Premature Evaluation: A$AP Rocky Don’t Be Dumb

I expected a mess. The last A$AP Rocky album was a mess, and that was almost eight years ago. Rocky's 2018 album Testing had lots of cool sounds and ideas, but it didn't have the snarling, swaggering urgency or the cohesive sense of vision that Rocky brought to his early records. In the time since Testing, Rocky shacked up with one of the most famous women on the planet and fathered three kids. He got briefly locked up in Sweden and almost locked up in the US. He only just recently got his acting career up and running with a couple of impressive turns in fall 2025 movies. He released untold numbers of random non-starter singles. He's been busy.

Over the past few years, Rocky give interviews about his in-process album, claiming that he was making the whole thing with Morrissey or whatever, and then everything would get pushed back again. So it feels like a small miracle that Rocky's long-promised Don't Be Dumb actually exists now, that it's not a complete mess. It's messy, but it's not a complete mess.

Among many other things, Don't Be Dumb serves as a testament to the durability of A$AP Rocky's entire approach and persona, even in the absence of actual records from the man. Fifteen years ago, Rocky came into the game as an insurgent knucklehead fashionista, a street hipster who'd immersed himself in rap history and fashioned himself as a Tumblr-core human melting pot of past underground sounds and styles. His music could be hard and dreamy and ignorant and sophisticated, and he had the personal charisma to pull it all together.

All these years on, rappers are still trying to dress and move like Rocky did when he first arrived. Rocky's sound was a psychedelic blur of '90s and '00s currents and subgenres, so he works as a kind of human link in the chain between that stuff and the current chaos of the rage-rap world. (Playboi Carti, the man who embodies that shift, started out as a Rocky protege and is still signed to his label.) The flashy moshpit physicality of Rocky's early live shows has supersized itself into the entire Rolling Loud industrial complex. Pretenders like Travis Scott took off with Rocky's curated-collage style and became giant stars. Even with all that time away, Rocky has never really felt absent. So it's striking when Rocky really hits his pocket on Don't Be Dumb. It's like: Oh right, this guy.

Some of it is just pure flow. As a rapper, A$AP Rocky knows what the fuck he's doing. There are plenty of awkward lyrics on Don't Be Dumb, and Rocky is never going to dazzle you with his wordplay or his wisdom. But as a technician and a stylist, he's still elite. I hear starpower just in the grain of his voice. He switches registers and patterns up all over Don't Be Dumb, to the point where, on first listen, I sometimes thought I was listening to a guest-rapper whose voice I didn't recognize. But even when pushing his voice to the point where it's not really recognizable, he always sounds good.

The first half of Don't Be Dumb is mostly dedicated to the reckless stoner music that first brought Rocky to the game. The single "Helicopter" is a nice example. The frantic video almost obscures how it's just a tense, tough, solid rap tune. It's easy to imagine what one of Playboi Carti's yipping brainrot disciples would do with its chattering beat, but Rocky hits a double-time bounce flow and moonwalks over it. The lyrics don't all work. Rocky blasts people who "do anything for a blue check," as if anyone still thinks social media verification is cool. But he gets over on pure delivery, and it's refreshing just to hear someone bring that base-level competence to the party.

On other moments, Rocky goes beyond base-level competence. "Stole Ya Flow," which seems to be directed at Drake and/or Travis Scott, is a corroded monster of a track that shows Rocky at his imperious best. It's one of many times where he fumes about all the people who don't give him proper credit for setting trends. That anger brings something out of Rocky. "Stop Snitching," seemingly inspired by Rocky's recent legal issues with former friend A$AP Relli, is even nastier, and it finds Rocky joining forces with deranged Houston underground staple Sauce Walka, who provides the same antisocial energy-burst that ScHoolboy Q bought to past Rocky records.

Even in the all-rap first half, Rocky attempts to provide a more mature image of himself, largely though the use of back-to-back love songs. Results vary. The Brent Faiyaz collab "Stay Here 4 Life" is a more textured version of the old, clichéd rap&B love song. It's fine, but it's a little boring. From there, though, Rocky goes straight from a rant about how he's never been a player into "Playa," a gurgly-smooth '80s-funk pastiche that makes Rocky sound impossibly cool.

Don't Be Dumb would be a really good rap record if it kept going forward from there, but Rocky takes it in different directions instead, leading into that territory with "STFU," a pretty-fun industrial rave freakout recorded with unknown-to-me California group Slay Squad. (Slay Squad member Brahim Gousse says, "They say Haitians eating cats, I make sure my dogs eat," and that might be the hardest line on the whole record.) I was nervous the first time I heard the hazy-guitar indie-pop breakup song "Punk Rocky," and I still think it's one of the weakest tracks here. But there's something endearing about Rocky going back to that Testing-style sprawl even after seeing how that record was received.

The more experimental stuff is a mixed bag, but it's pretty fun. "Air Force (Black DeMarco)" is squirming, anxious rage music that's as effective as it his hectic, and I laugh out loud when Rocky says, "I be with ya bitch late night, James Corden." (On the New York Times Popcast, Rocky confirms that the title is a Mac DeMarco shout out, and he says that he recorded music during COVID with DeMarco, Ariel Pink, and John Maus but that it never came out.) "Whiskey (Release Me)" has sleepy backup vocals from Damon Albarn and a quick outro adlib from Westside Gunn, presumably just so that Rocky can brag that he put those guys on a track together.

On the other hand, "Robbery" is an extremely silly experiment that nobody else would've even attempted. Over a sample of Thelonious Monk's version of Duke Ellington's "Caravan," Rocky and Doechii turn rap into costume-party hepcat patter. A full album of this would be unbearable, but one song of it is a good time. Closing track "The End," the only song ever to feature both Will.I.Am and Jessica Pratt, is another good time. Will.I.Am's verse ("I saw the Bible upside down to-day/ The only King James they know now is 2K") is dumber than dirt, but I like how its bleeps and hums give way to Pratt's soft incantation of the hook, her fingers audibly squeaking on guitar strings. (The 2024 Rocky/Pratt collab "Hijack" was the best of the nonstarter Don't Be Dumb singles, so it's cool that she still made it onto the final product.)

I like the way Don't Be Dumb nods back to Rocky's past without ever sounding like revivalism. I'm pretty sure that the first half of "Don't Be Dumb/Trip Baby" is Rocky's old comrade Clams Casino flipping a Clairo sample. It sounds cool as hell, and it would sound even cooler if Rocky didn't seem to be falling asleep on the track. One of the producers of the churning bonus song "SWAT Team" is SpaceGhostPurrp, an even older Rocky comrade who fell out with him many years ago. The other bonus track, "Fish N Steak (What It Is)," is only the latest entry in the long bromance between Rocky and Tyler, The Creator. Once again, those guys bring out the best in each other. Tyler's entire verse is just about feeling great while driving, and you should try to hear it on car speakers at your closest convenience.

Don't Be Dumb is 17 tracks and one hour long, and it never outlasts its welcome. There's plenty of stuff on there that doesn't really work, but even those moments have a charming, adventurous spirit to them. There's also plenty of stuff on here that does really hit, stuff that scratches itches that most of Rocky's peers have stopped even trying to reach. After all that time away, Don't Be Dumb mostly reestablishes A$AP Rocky as an A-list rap artist who gives a shit about artistry. Rocky has already called it a "masterpiece." It's not that, but it's a fun listen, and that's really all I need it to be.

Don't Be Dumb is out now on AWGE/A$AP Worldwide/RCA.