Tierra Whack - WORLD WIDE WHACK (2024) Hi-Res

The celebrated Philadelphia rapper Tierra Whack ends her debut full-length with a song called “27 Club,” a nod toward a macabre piece of rock and roll lore. It was at the age of 27 that Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse each left this earth, along with countless others—and troublingly, Whack once had plans to do the same.

She’s now 28, and the release of World Wide Whack bears witness to a lifetime of mental health struggles that mercifully haven’t had the last word. Remarkable for its interiority, the 15-song album is unflinchingly candid. And while its mere existence is something to celebrate, it avoids pat answers or faux-happy endings. Its final few minutes flirt with suicide as “somethin’ to commit to,” a grim reminder that depression and anxiety remain daily antagonists, lifelong companions. This is a more earthbound Tierra Whack than the one we encountered on Whack World, a collection of minute-long, high-concept singles paired with imaginative videos. With that album Whack effectively preempted the advent of Instagram Reels while proving herself a dioramist without peer. Most of these new songs fall somewhere between two and three minutes, but they still feel like masterpieces in miniature, intimate in their scope and spare in their production.

Part of what makes Whack such a compelling artist is how she sounds equally confident upholding old-school and contemporary values. Her rapping emphasizes dense vocabulary, precise rhymes, and technical virtuosity—even her least effective metaphors (“Flow so dope, fans fuck around and OD”) recall an era when rappers were assessed by the volume of their bars. And yet, she’s no golden-age conservationist: World Wide Whack foregrounds melody and emotional acuity, suggesting an artist fully conversant with the world that Drake built.

With spare beats and shiny surfaces often recalling the gleaming tracks favored by Noname or Chance the Rapper, World Wide Whack initially feels less colorful than Whack’s star-making EP. But if the album seems less hyper-saturated than Whack World, it nevertheless attests to its auteur’s unerring ear for weird sounds and textures, which effectively serve as hooks. The laconic “Burning Brains” is memorable for Whack’s use of garbled Muppet-speak, her ongoing commitment to funny voices being one of her most winsome and effective storytelling techniques. “X” summons the crisp cadence of a marching band, while “Moovies” builds to a synth-driven, roller-rink pop chorus. Most effective of all is the minimalist funk on “Shower Song,” maybe the best case yet for Whack’s less-is-more mentality. Many of the surrounding songs sound spartan, but maybe that’s the point: As Whack names her demons, it feels as if her world is being drained of color, her anguish rendered in sobering black and white.

That’s not quite to say that the album is one long descent into Whack’s pathology. The opening track is called “Mood Swings,” and the songs that follow make good on that promise, providing a series of internal monologues from multiple vantage points. “Shower Song” is empowered by the simple act of belting out show-stopping numbers from the privacy of the bathroom, and on other albums it might have felt like rote affirmation. In this context it feels necessary and vivacious, a shot of hope amidst reminders that, as two particular song titles put it, life is difficult and mundane suffering can make us feel numb—and, in “Two Night,” that death comes for all of us eventually. Thank God Tierra Whack has stared down those hard truths and that she’s here to share her struggle.