Donald Glover finally brought Atlanta back to the airwaves for a third season last night, four years after the last one. But that wasn’t Glover’s only noteworthy pop-culture moment of the evening. At midnight, when the ascendant Atlanta rapper Latto’s new album 777 dropped, it featured an increasingly rare feature from Glover’s musical alter ego Childish Gambino. The 777 track “Sunshine” features Gambino and Lil Wayne, and the three of them jibe quite nicely over Bongo and Luke Crowder’s production, smoothly trading verses within a sound Latto has described as “hood gospel.” Glover sounds especially comfortable gliding over the soulful, swaying beat.
The rest of 777 is similarly pleasing. Rather than succumb to bloat, the album packs 13 tracks into 33 minutes. Latto sounds confident and commanding throughout, sliding between rapping and singing with as much ease as anyone in modern hip-hop. Other guests include 21 Savage (on the infectiously bouncy single “Wheelie”), Lil Durk, Nardo Wick, and Kodak Black, and on “Big Energy,” Latto raps over the music from Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” which should be showing up in our Number Ones column within the next couple weeks. On first pass it’s an eminently enjoyable big-budget rap release, and you probably won’t regret digging into it below.
777 is out now on Streamcut/RCA.
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