Key Glock has never been a rapper who promises growth. He promises consistency, which is a different thing and, on his own terms, a harder thing to deliver. PROJECT X, which follows last year’s Glockaveli, is 20 tracks and 46 minutes of a man doing the one thing he does better than almost anyone working in Southern rap right now, and doing it so often across one sitting that the record eventually asks you to decide whether that’s a strength or a trap of its own.
Glock, born Markeyvius Cathey in South Memphis in 1997, has been building toward this kind of volume his whole career. He came up listening to Three 6 Mafia and Project Pat, got into trouble as a teenager that he’s never romanticized in interviews, and found his way into music through his cousin by marriage, Young Dolph, who signed him to his independent label, Paper Route Empire, in 2017. The two of them made two collaborative albums together before Dolph was murdered outside a Memphis bakery in November 2021, shot in broad daylight in an attack that shook the city. Glock has spent every album since carrying that loss without ever turning it into a gimmick. It shows up in flashes rather than full songs, which is mostly true again here.
What’s changed since Dolph’s death isn’t Glock’s subject matter so much as his position. Last year’s Glockaveli debuted in the Billboard 200’s Top 10 without a single guest feature, the biggest hip-hop debut of the year by that measure, and the single “She Ready” went gold and gave him his first number one at urban radio.
He’s no longer the cousin keeping a label afloat. He’s the label’s biggest star, and PROJECT X was rolled out like it. Paper Route Empire put branded Mercedes-Maybachs on display in multiple cities, ran a fan campaign through Vault.fm, and leaned hard into the title’s connection to the 2012 party movie of the same name, bringing two of its actors out for promotional appearances. It’s a rollout built for someone with nothing left to prove commercially, which makes the record itself a strange document: an artist at his most secure, rapping almost exclusively about how secure he is.
The album lost a piece of its own history the day before it came out. Tay Keith, who produced or co-produced several of its tracks and has worked with Glock for years, was found dead in his Nashville apartment on June 18th. He was 29. Police have said they don’t suspect foul play, and a cause of death hadn’t been revealed publicly as of release. It’s a loss that hangs over the record without being addressed on it, since the album was finished and locked before he died, but it’s worth knowing as you listen to the tracks he built, including “Face Down”, which carries some of his most recognizable drum work.
As for the album overall: Glock raps in a flat, unhurried cadence that rarely rises and rarely needs to, because the writing does the work the voice doesn’t. “Mannish”, “Hardknock”, and “Big 5” open the album in pure flex mode, stacking cars, jewellery, and a running tally of what he’s escaped to get here, and the best of them land a sharp detail inside the boast rather than just repeating it. “6AM” and “Drug Luv” move into after-hours territory, unhurried and a little hazy, the kind of tracks built for the comedown rather than the party itself. Tay Keith’s fingerprints are clearest on the harder cuts, “Face Down” and “Dummy” among them, where the drums do more talking than the hook does.
The record’s most replayable stretch comes when the tempo eases. “Mannie Fresh” leans into a bouncy, old New Orleans-style groove that suits Glock better than the harder material around it, and “Houston Flow” slows the bass down for something closer to a cruise than a flex. “Benzo” and “SRT Muzik” both work the car-as-status-symbol angle Glock has mined for years, and by this point in the tracklist it’s clear the album is less interested in narrative arc than in accumulation, one boast stacked on the next until the sheer volume becomes its own kind of statement.
The strongest material, though, is what slips through the armor. “Faded” finds him admitting, plainly, that he hasn’t kept a promise to himself about slowing down, and there’s real weariness under the bravado. “Seeing Red” opens on a man who isn’t in a good mood and doesn’t pretend otherwise. And the closer, “Reminiscing”, is where the album finally lets Dolph’s name surface directly, in a wash of gratitude and grief that doesn’t try to resolve either feeling. It’s the best song here because it’s the only one where Glock sounds like he’s working something out instead of simply reporting on a life already won.
Twenty tracks is a lot to ask anyone to sit through in one go, and a handful of these songs ride a single phrase or a single mood longer than they’ve earned. But Glock has built a career on knowing exactly what he is, and PROJECT X never pretends to be anything else. For the audience that’s followed him this far, that’s not a complaint. It’s the whole appeal.
