EST Gee has spent years making the kind of rap that does not need to announce how hard it is. The Louisville rapper’s deadpan delivery, street-level storytelling and refusal to sand down the edges have done that work for him. Now, he is taking stock of just how much has changed without pretending any of it came easy.
EST Gee has released his new project, Bigger Than the Devil, a 17-track collection out now via CMG/Interscope Records. Featuring YFN Lucci alongside Skrt, EST SkiMike, 86Snot, EST Spit and EST4Nikk, the album keeps its guest list deliberately close while putting Gee’s own voice firmly at the center.
That restraint is important. In a year when rap albums can sometimes feel engineered around the biggest possible collection of features, Bigger Than the Devil is not particularly interested in playing that game. EST Gee has already recorded with everyone from Lil Baby and Travis Scott to Future, Young Thug and Lil Durk. He does not need another star-studded guest list to establish where he sits. Instead, this project looks inward, circling survival, loyalty, money, ambition and the increasingly complicated reality of getting what you once wanted.
The previously unreleased “Way More” is probably the clearest thesis statement. Gee considers what happens when the stakes get bigger right alongside the success, measuring where he is now against the people and circumstances that helped shape him. There is money here, obviously. There is flexing. This is still EST Gee. But underneath it sits the question that has followed some of his strongest work: once you survive long enough to make it out, what exactly are you supposed to do with everything you carried with you?
That tension runs throughout Bigger Than the Devil. YFN Lucci and Skrt appear on “Tranquilizer,” while EST SkiMike joins “Ya Digg.” Gee brings 86Snot, EST Spit and EST4Nikk together for “You Know It,” keeping some of the album’s most visible guest spots within his own orbit rather than simply reaching for recognizable names.
The album also knows exactly where it comes from musically. Opener “I Got It Lit” samples the intro to Jeezy’s Trap or Die, connecting Gee’s own version of Southern street rap to one of the records that helped define the genre’s previous generation. It is a reference that works because EST Gee is far enough into his own career that the relationship feels less like imitation than lineage.
Previously released tracks “Supreme Sanders,” “Thug Club,” “Sometimes,” “Call Spitta,” “Ya Digg” and “You Know It” all land on the final tracklist, giving the rollout a home inside a project that feels considerably more focused when heard as a complete statement.
And EST Gee has been releasing enough music lately that focus matters.
In 2025 alone, he released both My World and I Ain’t Feeling You. The latter included “My Love” featuring Veeze and Rylo Rodriguez and “Houstonatlantaville” featuring Lil Baby and Travis Scott. His 2026 run has also included collaborations with fellow CMG affiliates 42 Dugg and Mozzy before turning the attention back toward his solo work with Bigger Than the Devil.
There is also something fitting about the album’s title arriving five years after Bigger Than Life or Death, the 2021 project that pushed EST Gee into an entirely different level of visibility. That mixtape reached No. 7 on the Billboard 200 and No. 1 on Apple Music’s All-Genre chart, helping transform a rapper who had built his following through self-released mixtapes into a national name. He followed it with I Never Felt Nun in 2022, which reached No. 8 on the Billboard 200, while his collaborative project with 42 Dugg, Last Ones Left, gave him another Top 10 release.
Five years later, Bigger Than the Devil sounds like a title from somebody who has had enough time to learn that becoming successful does not necessarily make life smaller, cleaner or easier. Sometimes everything just gets bigger with you.
EST Gee will take the album overseas this fall on the Bigger Than the Devil Tour. The run begins October 14 at Paradiso in Amsterdam before traveling through Frankfurt, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Paris, Cologne and Copenhagen. The tour closes with three UK dates, hitting London’s The Steel Yard on October 28, The Brooke in Southampton on October 29 and Soupkitchen in Manchester on October 30.
For an artist whose entire career has been built around documenting where he is without romanticizing how he got there, Bigger Than the Devil does not need some dramatic reinvention narrative attached to it. EST Gee knows what his music sounds like. More importantly, he knows why it sounds that way.
The circumstances are bigger now. The money is bigger. The audience is bigger. The pressure probably is too. But EST Gee is still rapping like somebody keeping receipts.
Bigger Than the Devil is out now via CMG/Interscope Records.
Featured image credit: Cassidyboi
