad and SZA’s “Stuck in the Mud,” and that The House Is Burning debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard 200. On this record, Dominic Fike appears on “Cameras,” and wrote on Instagram, “So grateful to zay for all the flows I copied and all the late nights watching this man’s music videos.”
He feels, Rolling Stone argues, like a figure from an era when Tyler, the Creator, Earl Sweatshirt and Rapsody are quietly pushing the form forward without arena-size singles. That reading fits an album that asks you to lean in. It also fits a month of rap that rewards patience: Rashad shares May with JPEGMAFIA’s Experimental Rap, and both are in our best new music roundup. Pitchfork closes on a line from “Nuthin 2 Hide” that “almost feels like a boast.”
The cut was something severe, but we endured
Isaiah Rashad, “Nuthin 2 Hide”, Pitchfork
IT’S BEEN AWFULIsaiah RashadListen on Apple Music
- Released
- May 1, 2026, Top Dawg Entertainment
- Length
- 16 tracks, 54 minutes
- Guests
- SZA, Dominic Fike, Julian Sintonia
- Previous album
- The House Is Burning (2021)
Added to the High Grailed archive on October 12, 2026.
