Pray for Paris

Musically, there are a number of things long familiar to fans of the Buffalo-hailing rap crew Griselda Records. There’s the fervent appreciation for both high fashion and professional wrestling; there’s the vivid and unending stories of local legacies built on the drug trade; and then, maybe most notably, there’s the incessant vocalized recreation of the sounds of guns firing (“Boom-boom-boom-boom,” goes a popular one). All of these are fully present on Westside Gunn’s Pray for Paris, an album which follows the crew’s hefty one-two punch of Gunn’s Hitler Wears Hermes 7 solo mixtape and their WWCD Griselda compilation at the end of 2019.

What fans might not have seen coming, however, are guest appearances from Wale, Joey Bada$$, and Tyler, The Creator (among others), along with production credits from Tyler (separate from the song he raps on), hip-hop legends DJ Muggs and DJ Premier, and one-time Vine star Jay Versace. Gunn is clearly aiming to up the creative ante with Pray for Paris, having commissioned the project’s cover art from friend and admitted Griselda fan Virgil Abloh. It’s a lot to process at face value, but it all works under the discerning vision of Gunn, who has often said he is less a rapper than a proper artist. But lest we forget—amongst the wealth of artistic flourishes the MC has included here—who Westside Gunn actually is, he reminds us in his signature high-pitched delivery on “No Vacancy” that he is still the man who will “blow your brains out in broad daylight.”