QRÖMELIFE

Time for more Pharrell music made on his lunch break. Ever since 2023, when he was handpicked to succeed the late Virgil Abloh as the men’s creative director at Louis Vuitton, his beats have seemed like a contractually obligated marketing tool to sell more clothes. I’m surprised the music doesn’t come with a QR code and a Lego figure from Piece by Piece. Sure, he’s far from the first artist to use their status as an all-time great to get you to buy shit, but there’s a big difference between slinging tees out of a merch stand and being the public face of a billion-dollar empire temporarily smitten by the financial implications of hip-hop cool.

Admittedly, it wouldn’t matter nearly as much if modern Pharrell beats didn’t sound like AI’d old Pharrell beats—but they do. The nadir of this era is Quavo’s new album, QRÖMELIFE, entirely produced by Pharrell with the care and attention to detail of a cameras-off Zoom meeting. If these stock ATL trap beats glitzed up with embarrassingly basic Latin pop flourishes and swagless funk weren’t being advertised as Pharrell instrumentals, I wouldn’t be able to tell. And still I barely believe he really put his name on the tin-can drums of “HAOYU DEWDAT” or the explosive diarrhea 808s of “Backwards,” a T.I.-assisted strip club joint that sounds like it would go crazier at the early bird hours of a Denny’s than Magic City.

Quavo’s been set up to fail. It feels like he either doesn’t realize or doesn’t care that he’s being used as a prop in Pharrell’s ascent into the billionaire class. None of the Migos have ever held my attention over a full–length solo album, but at least those past projects didn’t feel like attending a networking event. It doesn’t help that about half of QRÖMELIFE’s songs shoehorn in Louis Vuitton references, including “BA,” a track in honor of Bernard Arnault, one of the 15 or so richest people on Earth and one of P’s bosses over at LVMH. Here we have Future being roped into doing “Bernard Arnault!” ad-libs as Quavo sleepwalks through the triplet flow. Seems like something they could have saved for the company ski trip.

Quavo has rarely sounded less inspired, which I should’ve expected when I saw the word-salad definition of QRÖMELIFE he posted to Twitter. “Its a LIFESTYLE We all got chromosomes,” he wrote. “You spend most of your life looking for what made u special not knowing u got it in you take a look at yourself nd realize when go thru challenges U are protected in this outter of layer of QRÖME.” I’m not sure of the connection between that statement and the album itself, where he can hardly scrape together any memorable lines or flows. It’s such a nothingburger that it’s hard to even rag on the lobotomized take on a Mr. Collipark-style twerk jam on “Trance (Walk It Down)” or the wannabe TikTok GRWM video trend “Thick in the Mirror.” The lone standout “Hit-A-Lik” captures the funk the rest of the album doesn’t in Pharrell’s flickering bassline, which almost reminds me of Erick Sermon’s Shaft flip on Jigga’s “Reservoir Dogs.” Quavo, for a moment, is boogying like that generation of ’80s MCs who grew up on James Brown.

The famous colleagues who’ve shown up for the open bar and Louis gift bags don’t add much. Lil Baby’s melodies are on autopilot for “Ball My Love,” a by-the-numbers tricking ballad where an Auto-Tuned Quavo almost impressively can’t come up with a single notable detail about his girl. Everyone on “Baby Breath” was a lot better at rapping a decade ago, but I don’t mind—it’s like watching Ice Cube’s BIG3 basketball league on a hungover Sunday afternoon. P’s Baby Keem impression isn’t half bad. Tyler is having a little fun stretching his ad-libs like TisaKorean. A$AP Rocky is there. The Justin Timberlake-featuring “House Music” is a dumpster fire—the kind of private-equity house music that makes Honestly, Nevermind sound like Frankie Knuckles. “Music you buy houses with,” sings Quavo, breaking the fourth wall by revealing that they’re all here to fund their backyard tennis court renovations.

“Away” with Offset makes me wish I wasn’t shitting on QRÖMELIFE. There’s not anything particularly great about the song, other than that Quavo and Offset still bounce off each other well, even if they’re more like business acquaintances these days. It’s impossible to hear Quavo say, “I’m still a Migo” without thinking about Takeoff, and how important the Migos were to the last decade and a half of popular rap music. It’s probably the only song on the album that leaves me thinking more about Quavo than Pharrell—like there’s an alternate universe inside of this song where QRÖMELIFE is about Quavo’s mid-career pivot into a new-age Raheem the Dream, instead of a Pharrell business expense. Well, it’s not. Good luck on that promotion or whatever, P.