Review

Back At It: Boosie Badazz and Webbie Keep It Between Themselves

Twenty-two years after Gangsta Musik, Boosie and Webbie return with ten tracks and twenty-nine minutes — and only Boosie is still fighting for it.

Stephen Agorsor

2.5 / 5

The last song on Back At It is called "Pull Up." So is the first. They are separate entries — separate catalogue numbers, same title, both 2:33 — so the record ends where it began. That is not architecture. It is a shrug: the only thing arranged with intent is a rhyme between its two ends. Everything between them has to stand on its own. Most of it does not.

Start with the arithmetic, because it is doing work. Ten songs, 29:01, no features billed on any of them, longest track under four minutes. It is the first album credited to just the two of them since Gangsta Musik in 2004; the Trill Fam compilations of 2007, 2010 and 2016 were the label's records, with the label's name on the spine. It arrives not on Trill Entertainment but on Badazz Music Syndicate, the imprint Boosie runs with Taquari "TQ" Hatch. The label that built them is not the label releasing them: the institution is gone, the two men remain.

The history is load-bearing: this record argues with it. Boosie joined Trill in 2001, when the Baton Rouge label was backed by Pimp C; Webbie signed in 2003. Their first album together, Ghetto Stories, came in 2003. Gangsta Musik followed on May 25, 2004, through Warner Bros. and Trill, sold 320,000 copies, and gave them "Swerve" and "Give Me That," the latter with Bun B. Webbie's solo debut, Savage Life, entered the Billboard 200 at No. 8 in 2005 with 68,000 first-week copies. The partnership's commercial peak was 2008's "Independent," a No. 9 Hot 100 hit with Boosie and Lil Phat on the hook.

Then the split: not a falling out, a prison sentence. Boosie was sentenced in 2009 on drug and gun charges, indicted for first-degree murder in 2010, acquitted of that charge in 2012, and released on March 5, 2014, after roughly five years inside. By October he had renamed himself Boosie Badazz and started releasing at a rate nobody could track — BooPac in 2017, Boosie Blues Cafe in 2018, three projects in the first half of this year alone. Webbie took the other road: the Savage Life series through Savage Life 6 in 2020, then mostly other people's records and one-off singles. One man never stopped working; the other went quiet, and that gap is the record you can hear.

Back At It is supposed to answer whether the old division of labour still functions: Boosie agitated, nasal, talking fast and interrupting himself; Webbie low and unhurried, vowels stretched, leaning back in a chair while the room argues around him. That contrast was the engine. Here it is a solo record with a second voice on it. Boosie fills every lane he is given; Webbie declines to take one. He coasts, he mutters, he turns up, he does not compete. Twenty years on, that reads as absence.

“The partnership survives. The partner doesn't show.”

The sequencing says both men understood the terms. Nothing here is long. The shortest stretch is tracks two through four — "Come On," "Walk," "Shake That" — averaging two minutes and thirty-nine seconds, where a record like this puts the songs it hopes will travel. The weight sits later: "Tombstone" at 3:40, "Trill Shit" at 3:48 and "Cold World" at 3:34 land at positions five, eight and nine, and the closing "Pull Up" is a restatement rather than a finale. Ten short tracks with nobody else on them means no guest verse to change the temperature, no filler to hide behind, and nowhere to hide a mistake. They hide none: the fourth slot is a shrug, the last song is the first song again.

The best of it is "Trill Shit." It is the longest thing here, it carries the name of the label that raised them both, and it sits at track eight, where a duo album traditionally puts the song it actually means. It is also the only stretch where the two of them sound like a duo rather than one man and a guest. The weakest is "Shake That," which at 2:40 and in the fourth slot is doing the job of a single and announcing it in the title. Nothing about the record's shape suggests it needed to exist.

The reunion does not earn itself. A cash-in would have been longer, would have had guests, would have been sold as an event; twenty-nine minutes with no features is not that. The case for Back At It rests on Boosie, who does the work and knows it, and on Webbie, who does not. That is the finding, and it is not kind: the partnership survives, the partner doesn't show. What you are left with is a Boosie record with a familiar voice on the hooks — half an album, short enough that the disappointment never becomes tedious, sharp in two places, and two places fewer than these two men owe each other.

What it is not is a revival. Trill's sound was a regional argument that became a national one, and that argument has been settled for fifteen years. Back At It doesn't try to reopen it. It is Boosie using the short form because the short form lets him get out before the thinness shows, and ending on the same two words they opened with because there was no better ending available.

Album details

Artists

Boosie Badazz & Webbie

Released

24 October 2026

Label

Badazz Music Syndicate

Genre

Hip-Hop/Rap

Runtime

29:01

Tracks

10

Track list

Boosie Badazz & Webbie — Back At It: Boosie Badazz and Webbie Keep It Between Themselves, track list

No.	Title	Length
1	Pull Up	2:33
2	Come On	2:30
3	Walk	2:47
4	Shake That	2:40
5	Tombstone	3:40
6	Do It	2:29
7	Take It There	2:23
8	Trill Shit	3:48
9	Cold World	3:34
10	Pull Up	2:33