Following Lil Durk’s arrest on murder-for-hire charges last October, the rapper’s sixth studio album,Deep Thoughts, was postponed a whopping five times. What was once expected to be a standard mix of melodic sex talk and triumphant Chicago drill cuts has seemingly morphed into a raw, introspective cry from behind bars. Despite heavy marketing framing it as a penetrating reflection on the rapper’s ongoing legal troubles, though, the album rarely delivers the depth suggested by its title and the circumstances of its creation.

While 2023’sAlmost Healed maintained a straight face for much of its runtime,Deep Thoughts is “deep” for about four tracks before nose-diving into a scattershot collection of filler-grade material. Even then, some of the pearls of “wisdom” that Durk offers early on, such as “When you cash out on a porn star, you put your lifestyle on the line,” don’t exactly set a high bar.

As is often the case with Durk’s songs—ballads and bangers alike, and regardless of their quality, like the ghastly, overly graphic “Late Checkout”—there are stray lines or candid confessions that manage to carry real emotional weight. On the otherwise forgettable “1000 Times,” featuring a lackluster Lil Baby feature, Durk delivers a gut punch when he reveals that he Googles photos of the late King Von, who was murdered over four years ago, every day. The rapper even sneaks a verse from the Quran into “Shaking When I Pray,” a nod to his Muslim faith that adds spiritual weight to the album’s otherwise stock opener. But as heartfelt as these moments may be, they don’t make up for the fact that nearly every other element surrounding them falls short.

Outside of the no-frills “Notebook (No Hook),” which, as its title implies, offers a barebones look at Durk’s state of mind without the compositional niceties of a chorus,Deep Thoughts feels aimless and, perhaps most frustratingly, starts spinning its wheels well before reaching the halfway mark. There’s really only so many times Durk can croon in the same pained register over the same melancholic piano synths before it all starts to feel perfunctory, even with the occasional outlandish metaphor (“I know a pussy chasin’ a rat, I call ‘em Tom and Jerry”).

The overall dullness and crummy beat selection makeDeep Thoughts one of Durk’s more grating releases in recent memory. Thankfully, there are no Morgan Wallen appearances this time around—though, frankly, there aren’t any pop-crossover moments here that would even warrant one. The end result is an album that falls far below the usual standard of an MC whose artistic growth, hindered by real-life events both in and out of his control, seems stalled.