More Chaos’s “LiveLeak””>
Ken Carson. Photo via publicist
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Of Playboi Carti’s various signees and affiliates, Ken Carson is the clearest inheritor of the rage mantle, a statement that would have seemed laughable just a few short years ago. At the time, Destroy Lonely seemed to have more sauce, and Carti was taking all of their mutual producers’ best beats. But Carson has been the obvious MVP over at OPIUM — more talented than his labelmates and more consistent than his boss — since the 2023 release of A Great Chaos, which catapulted the Atlanta protege past Carti clone allegations into more rarefied territory.
In Scream 2, Randy Meek outlined his rules for a horror sequel: “More blood, more gore. Carnage. Candy. Your core audience just expects it.” More Chaos is more than happy to oblige, upping the ante on its predecessor, doubling down on bludgeoning bass (“Money Spread”), roiling synthesizers (“2000”), and of course, moshpit-manic anthems (“Trap Jump”).
More Chaos’s “LiveLeak””>
More Chaos album cover.
Over email, creative director Nick Spiders tells me Ken had a similar vision for the album’s cover art. “The main difference is that there’s actually more chaos on this one,” the 21-year-old says. “That’s why we needed this cover to be louder, crazier, bloodier.”
Spiders used the same camera to shoot both Chaos album covers, but that’s where the similarities between the images end. AGC is nearly pitch black, with Ken’s vampire grills glinting in 4KHD; by comparison, More appears almost like a painting, with a bright white background to contrast against Ken’s bloodspattered shirt.
“It just happened one day,” he shrugs after I ask about the creative process. “We shot that cover in about 5 minutes and had the final version about 5 minutes after that. The only edit was more blood.”
Perhaps nowhere is the album’s gore-galore ethos more front and center than “LiveLeak,” named after the now-shuttered video hosting service notorious for hosting incredibly graphic clips of violence and worse. It’s a two part song, with an overdriven front half produced by Canadian skai (OsamaSon‘s “Rehhab,” “New Tune”) that ricochets between your eardrums and a coda courtesy of Gab3, Kavi and Noah Mejia that surges and seethes as Ken demonstrates his spelling bee prowess. “V-A-M-P-I-R-E, I’m a vampire,” he grins, before describing a woman who loves him so much her first tattoo is a Ken Carson tramp stamp.
On one level, More Chaos almost feels anachronistic: rage-inspired artists like prettifun and OsamaSon have refocused on melodies over kick patterns, and Carti’s MUSIC was more nostalgic for the trap music of the late 2000s than the bangers of the early 2020s. But where most rage music cribs wholesale from Whole Lotta Red, Carson’s is clearly indebted to the music of Atlanta, albeit in subtler forms than a SWAMP IZZO! tag. In that sense, it seems less boilerplate and more like a mutation of the era of trap music pioneered by Future and Young Scooter. Does More Chaos hit your body real hard, right now? Then it did what it was supposed to.
