The 2020s File Feature
More Time
More Time — Pop Smoke: Recording, Release, and Chart History Pop Smoke's posthumous discography presented the music industry and his fanbase with a complicat…
01 The Story
More Time — Pop Smoke: Recording, Release, and Chart History
Pop Smoke's posthumous discography presented the music industry and his fanbase with a complicated task: how to honor an artist whose life was cut short before he could shape his own legacy on his own terms. "More Time," released as part of the posthumous collection Faith in July 2021, arrived more than a year after Bashar Barakah Jackson was fatally shot at his Hollywood Hills home in February 2020. The album, executive produced by Steven Victor and Rico Beats among others, represented the second major posthumous release from Pop Smoke's catalog following the chart-dominating Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon.
Pop Smoke had established himself as the defining voice of Brooklyn drill, a subgenre that adapted the dark, sliding production style of Chicago and UK drill to the specific street narratives and cadences of New York City. His debut mixtape Meet the Woo and its sequel had generated enormous underground momentum, and by the time of his death he was widely recognized as one of the most commercially promising rap artists of his generation. "More Time" belongs to the sessions that were assembled into Faith, a project that his label Victor Victor Worldwide and Republic Records curated from existing recordings after his passing.
The production of "More Time" carries the atmospheric weight that characterized the best of Pop Smoke's catalog. The drill-inflected beat, built around deep bass textures and spare percussion, provided the sonic foundation over which Smoke's distinctive low, gravelly baritone could move. His voice was one of the most immediately recognizable in contemporary hip-hop, a sound that seemed simultaneously ancient in its blues-derived rawness and entirely of its specific New York moment.
Faith debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 upon its release, demonstrating the sustained commercial appeal of Pop Smoke's catalog even eighteen months after his death. The album's success reflected both genuine artistic quality and the loyalty of a fanbase that had grown enormously in the period following his passing, as listeners who had not discovered his work during his lifetime encountered it through the heavy promotional machinery that surrounded the posthumous releases.
The singles and tracks drawn from Faith performed across multiple Billboard charts, with the album generating streaming numbers that placed several of its songs on the Hot 100. Pop Smoke had already demonstrated his crossover appeal with Shoot for the Stars, which had produced the massive hit "For the Night" featuring Lil Baby and DaBaby. The Faith campaign built on that commercial foundation while introducing new material to his growing international audience.
The curation of Faith was a subject of discussion among critics and fans, with some questioning the degree to which a posthumous album could truly represent an artist's intentions. However, the sonic consistency of the project with Pop Smoke's established aesthetic suggested that the production team made careful choices in assembling the material. "More Time" fits naturally within the emotional and sonic landscape that Smoke had been building across his catalog.
Republic Records deployed a comprehensive promotional strategy around Faith, including music videos, playlist placements, and radio campaigns that ensured the album reached the widest possible audience. The commercial machinery that Pop Smoke had begun to access during his lifetime was now fully engaged on behalf of his posthumous releases, giving his catalog a commercial reach that he might have achieved organically had he lived.
By mid-2021, Pop Smoke had accumulated billions of combined streams across his catalog, placing him among the most-streamed deceased hip-hop artists in history. The sustainability of that interest across multiple posthumous releases demonstrated that his appeal rested on genuine artistic merit rather than simply on the tragic circumstances of his death. "More Time" contributed to that ongoing legacy, offering listeners another entry point into the world Smoke had created during his brief but extraordinarily productive recording career.
02 Song Meaning
More Time — Pop Smoke: Meaning, Themes, and Emotional Register
"More Time" carries an emotional weight that its posthumous context cannot help but amplify. The song's central preoccupation with wanting more of something precious, more opportunity, more experience, more connection, resonates differently when the listener knows that Pop Smoke recorded it without knowing those words would be heard after his death. The theme of time, and the desire for its extension, acquires a particular poignancy given the biographical facts surrounding the recording's release.
Within the framework of Pop Smoke's artistic persona, the song engages with the tension between street ambition and personal vulnerability that ran through his best work. He was an artist who could project enormous toughness and confidence while simultaneously communicating genuine emotional need. "More Time" sits toward the more emotionally open end of that spectrum, allowing the listener access to a softer interior beneath the drill-derived exterior.
The lyrical content of the track deals with romantic and relational themes, the desire to spend more time with someone valued, to slow down the pace of a life that was moving too fast. This is not the triumphant braggadocio of his hardest street tracks but something quieter and more tender. The contrast between the heavy sonic environment and the personal emotional content was a signature move in Pop Smoke's catalog, and "More Time" demonstrates it clearly.
Pop Smoke's approach to vulnerability was always filtered through a distinctly Brooklyn sensibility, one that did not permit the kind of unguarded emotional display that characterized some other contemporary rap styles. His tenderness was always present but always disciplined, communicated through suggestion and implication rather than explicit declaration. This emotional restraint gave his more personal songs a credibility that matched the toughness of his street narratives.
In the context of Faith as a whole, "More Time" represents one of the album's more introspective moments, a pause in the relentless energy that characterized much of Pop Smoke's output to reflect on what was genuinely desired beneath the surface of the hustle. The track invites listeners to consider the human being behind the persona, the person who, beneath the drill production and the street credibility, wanted connection and time with the people he loved.
The posthumous framing inevitably shapes how "More Time" is received. Listeners approaching the song knowing that Pop Smoke would not have more time, that his life ended violently at twenty years old, bring a layer of interpretive grief to the listening experience. Whether or not that was the intended emotional register of the recording, it became part of the song's meaning through the circumstances of its release. The song functions simultaneously as a straightforward romantic expression and as an inadvertent elegy.
Within the broader landscape of early 2020s hip-hop, "More Time" also participates in a wider conversation about mortality, ambition, and the desire for more life that animated much of the music coming from artists who inhabited dangerous environments. Pop Smoke was not the only young artist whose catalog was shadowed by early death, and "More Time" connects his work to a larger tradition of hip-hop music that grapples honestly with the precariousness of the lives being documented in its verses.
→ More from Pop Smoke
View all Pop Smoke hits →
→ More from the 2020s File
View all 2020s hits →
Keep digging