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Rating: 7.0 / 10

Lloyd Banks new album has been widely anticipated for some time since the release of his radio smash “Beamer, Benz, or Bentley.” Slowly but surely he’s been building up hype by biting the Crooked I formula of releasing a new song every week. Now The Hunger For More 2 is ready for release and hopes to not get overshadowed by releases from Kanye West and Nicki Minaj. Although it’s shorter on music than the two aforementioned titles, Banks new LP is still solidly constructed enough to prove that he’s arguably the best rapper in G-Unit.

THFM2 plays more like a compilation of songs as opposed to an album due to the massive amount of features on the record, which includes Ryan Leslie, Kanye West, Fabolous, Juelz Santana, Swizz Beatz, Jeremih, Akon, Pusha T, Raekwon, Lloyd, and his G-Unit cohorts 50 Cent and Tony Yayo. This wouldn’t be an issue if the album was longer, but there’s only 13 tracks and almost as many features. Almost every song has a different style or topic to it, and this takes away any type of cohesion or flow it had going for it originally. This also leaves something to be desired on tracks where Banks is solo, including “On The Double”, which suffers from a weakly constructed hook that makes the entire song sound out of place on the album.

Even with that being said, THFM2 is still a solid album. Most of the features help to boost the value of the song. Juelz gives a show stealing verse on “Beamer, Benz. or Bentley”, 50 Cent comes through with an addictive hook on “Payback”, Kanye goes in with vintage quotables on “Start It Up”, Styles P meshes with the grimy undertone for “Unexplainable”, and Pusha T shows the difference between him and Dr. King on “Home Sweet Home.” On almost every song, Banks’ wordplay and multi-rhyme schemes shines, even if the song itself is far from impressive. It’s no debate that Boy Wonder’s writing has improved well beyond the last time we heard from him, and it dominates throughout.

Aside from the clutter of features and the occasionally out of place song, Lloyd Banks has done a solid job with THFM2. Because of the variety of topics there’s something here for everyone, but it won’t appeal strongly to anyone who has not been rocking with Banks and the Unit to begin with.