Lil Uzi Vert, a Hip-Hop Star Beyond Gatekeepers

Critic’s Pick The rapper’s long-awaited second studio album, “Eternal Atake,” and the deluxe version that followed provide rowdy thrills. Lil Uzi Vert, perhaps the defining rap star of the past few years, is a cipher, a whirlwind, an alien. An accident of history. A chemical recombination of what hip-hop success sounds, looks and, maybe most importantly, feels like in an era in which the old gatekeepers have been all but sidelined.

Breakout hits? One or two. Radio? Not so much.

Promotional dog-and-pony show? As if. For a straight-to-the-internet age, he is an unmediated presence — a tough talker and an in-the-clouds dreamer, a visual eccentric who deploys mystery to his advantage. He’s as thrilling in the shadows as in the spotlight.

Few artists in any genre inspire more fervor, more devotion, more curiosity, more exuberant joy. It’s been three years since his last album, but raucous festival performances, occasional bursts of social media activity and an online black market in leaked songs reinforce his fame — he is a rapper far more successful than the sum total of his hits. The release of his long-awaited second studio album, “Eternal Atake” — followed a week later by the deluxe edition, subtitled “LUV vs. the World 2,” with a whole new album’s worth of songs — is a relief: Finally, a new data dump.

“Eternal Atake” topped the Billboard chart with the most streams for any album since 2018; this week, with numbers for the deluxe edition included, it holds strong at No. 1. Of the rap surrealists of the last few years — Young Thug, Playboi Carti, Gunna and so on — Uzi is perhaps the most pointed, the most familiar with the structuralists who preceded him, and the one who still harbors affection for them.

“The sometimes blistering, sometimes disorienting “Eternal Atake” resolves these interests.”

It is part old-fashioned bluster, part flamboyant style exercise, all rowdy thrill. As ever, Uzi’s rapping voice is a whimsical chirp. His melodic approach borrows from pop-punk and R&B as well as the digitally decaying style popularized by Lil Wayne in the late 2000s (though in a couple of places here, he appears to lean back from the affectation, rapping with a more conventional tone). And the production throughout is anarchic: video game and anime soundtracks, plenty of rough-edged low-end, the occasional elegiac pop flourish.