Father of 4 is decidedly still a trap album, but it bucks the current conventions of the genre. In this genre everyone is a kingpin, every chain is so heavy it weighs on your neck, everyone is trapping but no one is still on the corner. In its current iteration, trap’s primary mode of communication is hyperbole. Both tracks seem like the Atlanta rapper and Quality Control hedging their bets, in case the personal album gamble fails to pay off. “On Fleek” featuring Quavo and “Quarter Milli” featuring Gucci Mane are the worst offenders and add nothing to the narrative that Offset has spent so long building. Offset loses focus as the tracklist and features balloon. Predictably, Father of 4 falls prey to the bloat that characterizes most Migos’ projects. In the middle of rapping, “Bitches is mad, bitches is trash, Oscar the grouch” Cardi adlibs in a growl that is far better than almost anything that comes after it. In a savvy move, Cardi is allowed to add her perspective on “Clout.” Brutal, swift and nimble, Cardi’s performance is among the best on the album and features her dismantling a variety of unnamed detractors: rappers, blogs, trolls. These songs place Offset’s rumored infidelity in a harsher light, and the new, personal details within them are uncomfortable to sit with. On “North Star,” Offset raps about an addiction to lean - “If I can’t sip it then mama I can’t even sleep” - and, a few songs later, the unnamed woman on “Don’t Lose Me” tells him to “put down the styrofoam” before he’s allowed back home. Once you peel back the (many) layers of admiration and horniness, Offset describes a wife hellbent on being a positive force in her husband’s life. The muse at the center of Father of 4 is, predictably, Cardi B. On “Lick” - a song that shares the same title as a 2017 Cardi B song he’s featured on - the beat rises in energy from the rest of the project, but the chorus remains deathly serious: “I took a couple of my dawgs on a lick…I was so broke that I could cry.
From there, his story becomes more panicked. “I was 17 years old when I had you/Tryna find my soul when I had you,” Offset sings in a digitally distorted warble.
The self-titled album opener is an autobiographical tale that explains the various ways he failed his children - Jordan, Kody, Kalea and Kulture - who range in age from nine years old to just seven months. Death, lean addiction and abandonment issues fill every crevice of this album, but those moments of introspection never outweigh the album’s primary goal: “Inspiration for the dads it’s never too late,” Offset wrote on Twitter.
His raps are filled with cascades of syllables and triplets that are rarely given more than a few seconds to develop. Narratively and stylistically, Offset is a man of speed. The scope of Father of 4 is small, and the album is at its most effective when the focus is on Offset, alone, sifting through his regrets. As far as reckoning with your mistakes go, Offset is trying to do it here. Raw and personal, the record is about a broken man from a broken family, struggling to avoid condemning his children and wife to a similar fate. Father of 4 is the first Migos project - group or otherwise - that sheds bombast for introspection.