Ken Carson is moving through 2026 at a pace that leaves little room between eras. Just weeks after releasing his fifth studio album, xperiment, the Atlanta rapper has returned with cartunez, a 13-track EP featuring Destroy Lonely, ApolloRed and OsamaSon.
Released August 27, cartunez extends a year that has already included another Top 10 album, a major international festival run and the launch of Carson’s U.S. Xperimenting Tour. Rather than treating xperiment as a project that needs months to settle, Carson is continuing to build around it while the album is still gaining traction.
The strategy fits an artist whose ascent over the past several years has been unusually rapid. xperiment debuted inside the Top 10 of the Billboard 200, becoming Carson’s second consecutive album to reach the chart’s upper tier after 2025’s More Chaos debuted at No. 1. According to his team, xperiment also generated nearly 16 million global streams during its first day of release.
cartunez keeps Carson closely connected to the collaborators and emerging rap ecosystem surrounding his recent work. Destroy Lonely appears on “roxy reynolds,” ApolloRed joins “9 bitches,” and OsamaSon features on “vamp city.” The remaining tracks include “scrape,” “swag jack,” “off a bean,” “rare creature,” “50K,” “005,” “eaters,” “fake news,” “disturbing the peace” and “yvngvmp.”
The EP arrives while Carson is simultaneously taking xperiment onto increasingly large stages. His U.S. Xperimenting Tour launched in Chicago in late August with xaviersobased, prettifun and DJ Moon supporting. The run continues through September, including stops at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, State Farm Arena in Atlanta and Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco on September 23.
Carson will then headline ComplexCon 2026 in Los Angeles on October 3 as the event celebrates its 10th anniversary.
That scale reflects how dramatically Carson’s position in rap has changed since A Great Chaos became his commercial breakthrough in 2023. The Platinum-certified album has surpassed 3 billion global streams, while “Overseas” gave Carson a Billboard Hot 100 entry and helped push his sound beyond the online and underground communities that initially fueled his rise.
More Chaos accelerated that trajectory in 2025, delivering Carson his first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200. His catalog has now accumulated more than 6 billion global streams, according to his team.
But xperiment suggests Carson is less interested in repeating the exact formula that brought him there than in stretching it. The album retains the blown-out production and volatile energy associated with his music while making room for more melodic and emotionally driven material. Longtime collaborators including AM, F1LTHY, Lucian and Clif Shayne contributed production, while 2hollis produced “shadeson.”
Its guest list also connects several generations and corners of contemporary rap. Destroy Lonely appears on “shopping,” Lil Uzi Vert joins “ghost,” Young Thug features on “drug kit,” and Playboi Carti appears on “deaf note.” Carson and Carti also collaborated on “wedidit,” which the two performed during Carti’s closing Summer Smash set.
Carson has surrounded xperiment with an equally deliberate visual identity. Its artwork depicts a USB drive inserted into his neck, an image that became the foundation for a series of short films directed by Joy Divizn. Built around sci-fi, suspense and surreal imagery, the films push xperiment beyond an album campaign and toward a larger fictional universe.
That attention to world-building has increasingly become part of Carson’s identity. His reach now stretches beyond music into fashion and merchandising through collaborations and campaigns involving SKIMS, Cactus Plant Flea Market, Affliction, Jesse Jo Stark’s Deadly Doll and, most recently, WWE.
Live performance remains central to the equation. Earlier this summer, Carson delivered his first Sunday-night festival headline set at Rolling Loud California before heading overseas for appearances at Roskilde Festival in Denmark, Splash! Festival in Germany, Openair Frauenfeld in Switzerland, Clout Festival in Poland and Frequency Festival in Austria. Some of those performances doubled as testing grounds for xperiment, including live debuts of new material and an appearance from Destroy Lonely for “shopping.”
Now cartunez arrives without waiting for that momentum to cool. Thirteen additional tracks this soon after a full-length album could easily read as excess. For Carson, however, the volume is increasingly part of the architecture: albums, EPs, films, fashion collaborations and live performances operating simultaneously rather than sequentially.
For an artist who has gone from A Great Chaos to a Billboard No. 1 album and another Top 10 release in less than three years, cartunez is less a detour from the xperiment era than another extension of it.
cartunez tracklist
- scrape
- swag jack
- off a bean
- rare creature
- 50K
- roxy reynolds with Destroy Lonely
- 005
- eaters
- 9 bitches with ApolloRed
- vamp city with OsamaSon
- fake news
- disturbing the peace
- yvngvmp
Featured image credit: ken carson
