As Gunna’s debut mixtape, Drip Season offers a lot of exciting promise of what’s to come. Songs like “Goin In” showcase Gunna’s ear for well-penned flexes and pop-adjacent melodies, while “Cop Me a Foreign” is the first example of Gunna’s impeccable chemistry with Young Thug. On the latter, the two croon almost in tandem, and the dynamic serves as an appetizer for what’s to come. However, this is hardly Gunna’s most concise effort: “Young N—a” lacks direction, while songs like “How Can I Switch” don’t do anything to elevate Gunna’s personality on the mic.

Creatively, Gunna’s Drip Season 2 was a step in the right direction for the rapper. He played with melody on songs like “Secure The Vibe” and “Phase,” and tried his hand at speeding up his delivery on songs like “Japan,” but elsewhere steps fully out of his element. He sounds completely out of place alongside Playboi Carti on the Pi’erre Bourne-produced “YSL,” and tries to replicate Migos’ triplet flow on “Top” with diminishing returns. Gunna’s Drip Season 2 felt like an occasion for the rapper to find his voice, which he would soon master on the projects that followed.

With features that feel underutilized and bars that feel recycled and simplified, Gunna sounds asleep at the wheel for too much of The Last Wun‘s 25 tracks. The mood barely shifts out of a relaxed gear, and despite its highlights, most of the songs come and go with barely any punch. The album potentially arrives as Gunna’s farewell address to YSL, but feels creatively stagnant as he raps about fame, wealth and hardly anything else.

If you ask Gunna’s day-one fans, Drip or Drown mixtape is really the project that started it all. Drip or Drown showed Gunna at a far more polished state, his bars and flow tighter than anything on the Drip Season tapes. Still, some of the songs on Drip or Drown meander aimlessly both lyrically and melodically — “Hopped in the coupe, let the Tesla charge/I keep a strap ’cause I really be knownin’,” he raps over a grumbled Auto-Tune flow on “Award.” Yet Drip or Drown feels like where Gunna truly starts to find his footing as a rapper.

Drip Season 3 is filled with all the ingredients of a great rap project: the beats are slippery and lush, perfectly complementing the Atlanta rapper’s woozy flow. Gunna’s ear for melody is significantly better than it was on his earlier tapes on songs like “Pedestrian” and “Helluva Price.” Features from Young Thug, Lil Uzi Vert and others add some welcomed variety to the autotune drizzle of Gunna’s voice. Yet the final result doesn’t quite stick the landing. The songs don’t take any creative or emotive risks and fall back to Gunna’s bread and butter of flexing about lavish wealth.

While DS4EVER spawned one of Gunna’s biggest hits in “pushin p,” the album as a whole is one of Gunna’s most uneven. The rapper sounds as if he’s on autopilot the entire time, as many of his big guest collaborators such as Drake, Future, Chris Brown and even Thugga all bury Gunna on his own songs. There are flashes of excitement — “25k Jacket” showcases that Lil Baby and Gunna’s tit-for-tat chemistry is alive and well — but not enough to overcome the monotony.

One of Wun felt like Gunna’s back-to-business album following the darker subject matter explored on A Gift & a Curse. The album’s bloated 20-song track list traverses familiar themes for Gunna, which was admittedly disappointing considering Curse implied something larger might have been shifting within the rapper’s creative orbit. It’s not that One of Wun is a bad album — songs like “$$$” with Normani and “neck on a yacht” have that signature bravado Gunna fans connect with — but it doesn’t bring enough new elements to the party.

Gunna finds some pockets of greatness on Drip or Drown 2. While the album doesn’t reach the commercial heights of those set to come after it, the project racked up millions of streams and provided some of Gunna’s tightest songs. On “3 Headed Snake” with Thug, the pair swerve over Wheezy’s production effortlessly, with Gunna following Thug’s stylistic lead in such a synchronized way it feels like a torch is being passed. Other tracks like “Derek Fisher” gave fans a taste of what’s to come with Lil Baby, and “Baby Birkin” showed how Gunna’s syrupy delivery was enough to carry a song all by his lonesome.

As Gunna’s official “first day out” release, the Atlanta rapper branched out on this album in a way he hadn’t on past releases. The approach, which is darker and more reflective than past Gunna projects, gave the rapper one of his biggest hits to date, “fukumean,” and reminded his doubters that he still had a great album in the vault. His voice is velvety smooth, and his flow sounds determined and slightly vindictive, as he attempts to clear his name of snitching allegations on songs like “bread & butter” and “back at it.” A Gift & a Curse is the closest Gunna has come to stepping outside of his comfort zone, and hearing him mine difficult subject matter, especially as the rap world seemingly turns against him, is incredibly powerful.

Lil Baby and Gunna’s Drip Harder is an almost no-skips masterpiece. While collaborative projects are hard to master, Baby and Wunna keep the tape alive by competing at every turn. On “Drip Too Hard,” Lil Baby utilizes his ear for melody while Gunna kicks the door open with rambunctious bars about private planes and diamond boogers (“I feel like a child, I got boogers in the face/Diamonds dancin’ in the dial like this s—t is a parade”), all packaged within a bouncy rhythmic flow. On other songs like “Belly” and “Business is Business,” the duo take a smoother ride, skating across the track’s glistening guitars and ambient synths. Drip Harder marked an important moment both in Atlanta hip-hop and in Baby and Gunna’s respective careers. The project demanded everyone focus on what both rappers had going on and felt like a sign that ATL hip-hop, which in 2018 felt relatively stagnant, was finally alive again.

After a slew of solo projects that had moments of grandeur sprinkled throughout, Gunna returned with Wunna, his best and most consistent solo effort. Gunna’s flows are wound tight, every bar is annunciated and his anecdotes are as charming as ever. “I put Prada on my collar ’cause she proud of what I said/I’m a leader, I got ’em followin’ my footsteps like the feds,” Gunna spits on “Dollaz on My Head,” doing so with a glint in his eye. While Gunna often treads through familiar territory involving girls, drugs, money and expensive clothing, he does so on Wunna with enough detail to make us feel the fabrics and smell the cash.