Who’s afraid of Nettspend? He hasn’t even peaked yet.

Unless your favorite dessert is cotton candy, you’ll understand the implicit problem with BAD ASS F*CKING KID, the rabidly anticipated debut of teenage rapper Nettspend: It’s mostly fluff. And if you’ve ever purchased an $8 bag of cotton candy at the state fair, you’ll also understand why you might not care that it’s a lot of puffed up air. Sometimes, you just want something sweet.

Nettspend, née Gunner Shepardson (born in Richmond, VA, circa 2007), first rose to prominence in late 2023 partly because he was cliqued up with NOVAGANG and 1c34 and partly because he was a white boy with baby-face rapping about lean. He’s since gone from looking like a comic-relief character on a Disney Channel sitcom to Sky Ferreira’s little brother, or 2Hollis’s mini-me, or perhaps Legolas as dressed by Hedi Slimane. I dismissed his music more out of principle than any critical qualms (once you’re responsible for your own health insurance, a Caucasian child encouraging liver damage doesn’t hit quite the same), but I must humbly and enthusiastically admit that Nettspend absolutely has It. The rumor mill says HBO agrees, who’s allegedly picking up a Nettspend documentary for a cool $2.7 million; you don’t need to buy the hype because it’s already been sold.

But there is more to Nettspend than hype and optics. Last year’s “shine n peace” was one of The FADER’s favorite songs of 2023 thanks to its frenzied groove and unceasing handclaps. A few of Nettspend’s strongest traits are on clear display here: an ear for beats that can keep up with his manic flows, a melodic instinct that can suffuse even the most trite one-liners with moody pathos, and odd turns of phrase that poeticize boilerplate images and ideas. At Nettspend’s best, these skills multiply and stack to dizzying effect, so when he yelps, “I’m looking at the sky, thinking ’bout how high it go” on “shine n peace,” he sounds tortured and ambitious and ecstatic and delirious all at once.

BAD ASS F*CKING KID doesn’t quite make good on the heartfelt promise of that song, or that of the handful of singles Nettspend has released so far this year, which don’t appear here. Lyrically disengaged, BAFK is instead tailored to instigate riotous reactions at live shows. Evidently aimed at his core fans, it’s LIVE.LOVE.A$AP for Zoomers, not Playboicarti for Gen Alpha.

For the unfamiliar, BAFK serves as an easy sampler of Nettspend’s free-associative style and his proclivity for distorted 808s and loose piano riffs, glimmering synths and recursive syntax. “She wan fuck but I’m shy / need a lit bitch, Tyla,” goes one typically confounding line. “Just touched down in the ‘Raq need to hit up Project Pat,” reads another. Much of the album’s front half feels perfunctory, though he’s still liable to toss off a stickily inverted malapropism like “money full of bag” on even the most straightforward mosh-pit plays. Bars like “Looking at me like a deer, cuz you know I took your doe” on “A$AP” feel genuinely inventive even if the song as a whole scans as a bad Xerox of his October single “F*CK SWAG,” which deployed a similar sound kit to better effect. But when he’s locked in, like on “Project Pat,” Nettspend can make buzzword soup go down easier than water. Nobody knows what it means, but it gets the people going.

Still, Nettspend’s real superpower has always been his poignancy. Look back to this summer’s “Nothing like uuu” where his lyrics about late nights in Richmond and bringing the drank into Nobu feel cataclysmic, not just life-changing but world-changing. That sentiment is the beating heart of BAFK distilled into “F*CK CANCER,” “Skipping Class,” and “Beach Leak.” The last one marks the album’s peak, sporting a starry-eyed Evilgiane beat that provides a perfect springboard for Nettspend to get totally misty-eyed as he falls asleep on dates and crowns himself “Future but Gen Z.” The hilarious Grimes sample on “Skipping Class” will certainly turn millennial heads, but the way that song zooms in on Nettspend’s age points to a key thematic issue plaguing BAFK: How do you market a rapper’s youth without making them seem too childish?

Nettspend has largely sidestepped questions about his age by ignoring it, a strategy that marries the eye rolling “of course this is all an act” absolution of Lil Tecca with the tapped-in, post-racial iconography of Yeat. That’s helped separate the young rapper’s music from his image a little. But that sliver of separation is key to allowing more skeptical listeners to enjoy the music. So where Nettspend should come across as wise beyond his years (if only when it comes to expensive clothing and beautiful women), BAFK leans too hard into Peter Pan Syndrome. The thrill of a song like “withdrawals” isn’t in watching a child misbehave outlandishly (ahem, Dave Blunts), but in the idea that Nettspend has already grown up too fast, seen too much, that his art captures something true about the world we live in.

Nettspend might be having the time of his life right now, but I don’t buy that he wishes he could “just not grow up,” as he says on the album’s intro. That feels like a cheap ploy to emphasize the absurdity of it all: He looks like THIS, but he raps like THAT! Maybe that sort of hook is a prerequisite for artists to get attention these days, but Nettspend doesn’t have to resort to these sort of crass, lowest-denominator plays; you might even say it undermines the effort he’s put into maintaining an image of inaccessible swag. But when he chants a line like, “And I just dropped the blunt, I’m screaming ‘Where the hoes?’,” so seriously, I believe that Nettspend isn’t worried about looking cool at all. And what’s cooler than that?