Eminem - Music to Be Murdered By Review

The production on Music to Be Murdered By splits into two camps: the Dr. Dre material, which gives the album its only sonic identity, and everything else, which sounds like Eminem scrolling through a producer folder. Dre returned for the first time since Recovery, and his fingerprints are all over the back half: the live-instrument warmth and careful arrangement that the rest of the album lacks. The drums knock without burying the mix, the basslines move, and the keys give Eminem space to breathe. These are the only tracks where the beat serves the rapping instead of just holding the tempo.

The rest of the production comes from a small army—D.A. Got That Dope, Royce da 5'9", The Alchemist, Ricky Racks—and most of it is trap-adjacent beats with minimal melody and interchangeable drum programming. Some tracks are serviceable but thin, just bass hits and hi-hats waiting for Eminem to fill the silence. Others are raw and skeletal, which fits the aggression but offers nothing to return to once the verse is over. The Alchemist's work is the rare exception: a psychedelic sample flip from Pescado Rabioso that gives the track texture and menace.

But too much of the album sounds like beats selected for their lack of personality, chosen so Eminem's voice can dominate without competition. The problem is that Eminem in 2020 needs the production to give him structure; left to his own devices, he fills every bar with syllables and every track with tangents.

The writing operates in two modes: when Eminem has a subject, he can still build a verse with clarity and purpose, and when he does not, he defaults to technical exercise and punchline sprints. One track serves as the album's centrepiece, a first-person narrative that alternates between the Las Vegas shooter's perspective and Eminem's own struggles with fame and substance, both preparing for a performance that ends in self-destruction. The concept is heavy-handed, but the writing earns it: the double meanings land, the imagery is specific, and the final turn into a gun control plea feels like the end of an argument rather than a tacked-on message. Another track is a rare example of focused writing, Eminem tracing his come-up and the lessons that came with it, no diversions.

But the rest of the album drifts. One track is shock-rap about killing his stepfather with no payoff beyond the violence. Another is a club track where Eminem tries on a melodic flow and delivers relationship punchlines that sound like they were written in 2004. Yet another is a relationship autopsy with no stakes and no reason to exist.

The guest verses are solid and largely wasted. Royce da 5'9" appears on three tracks and delivers every time, particularly on one where he opens with a verse that sets the posse-cut tone before Kxng Crooked and Joell Ortiz follow. Black Thought and Q-Tip turn in classic performances over a Mr. Porter boom-bap beat, and for four minutes the album remembers what Eminem used to sound like. Juice Wrld's posthumous hook is competent but underused, more a placeholder than a feature.

Young M.A matches Eminem's aggression but gets buried in the mix. The problem is not the features; the problem is that Eminem does not build songs around them. They show up, do their job, and leave, and the album moves on to the next idea before the previous one has finished.

The delivery is where Eminem still separates himself from everyone else and also where the album's lack of focus becomes most obvious. One verse is a technical marvel, 10.65 syllables per second, a new record even for him, and it is thrilling for exactly as long as it takes to realize the verse is not about anything. He is rapping fast because he can, switching flows every four bars because he can, packing every line with internal rhymes because he can. The skill is clear, but skill without purpose is just demonstration.

The album opens with Eminem in full combative mode, firing at critics and doubters with the same relentless flow that defined Kamikaze, and it works for three minutes before the lack of variation becomes exhausting. When he slows down, the melodic attempts feel strained, his voice not built for the singing he keeps trying. The album's best performances come when he locks into a single flow and lets the subject guide the cadence, and the verses land harder for it.

Music to Be Murdered By has no sense of sequence. The first four tracks move from Hitchcock intro to combative opener to posse cut to interlude, all fine in isolation, but then a pop-rap club track drops into the middle of the aggression with no transition and no reason. The album lurches between modes: technical display, gun control statement, ballad about Eminem's father, boom-bap posse cut, horrorcore. None of these ideas are bad on their own, but stacked together they cancel each other out.

The album has no argument, no through-line, no reason for any of this to follow anything else. The sequencing improves slightly in the back half when the Dre material takes over. A brief stretch forms where the production stays consistent and the writing tightens, and for ten minutes the album feels like it knows what it wants to be.

Then the album pivots back to trap drums, and the closing posse cut has nothing to do with anything that came before. The interludes frame the tracklist but do no actual work: the Hitchcock samples are atmospheric set dressing with no connection to the music. If the concept is murder, the album never explains what is being killed or why we should care.

The length is the final problem. At twenty tracks and sixty-four minutes, Music to Be Murdered By has no filler in the traditional sense—every track is fully realized, every verse is technically proficient—but half the album is still unnecessary. Multiple tracks could be cut without losing a single idea, and the remaining thirteen would form a much stronger album. Eminem has not released a focused project since The Eminem Show, and this album is the latest proof that he either cannot or will not edit himself.

Music to Be Murdered By ranks in the middle of Eminem's catalog: better than the disaster of Revival, more consistent than the unfocused Relapse, more ambitious than the reactive Kamikaze, but nowhere near the focus of his first three albums. It sits just above Recovery in quality, which is not a compliment. The Dre-produced material is the best work Eminem has done in a decade, and one track is the best single he has written since The Marshall Mathers LP 2. But the album as a whole is a sprawl, seventy-four minutes of ideas that never cohere, technical skill that never finds a subject worth the effort, and a concept that gets mentioned twice and then forgotten.

This album is for Eminem diehards who want to hear him rap at the highest technical level and do not care whether the songs go anywhere. If you are still defending Revival, you will find things to love here. If you thought Kamikaze was a return to form, this album will frustrate you by repeating the same lack of editing.

If you have not listened to Eminem since The Eminem Show, this will not bring you back. The pop-rap tracks are skippable on first listen. The horrorcore and shock-value material is Eminem on autopilot. The Dre stretch and the posse cuts are where the album earns its runtime.

Start with the tracks where Eminem sounds like he has something to prove beyond his syllable count. If those work, move to the tracks where the writing and production both show up. Skip the club tracks and horrorcore entirely unless you are committed to hearing every bar. If you want to understand where Eminem is in 2020, this album will tell you: still one of the best technical rappers alive, still capable of writing a great song when he focuses, and still unable to build a great album because he refuses to choose a direction and commit.

For a deeper dive into Eminem's late-period work, Kamikaze is leaner and angrier, and The Marshall Mathers LP 2 is more ambitious. Music to Be Murdered By is the sound of an artist who can do everything and has forgotten why any of it matters.