Westside Gunn has hit a creative wall. And Then You Pray For Me is not only a disappointing sequel to 2020’s Pray for Paris, but a forgettable and lackluster album entirely, with 81 minutes of music but not a minute I’ll come back to.

It’s not that it necessarily sounds bad, but it suffers from the sonic fatigue and creative dull that Westside Gunn has fallen into following the terrific releases of Pray for Paris and HWH 8. In a time where artists are expected to constantly evolve, a product of the streaming era, Westside Gunn’s one-dimensional boom-bap and soul-sample playbook has been slowly arising as a major criticism of him. Coming off of a feature on Travis Scott’s Utopia and a nearly one year hiatus after the underwhelming HWH 10, I had hoped Westside Gunn would come back revitalized. There’s an attempt, but it falls flat. 

Each song of And Then You Pray For Me falls into one of two categories: decent but redundant, or fresh but poorly-executed. Westside Gunn disperses these two types of songs over a 21 song tracklist and fails to bring to the table anything exceptional, nothing that’ll keep me coming back like its predecessor Pray for Paris did.

In the camp of songs that were good but forgettable, Babylon Bis featuring Stove God Cooks, in particular, was one of my favorite listens of the album. It sports an elegant piano beat and smooth flow that made me a fan of Gunn. But even as I enjoyed it, it didn’t stand out to me. There’s a dozen other Westside Gunn songs that sound like it. In the camp of songs that were fresh but poorly-executed, 1989, also featuring Stove God Cooks, features an ear-grating trap beat with mismatched vocals from Gunn. 

Westside Gunn’s 2020 album Pray for Paris was a personal classic. Coming out during the monotonous months of COVID-19 in which many album releases were pushed back and rescheduled, Pray for Paris was something great, and most importantly, something exciting. It is a testament to the downward trajectory Gunn has spiraled down that the sequel is anything but.