Shaun Rodgers
Staff Writer
With Hits Daily Double projecting over 100 million streams in its first week and sales estimates between 125,000 and 150,000 album-equivalent units, Cardi B’s “Am I the Drama?” arrives with numbers as big as its hype.
After seven years of anticipation and sky-high expectations, her sophomore album should have been a triumphant return, an album to reassert her dominance and silence doubters. Instead, it’s an overstuffed, unfocused, and uneven project that proves bigger isn’t always better.
The first issue is that listeners must press play on 23 tracks, totaling 70 minutes. The bloat is undeniable. Instead of curating her best work, Cardi seems intent on throwing everything at the wall, hoping for anything to stick. Sure, fans get more content, but more does not equal better—the result is a drag of an album that loses momentum almost as quickly as it builds it.
The lazy decision to tack on five-year-old tracks like “WAP” and “Up” feels like a cheap add-on. They do not align with the emotional theme Cardi tries to establish, and their presence only underscores how much fresher her older material sounds compared to some of the new tracks. Instead of boosting the project, they underscore its unevenness.
Lyrically, Cardi is at her sharpest when she’s in attack mode, but even that strength becomes a weakness here. Diss after diss, the album begins to feel more like a running Instagram beef than a cohesive record. Yes, it’s entertaining to hear her unload on rivals like Ice Spice, BIA, and JT, but when every other track circles back to the same playground fights, the impact dulls.
Cardi does attempt to show vulnerability, and to her credit, it adds some dimension to the project. “Man of Your Word” and “Shower Tears” peel back the boldness to explore heartbreak and betrayal. These moments could have been standouts, but they’re dragged down by bland production and clunky hooks. What should be gut punches end up feeling like half-baked attempts at depth.
Production across the album is glossy and expensive, but inconsistent. Trap, Latin rhythms, polished pop-rap, it’s all here. That diversity could have worked if curated with intention, but instead, it feels scattershot, as if Cardi wanted to cover every lane at once. The result is an album without a clear sonic identity.
Then we circle back to the elephant in the room, which is the recycling of “WAP” and “Up.” Yes, those songs were cultural steamrollers, but they belong to a different era. Shoving them into this project years later is the musical equivalent of reheating leftovers and calling it a new meal. It inflates the tracklist while cheapening the album’s identity, making it feel like Cardi couldn’t generate enough fresh material to carry the project on its own. For an artist of her caliber, that’s disappointing.
There are undeniable bright spots. “Pretty & Petty” has a hook tailor-made for TikTok, “Bodega Baddie” oozes charisma, and even the flawed attempts at vulnerability show Cardi’s willingness to evolve. Her personality alone keeps the album from sinking completely; she remains funny, magnetic, and raw in ways that most rappers can’t replicate. But those flashes of brilliance are buried.
“Am I the Drama?” feels lazy in its construction. It’s too long, too scattered, and too reliant on the ghosts of past hits. Instead of pushing herself forward, Cardi pads the album with nostalgia and spectacle. She hasn’t lost her edge, but this album proves she hasn’t sharpened it either.
This album deserves a 3.5 out of 10. A bloated, padded project weighed down by filler and old material, with just enough sparks of Cardi’s talent to remind you why you cared in the first place.
