Breathing, Agency, and Other Superpowers Drive Isaiah Rashad’s Latest Chapter | It’s Been Awful
May 14, 2026 | Evan Dale
Omar Jones
There’s surely a lot that Isaiah Rashad is grateful for. His talent, his success, the continued support of his friends, family, and fans. But that doesn’t mean it’s all been good. There have been hurdles. Through his path from Chattanooga to Top Dawg Entertainment, and in all the years since, well-documented battles with - amongst other things - wavering sobriety have imparted more than speed bumps on his journey. At times, he’s been on top of hip-hop – on top of music in a lot of ways. At other moments, it’s been awful. Volatility has defined his personal experience with music, fame, and growth. Through the same timeline, however, the fan experience has been record after record that – even through the rapper’s lows – have represented unyielding and freewheeling musical highpoints in a stylistic space that so often drowns in the monotony of trends. Through the good and the bad, Isaiah Rashad has always delivered something new, exciting, and entirely unrepeatable. Even when weighed against prior versions of himself, his music continues to differentiate and evolve, a mirror held up to his own meandering personal life.
With It’s Been Awful, he’s doing the same – in a new way, of course – and yet in a way that feels representative of his personal and artistic paths converging and diverging over and over again to this point. No one’s journey is without its challenges – Isaiah Rashad is simply great at turning his lived experiences into something transferably experiential to anyone listening. He’s also likely had higher highs and lower lows than the vast majority of us will ever experience. Here, he turns to the things he’s grateful for – breathing, agency, and other often-overlooked superpowers – to balance a thesis on the range of his sound built atop a foundation of raw vulnerability.
Breathing // An air of effortlessness has always defined Isaiah Rashad’s music. From the moment Cilvia Demo introduced us all to his sound in 2014, there hasn’t been a moment where it’s felt like he’s been forcing it. He’s always been telling his own story, and telling it comes naturally to him. Whether through downtempo musings on love and lust, high-energy exaltations of his days spent partying without an iota of concern, or coming to terms with the comedown from it all, it’s never felt like he’s breaking a sweat to convince the music and the stories driving it to come to confluence.
When this, his fourth full-length project, began taking shape at the release of leading single, SAME SH!T, there was a moment where it seemed some higher, hyper entity had taken over Isaiah Rashad’s craft. He’s always had the hard-hitting heaters, and for three minutes, the track is exactly that. His raspy, head-nodding flow meditates – floats – over a ghostly, sample-fueled beat for a banger oozing of dark matter trap. And with the flip of the track to the next, BOY IN RED– where he’s joined by SZA – he unearths a warmly romantic sail through a bedroom R&B dream. Stylistically unrelated, the tracks fall into one another with grace for no other reason than Isaiah Rashad happens to be so unpredictable that the ends of his musical spectrum coalesce with only the effort of breath.
Omar Jones
Agency // His canon at large is a masterclass in sonic range. With each release, he adopts and makes his own new influences, nuances, and textures. Because of that – and because he simply has one of the more unique registers anywhere in music, to pair with a flow that ricochets from beat to beat in chaotic, albeit nimble cadence – his sound has never really been definable. He’s a prolific rapper, a detailed lyricist, and simultaneously a daring vocalist whose emotional breadth carries weight.
Where a track like SCARED 2 LOOK DOWN emanates from the same high-energy, yet still storytelling focused depths as SAME SH!T, its juxtaposition with a cut like the Dominic Fike featuring CAMERAS – which is a romantically inclined, soulfully joyful bit of nostalgia – would feel jarring for most other artists. But for Isaiah Rashad, who has the agency to maneuver stylistically in opposite directions within the framework of a single project, the two tracks help deep-dive into the complexities of the story he’s telling. We all contain multitudes, and Isaiah Rashad – through the example of the two tracks but consistent throughout the project at large – puts his on display via textural disparities.
Superpowers // It’s that knack to tie together what would be for nearly any other artist loose ends, that has always been what’s made Isaiah Rashad so different. You know it’s his track when you hear it, even though his music spans such broad sonic spaces. And you know his albums when you hear them because he somehow pulls all of the complexities together without ever sacrificing the authentic identity at its core. Somewhere in the triangulation of quick-firing poetics, slow-burning romantics, and deep diving therapy sessions, his sound always bleeds of an authenticity tethered not the musical styles he pulls from, but from himself and his experiences.
DO I LOOK HIGH? opens with a sample-strewn beat that feels like it could have been carved from the legendary hands of J Dilla. As Rashad’s meditative, distorted flow works its way across the track, the liquid effortlessness and the brash experimentation of it all don’t butt heads. Instead, it just works, even when played next to a track like 719 FREESTYLE. Closing out the album with the raw ingenuity of his own mind, Rashad brings it back to where it all began. A high-energy, addictive freestyle, 719 isn’t merely for rap bonafides or for carrying on a seeming TDE tradition of pulling in at least one freestyle into the bigger picture; it’s a moment of reflection for the immensely talented, equally troubled superstar to connect with his musical roots and his personal path.
Full circle, yet a continuation of his ever-unpredictable journey, It’s Been Awful is an equal parts inwardly reflective meditation, and outwardly wide-ranging cohesion manifest masterpiece.