Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign’s long-awaited sequel project “Vultures 2” was released earlier this month, and it was not worth the wait.
This album, like the first “Vultures” project, was all over the place. There was little to no production across records, vocal deliveries were offbeat and raspy, and overall, many songs were incomplete. Long-time fans know this is a staple of Ye as he started doing this after the release of his album “The Life of Pablo,” where he released the project unfinished and continued to update it as he mastered the album in real-time.
This was something cool to witness, and fans know the current version of that album is a lot better than what was originally released.
The issue is that “Vultures 1” has barely been updated since its release in February of 2024 with a few Ty Dolla $ign vocals being re-mixed and production changes. The sequel project was released, regardless of “Vultures 1” being unfinished.
“Vultures 2” doesn’t contain a single song that seems like it was created by the master of ceremonies who was once the great Kanye West. Two of the tracks from this album, “Field Trip” and “Sky City,” actually use an AI Kanye filter to perform his verses on those tracks. Songs like “530” and “Forever Rolling” sound almost AI-generated. Many of the tracks throughout this record contain samples of songs that were not cleared by the original creators as well which is something Ye is continuing to do regardless of consequences. Ye is, oftentimes, off-key in this album and constantly sounds muffled. I was hoping the features on this album would give it a little bit of mercy, but I was wrong. The features are unfortunately underwhelming even though there are larger names featured on this album like Lil Wayne, Future and Kodak Black. The mixing is so bad that you can’t even understand what certain people are saying. I can’t believe they decided to be featured on this project, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them asked Ye to keep them off the project but kept them on anyway. There is not a single track on this album I enjoyed listening to because of how bad the productions are.
Another issue with this project is the lack of vision. All of Ye’s albums have an overarching theme or message that fits his vision of how the music is supposed to be interpreted. There is no substance to the lyrics, and it feels like there is no meaning to anything being said. It seems Ye does not have the creative ability and focus he once did to produce good lyrics and music that resonate with people.
It is sad to see such a great producer and writer become so lazy and uninterested in their craft. It is clear that Ye doesn’t care about the presentation and the quality of his music anymore and it also seems he doesn’t care about the remaining fans that have stuck with him through controversy after controversy. As a fan of Ye myself, I think the direction he is going in is awful, and if he continues to do so, it will start to affect how fans view his past works that deserve merit. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like this pretending to finish the album in real-time is going away anytime soon. There are already leaks from “Vultures 3” surfacing, which I find insane as little to no changes have been made to “Vultures 2” after almost a month of streaming. I am hoping Ye is just saving his creative energy for his projects, but I doubt this is the case. If you have yet to listen to this album, do yourself a favor and listen to any other Ye album released before 2021.
2/10.