Copyright Pitchfork
Bruiser Wolf has a voice that could grab your attention from the other end of a carnival. It’s part of the reason he’s become one of the more arresting figures in the Detroit scene and a standout among the Danny Brown-led Bruiser Brigade universe. But the years following his 2021 breakout Dope Game Stupid have been a steady search for the right production style to complement his jaunting soliloquies, laced with drug dealing capers and trapdoor metaphors. It’s a balancing act that you could hear throughout 2024’s My Story Got Stories, where the more restrained sample loops and conventional structure threatened to tame his magnetic eccentricities. Wolf’s earlier 2025 release, Potluck, was an experimental exercise where he rapped like he was shooting the shit in the pool table from The Mack. He tested how his stories and delivery reacted to a range of beats from Harry Fraud, Knxwledge, Nicholas Craven, F1lthy, and Raphy (who produced much of Dope Game Stupid). It never quite established a uniform rhythm but it did inspire his next venture: a full-length collaboration with Fraud. A tempered course correction from Potluck’s gleeful sprawl, the 11-track Made by Dope drills deeper into Bruiser Wolf’s conversational writing style with production that’s comfortably attuned to his quirks, even if it doesn't necessarily break new ground. Fraud’s production creates the sensation of hearing Bruiser yelping from a sky-blue lowrider Impala across the block. The vocal sample on “Layup Lines,” which is pleasantly reminiscent of a Voices of East Harlem cut, turns into an angelic, unrelenting chorus of background singers that helps lift Wolf’s raps off the ground. The truncated jazz suite that opens “Against the Odds” could soundtrack the credits of Coffy before a rousing organ turns Bruiser’s jokes about polygamy and flooding the block into a swirling gospel sermon. While Wolf’s voice itself is an instrument, Fraud understands it works best alongside opulent compositions. That’s partly why “Boss Up” drags near the end with its understated drums and tedious whirring: The production is structured to be repetitive but Bruiser’s superpower is his spontaneity. The enthralling beat on “Eye Owe You,” meanwhile, allows Bruiser to crescendo from measured delivery—“The doors on the Porsche open up like a casket”—to paranoid, staccato squawks: “This ain’t it!/The cannabis been tampered with.” Bruiser has rarely played the straight man, especially over the past year with his stellar verses on billy woods’ GOLLIWOG and Curren$y’s Never Catch Us. That remains true on Made by Dope. “I don’t do nothing but think of punchlines all day,” he told an interviewer this year. “I call my people like, ‘Man you think this punchline is stupid?’” He seems even more entrenched in this process throughout Made by Dope, as if he’s just getting shots up in the gym. Lines like “She suckin’ on the head like she eating a crawfish,” and “I had ‘em at the same time, spontaneous combustion!” manage to feel less crass and more playfully cartoonish when they come out of his mouth. His sports obsession continues to blend with his drug-dealing analogies, which seems to be his priority: He hugged the block so long that they called him for holding and shrugged off disloyal counterparts like Kevin Durant at the free throw line. The pensive interiority and heartbreaking reflection that made Dope Game Stupid so stunning have been largely pushed to the side, or at least sprinkled in like Easter eggs. The jokes still hit—finding different ways to refer to cocaine as various white celebrities will always have a long shelf life. But the peeks into his life have been traded for a bird’s eye view. Fraud’s base-level of production and Wolf’s commitment to finding new turns of phrase for his endless well of stories combine to elicit a sense of competency, which isn’t necessarily a sign of getting stale. He keeps his sports references fresh by referencing Kylian Mbappe, flexes on you by calling your trophy wife a “participation,” and runs a thrilling alley-oop with fellow Bruiser Brigade member ZelooperZ on “The Spaniard.” In the closing “Heart Broke,” he sandwiches lines about cutting the “white girl” so it needs stitches and carrying the “eight” like Lamar Jackson with a brief spiral about the danger of complacency: “People test your pride three times a day/You gon’ get aggressive, or shine away/Or get arrested, or you playing it safe/It’s a lose, lose, because both a mistake,” he raps. The anxiety is either deep in the rear-view mirror or right around the corner, depending on your perspective.
