Even back in 2018, Playboi Carti played fast and loose with album deadlines, teaser clips, release dates, and traditional promotion.
Thirteen months after releasing his self-titled breakout mixtape, Carti returned with his major-label debut, Die Lit. The album is now considered one of the most influential rap records of the past decade, though at one point its release wasn’t even certain.
It’s easy to forget now, but just a week before the album was set to drop, a version was leaked. Only a few of those songs—”Shoota,” “Love Hurts,” “Choppa Won’t Miss,” and “Foreign”—ended up on the official version of Die Lit. This vault of unreleased tracks has led to Carti’s current status as one of the most mercurial figures in rap.
Die Lit was a classic from the jump. Released on May 11, 2018, it debuted at number three on the Billboard 200 with 61,000 album-equivalent units. Powered in part by Pi’erre Bourne’s production—he handled 15 tracks—the album set an early blueprint for the contemporary rap underground, a sound that would fully develop with Whole Lotta Red in 2020 (though Pi’erre played a much smaller role on that project).
More than seven years later, there’s plenty we remember about the Atlanta rapper’s boundary pushing studio debut. There’s plenty else, though, that is overlooked when remembering the impact the album had. Here are six things you may have not known about the making and release of Playboi Carti’s Die Lit.
As Complex initially reported back in 2018, the aesthetics of Die Lit were as important as the sound of the album, a balance Carti would put a premium on throughout the early days of his career. Presentation was paramount, and to achieve the punk rock aesthetics he wanted to portray on Die Lit, the rapper and his team went to work on infusing the album with a raw, DIY feel in terms of imaging and branding.
That began with the cover art, for which Carti recruited video director and photographer Nick Walker, who had previously worked with FKA Twigs, Beyoncé, Mac DeMarco, and others. According to our article published just a couple of weeks after the album’s release: “The concept of the cover was based around a reference photo of an old punk rock show found by Midnight Studios art director Shane Gonzales. ‘So many of these hip-hop shows now have that energy from punk shows back in the day,’ Walker says. ’Carti’s music really goes against the grain, too, just like punk used to do back in the day. He’s into a bunch of different music and things like that, so it was a really easy pairing.’”
Tracking down the exact photo the cover pays homage to is trickier. There’s a couple of punk show photos that share a similar setup, from a Charged GBH gig in the late ’70s or ’80s to a Trash Talk show in the 2010s.
Speaking of the cover, there’s even lore surrounding the figures in the background. Amid the chaos, two stand out: a Black woman with a mohawk and a white, bearded man staring straight into the camera. While the woman eventually revealed her identity—and even talked openly about her experience—little was known about the man. For years, some fans even speculated that he was Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl.
Last year, the YouTube channel The Right Note finally tracked down the so-called “Die Lit Guy.” It turns out he’s an actor named Francisco Marcano, who also appeared in the “R.I.P.” video and had no idea who Carti was and that he’d end up on the album cover. Funny enough, he didn’t seem to mind—he posted about it on social media when the album dropped, hiding in plain sight the whole time.
One of the chief influences on Die Lit is an Atlanta favorite but generally overlooked artist by the name of Ethereal.
His synth-heavy work, alongside Awful Records affiliates like KEY! and Father, played a big role in Carti’s sound on the project. During a 2018 interview with Dazed, Carti explained: “Shoutout to Ethereal. When I met him, I was looking for shit that he was already doing. I was like wow. This is the guy. Ethereal is a legend…without him, I don’t know where the fuck I’d be. He’s a good dude. So talented. He’s another GOAT. I’m not even talking about his music right now. As a human, that man is a really good dude. He took me in when I was skipping school. Took me on the road, started going crazy. My senior year of highschool, he and Father and Key! started going crazy, making all these tracks.”
Few rappers have had as much music leak as Carti. The Die Lit leaks—arriving just a week before the album’s official release—are legendary, marking one of the highest‑profile spillages in modern rap history.
Many of those tracks have since become fan favorites. The leaked demo of “Shoota,” with its extra Auto‑Tune and an additional verse from Lil Uzi Vert, has achieved cult status. While songs like “They Go Off,” “Tattoo,” and “Arm and Leg” are still beloved in certain Carti circles.
All that unreleased music from this era has left fans wondering just how deep Carti’s vault really is?
Is there a feature of Carti’s style that’s more notorious than his baby voice delivery?
The high pitch switch-up has divided the internet since he first started deploying the vocal tic, with some applauding its ingenuity and others dismissing it as an offshoot of mumble rap nonsense. Regardless of your thoughts on the method, there’s no denying that he ushered the sound into the mainstream on Die Lit. Early records featured the style, but he upped the stakes on his major label studio debut, clearly his biggest look to date.
As Greg Gaffney wrote in his explainer on the rise of Carti’s baby voice for Complex: “Carti doesn’t just use his baby voice on energetic songs. He finds plenty of use for it on the slow-burning Die Lit track, ‘No Time.’ It opens with Carti testing out his vocals in a lower tone before diving into the melodic baby voice that makes up the bulk of the song. Where other tracks have baby voice moments that feel like they’re still being worked through in the recording booth in real time, ‘No Time’ finds Carti in a different space as he sounds relatively composed.”
Carti and Die Lit’s sonic architect, Pi’erre Bourne, have one of the best connections in rap.
While they were both Atlanta staples when they began recording Die Lit, their relationship was forged thanks to an unexpected mutual connection. Pi’erre recalled a story about giving some beats to Yachty’s homie, K$upreme, and how those beats eventually landed with Carti, despite Pi’erre’s protests. In an XXL interview from 2017, he said: “I played [K$upreme] three or four beats. My friend had just gave me some new drums either earlier that day or earlier that week, so I had some fire beats. I pressed play and he was like, ‘Yo, send me a couple of those.’ I sent him the ‘wokeuplikethis’ beat. He had the ‘Woke Up’ beat. And then the next time I saw him in the studio, maybe a week or a couple days later, he was like, ‘Yo, Carti hopped on that shit.’ And he said it so lightly… I was like, ‘Who got on my beat? Like what the fuck? Why you ain’t call me?’ I don’t like when people do shit like that with my shit. So I was like, Alright, so Carti got on my beat… where’s Carti? [laughs] I need to figure out what’s going on, because I can make a beat for him. I was like [to K$upreme], ‘I gave you those beats for you.’ He was like, ‘Nah, bro… he wanna hop on it. Shit, hop on it.’ From there, Carti and Pi’erre began plotting their domination in Atlanta’s rap landscape.
