Playboi Carti Premieres New Music & Brings Out Opium During His Summer Smash Set

Playboi Carti was one of the headliners for Lyrical Lemonade’s Summer Smash Festival this weekend, particularly on Saturday (June 15), and it was even more wild and chaotic than you’d expect in the best way. The crowd was absolutely electric, he went through his recent non-streaming singles for the first time in a live performance setting (excluding VULTURES listening parties), and he even brought out the rest of his Opium crew, including Ken Carson and Destroy Lonely. The Atlanta rapper had some leaks emerge recently, particularly one with Travis Scott, but more importantly, he took matters into his own hands. Reportedly, he debuted two unreleased tracks during this set.

Furthermore, a clip of one of these tracks (reportedly titled “ALL RED”) features DJ Swamp Izzo, who claimed over the weekend that Playboi Carti would drop something on Saturday. While that didn’t end up manifesting officially, at least this performance refueled a lot of hype and hope concerning his next album. As far as the sound of it, it’s a bit more bombastic and bouncy than the other singles… or at least, from what we can tell in the distorted and choppy clip below. We’ll take anything we can get at this point, and we’re sure there are cleaner leaks online.

However, this excitement around Playboi Carti’s new era hasn’t taken away any interest or mystique behind what we’ve already received from him. For example, fans comically reacted to audio of his raw ad-libs, something that contextualizes his tracks in a pretty interesting manner. Some folks might not consider what goes into a recording process, especially for something so volatile and energetic. Even though it just sounds funny at face value, it’s always compelling to see how a track came together and how they masked that process with magic.

Of course, take all this with a massive, long-standing, and exceedingly frustrating grain of salt. Playboi Carti’s made promises before that never came to fruition, and it’s clear that there are a lot of factors in the album’s release that might not have much to do with the artist himself. But whenever he does have something big in the public eye, he always shows out and usually offers at least something new for fans to chew on. So we’ll sit patiently until a drop lets us loose in the pits.