The Party Never Ends

Perhaps it’s true that more unreleased music from the late Juice WRLD is never a bad thing, particularly for fans who grew up alongside the beloved rapper’s melancholy melodies. His third (and ostensibly final) posthumous album, released just shy of the five-year anniversary of his tragic death in 2019, fills the void with 18 more tracks of misfit music. The themes of <i>The Party Never Ends</i> are familiar: doomed love, vicious cycles, numbing out and fighting demons, sung in an anguished warble over emo-inflected trap beats. But it’s profoundly chilling to hear Juice deliver lines like “Oxycodone knows my soul, makes me whole/Death melodies on my stereo” (“Oxycodone”), or when he concludes on “Misfit”, “I was pretty cool in my last life.” Nor does it feel much like a party when Eminem, one of Juice’s biggest inspirations, recounts his own struggles with addiction on “Lace It”: “Do not think I take it for granted that I’m still here, synthetic heroin, you/Tried to kill me, then you murdered Jarad, didn’t you?” Then he warns young listeners: “I ain’t lecturing you but, man, just be careful.”