As soon as upon a time, Dangerous Bunny was the king of a motion referred to as Latin entice. Seven years in the past, earlier than the Rolling Stone covers and the Gucci advertisements with Kendall Jenner, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio was an audacious newcomer with labyrinthine graphics on his scalp and a closet stuffed with neon short-shorts. When his 2022 album Un Verano Sin Ti—a pop masterwork immersed in Caribbean humidity and dreamy glitz—arrived, it catapulted him into the general public eye like by no means earlier than. In case you weren’t already following Benito’s journey, UVST’s gushing sentimentality and industrial polish made it look like the Puerto Rican artist had at all times been the form of pop star who sells out stadiums. However acolytes know that Benito has lengthy been an elite rapper—even when he’s generally sidelined that ability on his jaunt to the highest.

Nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana, Dangerous Bunny’s fifth solo studio LP, capabilities like a rap homecoming. The album is bloated however thematically centered, centered on a few of Benito’s favourite subjects: fucking, counting racks, his love of Puerto Rico. As he embraces the insouciant recklessness and unabashed horniness that enamored the globe, some would possibly rejoice that El Conejo Malo has returned to his roots. Although he’s preternaturally humorous and steadily debonair, solely a portion of those songs strategy the vim and vigor of his generation-defining anthems.

Nadie sabe involves life when Benito is deliberately provocative or artfully humorous. His smutty wisecracks produce laugh-out-loud gems: On the salacious “Baticano,” he invokes Teletubby characters in a rhyme about placing his pinky in a girl’s ass and making like to her the place she “pees” and “poops.” On “Fina,” he brags about his dick being bald and big-headed, just like the four-year-old cartoon character Caillou. “Thunder y Lightning” is a gritty drill howl, with Benito and visitor Eladio Carrión going bar for bar as they stunt by deep-cut Puerto Rican sports activities references. When the music ends, Benito takes a jab at former inventive companion J Balvin for being too infatuated with success, noting that he’s “associates with all people.”

The antics are entertaining, and embody the cavalier goofiness that has set Dangerous Bunny aside in an business stuffed with high-gloss acts with little to say. However many songs lack the sophistication and structural complexity of his entice epics. Opener “Nadie Sabe” is a Drake-adjacent lament on celeb insecurity, whereas “Hibiki,” “Gracias Por Nada,” and “Child Nueva” are marred by unimaginative flexing and empty kiss-offs. Benito often does every thing with a peerless sense of panache and individuality—and a considerate eye for the problems affecting his homeland—so it feels uncharacteristic for him to be preoccupied with such prosaic issues. Even Benito himself appears to acknowledge this: On the spotlight “Los Pits,” which remembers Jay-Z’s realization in “Second of Readability,” he claims that he may be “rapping about extra profound points, however the checks arrive and confuse me.”