There are some musical clunkers on The World Is Yours, but the album’s unevenness is mostly due to Rio’s performances. For the first time in his career, he sounds worn down both mentally and physically, which makes sense when you consider last year’s relentless touring schedule, his consistently prolific output, and all the other personal shit he’s been through. You can hear the toll life’s taken on him from the start of “Be Like Me,” the album’s paranoid and funereal opener, where Rio’s mucus-y voice sounds especially scratchy and strained. Rio addresses the frog in his throat on “Lost My Voice,” where he wearily attributes his sickly croak to an excessive lifestyle of “calling hits” and “talking shit.” Clearly, there are other things on his mind, too. “Ain’t seen my kids in two weeks, I can’t crack a smile,” he raps, with an abnormal air of defeat.
Ironically, it’s the physical decay of Rio’s voice, rather than any surface-level genre exercise, that yields the most interesting evolutions on The World Is Yours. In album highlight “Lemme Guess,” his hoarse delivery complements the beat’s drearily grim pulse, and when he does muster up the enthusiasm to crack a cackle-worthy (if hackneyed) zinger (“I’m waiting for my lawyer to roll up, he at a bar mitzvah”) it’s somehow even funnier that it sounds like those could be his dying words. His slumped-over posture is less funny during flashes of pained honesty, like being embarrassed to tell his mom he drinks a pint of lean a day (“Easter Pink”) or the line in “Be Like Me” where he bleakly muses that he’d rather “die from taking pills like my auntie” than meet a different, more violent demise.
The album’s incoherent sequencing prevents The World Is Yours from finding the fluid groove that F.L.I.N.T. had, despite a handful of individual tracks where Rio sounds memorably alive. When he’s locked in over a classic Michigan thumper, he can sound as energized as ever: nimble, perky, doling out outlandishly specific insults like, “Bitch booty got a weird shape like a bag of biscuits,” (“100% Alcohol”). For every banger, though, there’s another throwaway where Rio’s exhaustion makes him sound like his heart’s not in it. The title of his last album, Feeling Like I’m Not Through, personified the tenacity of the rapping within. The World Is Yours, however, doesn’t embody the hustler verve of the Scarface quote it’s referencing, nor the other grindset rap classics that also borrow the line’s hungry sentiment. Rio just sounds tired, and here, The World Is Yours feels like his way of saying, “go ahead, you can have it.”
