mgk and Wiz Khalifa’s blog era boyz Is the Mixtape Their 2010 Selves Were Owed

mgk and Wiz Khalifa dropped blog era boyz at midnight Friday and it’s exactly what the title promises. Nine tracks, 26 minutes, no features, no pop-punk, no Travis Barker, no Cardo, no Hit-Boy. The whole project is built on Wiz’s longtime Taylor Gang producer Sledgren working hand in hand with mgk’s EST 19XX in-house team (SlimXX, BazeXX, No Love For The Middle Child) for the first time on record. That’s the thesis. Two camps that grew up sampling each other’s DatPiff uploads, finally on the same beats.

If you didn’t live the 2010-2013 stretch when Kush & Orange Juice was on every iPod and Lace Up was the Cleveland kid’s calling card, the framing might feel like nostalgia bait. It isn’t. It’s a corrective. mgk has spent the last five years making pop-punk records with one foot in heartland rock and his rap audience went somewhere else. Wiz has been dropping mixtapes at a Wiz-Khalifa-prolific clip (Khaotic in January, Girls Love Horses in February, Kush + Orange Juice 2 last spring) but never quite pulling at the era that made him. blog era boyz is both of them deciding to stop drifting.

The name is the joke. Wiz teased the project on Pat McAfee back in April as "BEB" and refused to say what it stood for. They told fans it was "Big Enormous Burger." Everyone knew. When they finally dropped the title on May 20, it landed lowercase with a "z" on the end, which is its own punchline. The site at blogeraboyz.com is built to look like a 2011 Pigeons & Planes post. If you’re under 25 you might not get the reference. That’s fine, you weren’t supposed to.

The Sound

The whole thing breathes. "girl next door" leads with a Sweet Trip sample that turns the song into a hazy late-night dream-pop loop. "everything tatted" runs Wiz’s Star Power-era body-art bars over a Sledgren beat that sounds like it could have leaked off DatPiff in 2011. "MPH" is the most-tweeted-about song on the tape because of the "new bitch with matching acrylics" line, but the rapping is the actual story. Both of them are in pocket. mgk hasn’t sounded this comfortable on rap drums since Tickets to My Downfall.

"fill my pockets" is the one that hits hardest if you’re paying attention. mgk: "I got rich and that ain’t fix shit cause the whole world know me and I’m still lonely." Wiz floats around him with money-as-emptiness Taylor Gang bars. It’s also the only track on the project where you can clearly hear mgk processing the last two years of his actual life. Daughter, breakup, dad, the whole stack.

The Tracks That Matter

"family > everything" sets the thesis. "everything tatted" sells it with a video full of Bam Margera, Ty Dolla $ign, Mod Sun, and Boo Johnson. "MPH" will be the song everyone fights about for a week and then absorbs. "stoned" is the most direct callback to "Mind of a Stoner" since 2013. "girl next door" is the obvious single and it has a real hook. "fiberglass" closes the tape and feels like the kind of song you don’t notice the first time and end up with on repeat by week three.

The Live Context

If you saw the Lost Americana Tour in the past week you already heard half of this project. mgk has been bringing Wiz back out for a three-song block in the middle of his set, "girl next door" into "everything tatted" into "Mind of a Stoner." On May 16 in Concord, setlist.fm logged "everything tatted" as "Unreleased mgk x Wiz Khalifa song." It’s released now. The rest of the summer tour is going to feel different.

The Verdict

blog era boyz isn’t trying to be anyone’s album of the year. It’s two rappers who haven’t really worked together since 2013 cutting a 26-minute mixtape that sounds like they hung out for a weekend and made the project the 2010 versions of themselves were owed. That’s the entire pitch and it works. The lack of features, the short runtime, the EST + Taylor Gang production split, the lowercase z on the title, all of it is the same call: this is what we should have made twelve years ago, here it is now.

If you stopped paying attention to either of these guys at some point in the last five years, this is the one that brings you back.

Stream blog era boyz on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you listen.