There's a particular kind of patience that TDE fans have had to develop. Isaiah Rashad has now disappeared twice — once between 2016's “The Sun's Tirade” and 2021's “The House Is Burning,” and again for the five years that followed. Each time, the gap felt less like strategic mystique and more like something genuinely wrong. Which is why “It's Been Awful,” his third studio album released May 1 on TDE and Warner Records, lands differently than a typical comeback record. It's not a triumph lap. It's a reckoning.
The album's rollout told you exactly what you were getting into. In March, notecards began circulating online — received alongside orders from Top Dawg's website — with the words “It's Been Awful” on the front and a message on the back that read, essentially, as a quiet rebuke of everyone who wanted to watch Rashad fail. He reposted them on Instagram. By the time the official trailer dropped on April 7 and the lead single “Same Sh!t” hit on April 9, the emotional stakes were already set. This wasn't a rapper teasing a blockbuster. This was someone preparing to confess.
The 16-track album, running 54 minutes, was built with a production team anchored by Keem the Cipher and multi-role collaborator Julian Sintonia, who handled programming across much of the record and takes lead vocals on track eight, “Do I Look High?” The production creates what one reviewer accurately called a hazy, muted soundscape where pitched-down percussion meets warm electric piano. It's a sound that owes something to OutKast's “The Love Below” and something to Prince's quieter, more intimate work — both of which Rashad cited as reference points alongside Fousheé, whom he named as his single biggest inspiration for the album. The opener, “The New Sublime,” sets a dour tone immediately, Rashad soliciting prayers for his family and wrestling with the specter of relapse. “M.O.M” — short for “man on a mission” — picks the tempo up before “Same Sh!t” drops into 808-laden territory, the two tracks circling the same anxious center: family, hustle, the pressure of both.
The features are sparse and deliberate. SZA appears on “Boy in Red,” their sixth collaboration — a deceptively peppy track that carries real weight underneath. Dominic Fike lends melodic texture to “Cameras,” the album's most ethereal moment. Between those two poles, Rashad does most of the heavy lifting alone, and the subject matter earns the solitude. He traces addiction, the pull toward relapse, the compound damage of lust, childhood wounds, sexual identity — all of it laid out without the comfort of neat resolution. “Act Normal” confronts the 2022 incident when tapes of Rashad making out with men leaked online — the moment that forced a public reckoning with his sexuality and became, for his fanbase, a defining chapter in who he is as a person. “Ain't Givin' Up” references rehab. The album received a Metacritic score of 77, with critics largely landing on the same word: honest. Some listeners have noted the 16-track runtime stretches the record's emotional bandwidth, that it could have been tighter at ten songs. That's a fair point. But it also misses something: the sprawl is part of what makes “It's Been Awful” feel like a document rather than a product.
Rashad has described the album as a “sultry southern mix” with “a deep sense of intimacy,” pulling from twangy rock, psychedelia, and trunk-rattling Southern rap in the same breath. That's not an exaggeration, and it's not a genre salad — it's more like the sound of someone who grew up on OutKast's “Stankonia” and Too $hort in equal measure finally letting both of those things coexist. He performed a set at Coachella's Do LaB stage in April before the album even dropped, which felt right — the Do LaB is where artists go when the main stages aren't the point. After the album's release, Rashad sat down with The Breakfast Club on May 5 and identified himself as bisexual — a statement that recontextualized “Boy in Red” and “Act Normal” without reducing either to a single reading. It's worth noting that Rashad had previously described himself as “sexually fluid” in a 2022 interview with Joe Budden, so this was less a sudden revelation than a clarification that had been building for years. The songs were already doing their work before the interview. That's what good music does.
“It's Been Awful” is the kind of record that rewards the people who never stopped paying attention. Not because it's a masterpiece — it isn't, quite — but because it's genuinely, uncomfortably real in a way that most rap albums in 2026 are not. Rashad didn't make a comeback record. He made a confessional, and he made it in a room where he could be honest. That's rarer than it sounds.
