Lil Uzi Vert is a Philadelphia-born rapper who rose to fame during the SoundCloud era of music, emerging along with artists such as Juice WRLD and XXXTENTACION. Lil Uzi set himself apart from the crowd and showed himself as an artist who could really experiment and push the boundaries of what rap could sound like at the time.
When people think of Lil Uzi’s discography, they often think of standout projects like Lil Uzi vs. the World and Luv Is Rage 2, which are really good bodies of work that cemented him as one of the most talented artists to come out of his era. Although, now in 2025, things are looking bleak for Uzi with his new album flopping as it only sold 59,000 units in its first week, which is abysmally low for an artist of such popularity. His fanbase is slowly turning on who he has become. The sentiment that most people have on Lil Uzi Vert in the present is that his old albums were really good, but he simply does not have the talent he used to. This situation is not career-ending for Lil Uzi. He 100 percent has it in him to get back to the place he once was in the rap scene, and it all depends on the quality of his next album.
Rewinding all the way back to the start of the pandemic in early 2020, Lil Uzi released his highly anticipated album Eternal Atake, which received mixed but mostly good reviews. Since it was dropped on a Tuesday morning instead of the usual Friday night, it was more memorable and in turn, the album sold 280,000 units during its first week of being released. After this massive success of an album, he did not release another solo album for another three years. When 2023 rolled around and Lil Uzi was getting ready to drop his new album, titled Pink Tape, his career was in a much more stable position than it is today, as Uzi went on a very successful feature run in late 2022, which brought a lot of hype to this upcoming album. When Pink Tape finally dropped, it did well and sold 167,000 units during its first week, but it had a lot of mixed reviews from fans. A common sentiment amongst fans was that the highs were really high, but the lows were also really low. With the album creating a void between him and his fans, he knew that his next project after this would have to be really good to seal that void and heal the relationship he had with his fans.
Lil Uzi’s next album was released a year after Pink Tape in late 2024, and is a sequel to his 2020 album Eternal Atake. This was his worst album to date; it felt like an unfinished mess that put a negative stain on Lil Uzi’s discography. The album was met with so much hate from fans that they were theorising that it was made low-quality on purpose to fulfil a contractual obligation to his record label, which allowed him to be an independent artist. On this album, Lil Uzi’s voice sounded a lot different from how it did in his other work, which is not out of the ordinary, but on some of the songs on the album, he claims his voice sounds the way it does due to him huffing nitrous oxide, which is known to cause brain damage. This use of nitrous oxide to make songs is another reason fans thought Eternal Atake 2 was lacking in quality compared to his other projects.
He has not released an album since Eternal Atake 2, and now his career is in a sort of limbo state where fans still go back and listen to his old projects, but there is no real anticipation for any new music from him.
Lil Uzi’s next body of work will define him as an artist because if he drops a really bad album, people will move on from him and only remember him for his older work and what he once was. But if he drops an album that is completely finished and pleases his fans while still experimenting in the right ways, he can show the world that he is an artist who is still worth following and listening to.
One way that people know that Lil Uzi still has it in him to drop an amazing album is due to the music found in his extensive unreleased catalogue. There are entire finished albums that never got to see the light of day because of leaks, or the music did not fit his artistic vision. Fans adore these songs and regard them as grails, with some scrapped albums gaining a cult-like following in his community. These amazing songs were made as recently as late 2023 and early 2024. However, most casual fans are not listening to him enough to know about his unreleased catalogue. A Famous example of this happened. In the stage between Pink Tape and Eternal Atake 2. Lil Uzi had two other albums that were supposed to drop first that never did, such as Barter 16, which is an album inspired by Young Thug’s mixtape Barter 6. This album is still regarded as some of his best work by his fans, even though it will never be released officially. If Uzi could stick to his plans and fully flesh out themes and aesthetics for his albums, it would greatly help his public standing.
All in all, Lil Uzi Vert’s next album will be career-defining for him, and his fans just hope that he can return to the position he was in when he first emerged onto the scene back in 2016.
