Juice WRLD’s Final Album: How Leaks, Fans and Delays Brought His Career to a Close

variety.com:

Steven J. Horowitz Senior Music Writer For obvious reasons, posthumous albums are always a challenge to create. And from Jimi Hendrix to Nat King Cole to Tupac, some have been successful commercially and creatively — others, not so much.

But when Lil Bibby tweeted, “The Party Never Ends,” in May 2021, he didn’t think the project he was teasing — the third and final posthumous album from genre-bending rapper Juice WRLD — would take three years to assemble. “I just wanted it to be perfect,” says Brandon Dickinson, aka Lil Bibby, who formed the label Grade A Productions with his brother George “G-Money” Dickinson in 2017 after hearing Juice’s breakthrough hit “Lucid Dreams” on SoundCloud. “This last one, I just wanted it to be as good as the first ones.” “The Party Never Ends,” releasing on Nov.

29 after a string of delays, is the coda on a career cut short after Juice WRLD died of an accidental overdose in 2019 at 21.

In his fleeting time as a recording artist — his death came a year and a half after “Lucid Dreams” became a definitive cornerstone of SoundCloud rap — he built the type of cachet that artists spend years pursuing, amassing a fan base captivated by his singsong flow and raw meditations on mortality and drug addiction.