With the five-year anniversary of Jarad Anthony Higgins’ passing, who is better known as Juice WRLD, coming up in just a few days, I listened to his newly-released and third posthumous album, “The Party Never Ends.”
I’ve been listening to Juice ever since he released his first studio album, “Goodbye and Good Riddance,” in 2018, and I still think that his best album is either that debut piece or his first posthumous album, “Legends Never Die.” This isn’t to say that “The Party Never Ends” is a bad album, but it is not his strongest work. In fairness, this unfortunately may not be his fault due to his passing from an accidental overdose in late 2019.
Juice always used his music as a way to describe love, women and drugs, and he followed this theme in “TPNE.” In my personal opinion, it gets repetitive in the album this time around. Maybe I have matured from my early high school days when everyone was going crazy when “GAGR” was released. The continuous talk about drugs may rub me the wrong way because of his death as well, and knowing he would overdose just months after recording makes this a harder listen. “Oxycodone numbs my soul, makes me whole” is the first line of the appropriately named “Oxycodone” in which Juice talks about heartbreak and pills.
Juice is known for his sad and melodic rap, which helped him explode on the scene in 2018 with “Lucid Dreams.” This year’s album goes back and forth between his normal flow and his sadder rap, which is showcased in “Party By Myself.” I’m a fan of the slower, more chill flow as it’s a nice way to be calm yet listen to his music. “Oxycodone,” as I mentioned earlier, is another edition of the slower flow that I enjoyed, and although parts of the song are sad and radiate Higgins’ drug use, I sympathize with the talk about heartbreak.
With the album obviously unfinished when Juice passed away, there are multiple features to fill the cracks. Offset, Nicki Minaj, Fall Out Boy and Eminem feature on “TPNE” with Minaj and E’s songs releasing before the full album. Eminem also co-produced the album and strays away from his fairly famous flow.
My favorite song on the album, for the time being, is “Misfit,” where Juice raps about having “one main girl” and that he does not fit in. The flow is slower, yet not to the level of “Party By Myself” and it’s clearly a more sentimental song than some of the others. He is in a state of heartbreak where he only wants one woman and not multiple.
Overall, this album is not my favorite from Juice but I am thankful we got one final album from the 2019 Billboard Top New Artist Winner. The fifth and supposed final album from Higgins gets a 6.5/10 but I will continuously rotate some of the songs from “The Party Never Ends” into my playlists along with some of his older music, which is so nationally recognized.