The World Is Yours

For many years, Rio Da Yung OG was—and maybe still is—the most casually hysterical rapper alive. Beginning in 2019, the Flint, Michigan, native rapped with more or less the same flows and the same rhyme schemes on over a dozen projects straight and never grew boring. His humor, at once cartoonishly absurd and ghoulishly authentic, is the type that makes you cup your mouth and hold your breath so you don’t risk laughing over the next punchline. Of all the Michigan street rappers whose hookless strings of devilishly clever non sequiturs lifted the nation’s spirits during lockdown, Rio may be the most consistently entertaining. Between 2021 and 2024, a steady drip of archival material held fans over while Rio served nearly four years of a five-year prison sentence. The music he’s released since being freed has included some of his strongest material yet—but also some of his weakest.

On 2025’s remarkably gripping F.L.I.N.T. (Feeling Like I’m Not Through), Rio embodied the album’s title by proving that he had the capacity to evolve beyond his low-stakes shit-talking and paint a more nuanced self-portrait. The gut-busting bars in “Different Music” were solemnly interrupted by Rio’s admission that he cried in prison after losing a string of family and friends. One of his best tracks to date, “Another Story,” was a stream-of-conscious recounting of the larger-than-life traumas he collected throughout his youth. These stray moments of vulnerability only offered brief glimpses at Rio’s psychic wounds, but they added crucial context to his story. The raunchy punchlines hit harder when you know the guy has been through all of that and still has a sense of humor.

On The World Is Yours, Rio’s clumsy follow-up to the magnificent F.L.I.N.T., the 32-year-old’s signature wit and newfound sensitivity are dampened by a palpable exhaustion that permeates most of the 59-minute affair. Despite being released via his own independent label, M.I.N.E. Entertainment, The World Is Yours is built like a major-label album that’s hampered by ill-fitting guest features and forced deviations from the artist’s comfort zone. Some of the many drop-in visitors, like the quick-talking New York MC Judah Weston and Rio’s longtime Michigan compatriot YN Jay, are perfectly suited for the nervy piano beats that Rio’s made a whole career spitting bullshit over. Other cameos, like Trippie Redd’s rage squawks on the interminable Atlanta trap pastiche “Laced Blunts,” or Rylo Rodriguez’s Auto-Tuned moans on the melodramatic pain-rap ballad “Easter Pink,” clash horribly with Rio’s loquacious chatter.

Rio’s been rapping over different variations of the same Wayne616 and BEATSBYSAV instrumentals for the better part of a decade, so it’s understandable that he finally wants to switch things up. It’s just a shame that most of these swerves feel less like sincere experiments than they do half-hearted obligations to try something fresh just for the sake of it. On “Who Did the Body,” a Truebeatzz-produced trap duet with Monaleo, Rio struggles to find the pocket within the first few bars and stumbles awkwardly for the rest of the song. Ditto on “Laced Blunts,” where he begins by amusingly mimicking a Travis Scott inflection before giving up the bit and lazily babbling about pints of Actavis and AR pistols without his usual fire under the hood. He’s a little more comfortable on the jock-rocky “Douche Bag,” but the song’s nu-metal guitar sample is so unbearably cheap that it makes the garishly synthetic guitars on Music, Fashion, Film sound crisper than Clapton riffs.

There are some musical clunkers on The World Is Yours, but the album’s unevenness is mostly due to Rio’s performances. For the first time in his career, he sounds worn down both mentally and physically, which makes sense when you consider last year’s relentless touring schedule, his consistently prolific output, and all the other personal shit he’s been through. You can hear the toll life’s taken on him from the start of “Be Like Me,” the album’s paranoid and funereal opener, where Rio’s mucus-y voice sounds especially scratchy and strained. Rio addresses the frog in his throat on “Lost My Voice,” where he wearily attributes his sickly croak to an excessive lifestyle of “calling hits” and “talking shit.” Clearly, there are other things on his mind, too. “Ain’t seen my kids in two weeks, I can’t crack a smile,” he raps, with an abnormal air of defeat.

Ironically, it’s the physical decay of Rio’s voice, rather than any surface-level genre exercise, that yields the most interesting evolutions on The World Is Yours. In album highlight “Lemme Guess,” his hoarse delivery complements the beat’s drearily grim pulse, and when he does muster up the enthusiasm to crack a cackle-worthy (if hackneyed) zinger (“I’m waiting for my lawyer to roll up, he at a bar mitzvah”) it’s somehow even funnier that it sounds like those could be his dying words. His slumped-over posture is less funny during flashes of pained honesty, like being embarrassed to tell his mom he drinks a pint of lean a day (“Easter Pink”) or the line in “Be Like Me” where he bleakly muses that he’d rather “die from taking pills like my auntie” than meet a different, more violent demise.

The album’s incoherent sequencing prevents The World Is Yours from finding the fluid groove that F.L.I.N.T. had, despite a handful of individual tracks where Rio sounds memorably alive. When he’s locked in over a classic Michigan thumper, he can sound as energized as ever: nimble, perky, doling out outlandishly specific insults like, “Bitch booty got a weird shape like a bag of biscuits,” (“100% Alcohol”). For every banger, though, there’s another throwaway where Rio’s exhaustion makes him sound like his heart’s not in it. The title of his last album, Feeling Like I’m Not Through, personified the tenacity of the rapping within. The World Is Yours, however, doesn’t embody the hustler verve of the Scarface quote it’s referencing, nor the other grindset rap classics that also borrow the line’s hungry sentiment. Rio just sounds tired, and here, The World Is Yours feels like his way of saying, “go ahead, you can have it.”