I never got a chance to do a TMT review of this for a couple reasons, but I was gonna feel really bad if I let it go by entirely. Reviews overall were pretty positive, I think, but the album probably got a bit shortchanged by a general sense that people were afraid to criticize it rather than giving it deserved praise. I'd probably just stay quiet if I thought it sucked, but I listened to this for a month or so straight before other new discoveries started to creep in.

There was never any doubt that Cardi could (and probably would) make a good album of Bodak Yellow-type stuff, but the big standouts on here are all departures from the obvious winning formula. Ring might be my favorite track on the record and I Do (with SZA, no less) offers the rare pleasure of hearing two artists do their best work on a single song. Even the obvious cross-promotional plays are worthwhile: Cardi's great strength is the ferocity of her delivery, and it's her voice that stands out even among the drip drip gang vocal of Drip. I can remember every part of Bartier Cardi except for 21 Savage's verse, and Chance the Rapper sounds like he was too intimidated to record his Best Life verse from less than a hundred feet away. Cardi's comfortable in like twelve different styles here, and she's hardly the first to try and fail to reproduce the whole Dreams and Nightmares thing anyway (on Get Up 10). Otherwise, the misses are excusable on the basis of breaking new ground (production-wise on Thru Your Phone and stylistically on She Bad) alone.

I was probably unnecessarily resistant to Bodak Yellow in large part because there's a long history of songs getting lifted from Southern artists and repackaged for consumption by the rest of the country (usually with inadequate attribution or worse yet, the wanton presentation of critical fantasy as anything resembling reality), but Invasion of Privacy offers at least half a dozen better tracks to get excited about, convincingly freeing Cardi from being evaluated through the lens of Bodak alone.

Highlights: Be Careful, Ring (feat. Kehlani), I Do (feat. SZA)