By: Samuel Mortel
The music industry has been suffering from a serious epidemic for quite a while: albums are far too long, and it seems like we’re reaching a breaking point.
On Aug. 27, Young Thug and his label Young Stoner Life (YSL) released “Slime Language 3,” the latest installment in a series of intra-label collaboration records that Thug has been putting out since 2018. I, like most Young Thug fans, was excited for him to return to music, especially looking forward to “Slime Language 3” as the introduction of what the rapper referred to as the “New Generation” of YSL with a fresh group of up-and-coming artists.
Then, the tracklist was revealed, and my excitement turned into dread. “Slime Language 3” had 41 songs, requiring 2 hours and 15 minutes of listening time. That’s only 2 minutes shorter than the entire runtime of Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners.”
After listening to the full project, it honestly felt punishing. Just song after song of disappointment, and it ends up literally draining your energy. You can’t help but feel like an artist being willing to put out a record this bloated is emblematic of a lack of quality control and an eroding care for the sanctity of an album as a work of art.
This problem isn’t just confined to Young Thug or even just to rap. You could look across the music industry and see numerous examples of some of our most popular musicians making bloated albums.
Does Alex Warren really need 21 songs to get his point across? Does Morgan Wallen really expect people to take nearly 2 hours of their time to listen to his 37-song album?
Throughout history, countless classic, universally adored albums are, at most, only about an hour long. Nirvana’s “Nevermind” has only 13 songs and is 49 minutes long. Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” has the same amount of songs and the same runtime. In 2018, Kendrick Lamar became the first rapper to win a Pulitzer Prize for his album “DAMN,” a record with 14 songs and a 55-minute runtime.
There’s a real correlation between some of our most celebrated albums being concise and not overstaying their welcome. It’s far easier to revisit an album and appreciate it as one, complete statement when it doesn’t require you to clear your schedule. This new phenomenon of musicians dumping a flood of songs on one project carries the same weight as Netflix dropping all ten episodes of their new dime-a-dozen streaming show on the same day just so people can binge it, have one conversation about it with their friends, and forget about it the next week. It’s just another grain of sand on the endless beach of “content”.
Anyone on the planet can picture the iconography of Thriller-era Michael Jackson. The impact and aesthetic of Blueprint-era JAŸ-Z still stand out amongst his long career. The pure artistry of “Purple Rain” has stood the test of time 42 years later, and you can still feel how much care Prince put into crafting that world. He made a whole feature film to go along with the album!
There’s nothing inherently wrong with putting out a long album or a large amount of music in a short amount of time. There are some great albums that are also pretty long. SZA’s latest project “SOS” surpassed “Thriller” as the album with the most Grammy nominations, earning a nod across 14 categories, all off an album with 23 tracks and a runtime of 1 hour and 8 minutes. Stevie Wonder’s classic “Songs in the Key of Life” has 21 songs totaling 1 hour and 45 minutes. “All Eyez On Me” by 2Pac has 26 songs and has a comparable runtime to “Slime Language 3,” totaling 2 hours and 5 minutes.
It’s not impossible to make a long album that receives critical acclaim, but it’s very rare.
The key difference is that any example of this being done successfully is by, objectively, one of the greatest artists to ever live.
If you look at “Songs In The Key Of Life,” the project exists in its own world, with its own creative vision. There’s another universe where we got another version of the album, one that is forgettable, where all the songs just bleed together with no cohesive vision or overarching statement. I’m happy to live in this world instead, where Stevie Wonder cared enough about his craft to deliver a piece of art that leaves a lasting impression. There’s a reason that after 50 years “Another Star” sounds just as energetic as it did when it first hit record stores, and you still might hear “Sir Duke” playing on the radio. No disrespect to Lil Baby, but I don’t really trust him the same way I trust Stevie Wonder.
This uptick of long albums gets even worse when we factor in the trend of deluxe editions. As I alluded to earlier, “Slime Language 3” was Young Thug’s second project since his 2024 release. His first return to music was his solo album “UY SCUTI” in 2025, a slog of an album with 20 songs, most of which were either unremarkable or offensively bad. The next week, Young Thug would drop “UY SCUTI (Supernova Edition)” with an extra 8 songs. While a lot of those songs are better than the vast majority of the actual album (mostly due to most of them being recorded nearly a decade prior), they’re still buried in an album that’s 1 hour and 43 minutes long.
Is it really worthwhile to go through 28 songs to end up with only 10 or 11 songs that are actually listenable?
In 2024, Taylor Swift released “The Tortured Poets Department,” a 17-song album that’s widely considered one of the worst of her career. Swift later dropped an extended version with 14 more songs, an hour longer than the original. Chris Brown released a poorly received 27-song album earlier this year, and decided to further terrorize the general public by adding another 10 songs in the deluxe.
Frankly, it feels like we lost the plot. We can’t keep being expected to sit down for an hour and a half or even longer and endure 10 songs that could’ve easily been cut from a 25-song project. This epidemic of unnecessarily long albums shows a lack of respect for fans, a lack of respect for music as an art form, and just makes long-lasting, timeless albums rarer.