Members Only - Members Only Vol. 4 (2LP)

On January 23, 2019, the South Florida collective Members Only dropped Vol. 4, timed with what would have been XXXTentacion’s 21st birthday. The timing mattered. This crew grew up in the Broward County underground, packing sweaty rooms with blown out speakers and a punk sense of community, and the project arrived as both a celebration of that world and a tribute to their most famous founder. You can feel the grief, but you also feel the stubborn rush of a scene that never waited for permission.

Vol. 4 plays like a cipher that never ends. Verses tumble into hooks, hooks give way to barked ad libs, then someone else jumps in and flips the tempo. The roster is big and most of them show up in razor bursts. Kid Trunks snarls and darts through beats like a game of chicken, Craig Xen brings a serrated edge, Cooliecut and Flyboy Tarantino trade punchy lines, Bass Santana keeps the energy spiking. The sound leans hard into the Florida DNA that first blew up on SoundCloud, all distorted 808s, quick runtimes, and sudden left turns. It is not polished. That is the point. The best moments feel like a live mic was thrown into the middle of a house party and nobody worried about clipping.

XXXTentacion’s presence is scattered across the record and you can hear why the collective wanted it out on that date. When his voice cuts through, it lands like a flare. Sometimes he goads the beat into chaos, sometimes he drags the room into a darker headspace, and you remember how he could collapse mood and melody into a few bars. There is a push and pull between tribute and forward motion, and the balance mostly works. Nobody tries to imitate him, which keeps the project from sinking into hagiography. Instead, everyone sounds like themselves, a loose confederation of voices connected by a shared origin and a taste for unruly drums.

As a listening experience, Vol. 4 is built for whiplash. One track leans into snarling mosh pit energy, the next swerves into something more melodic or deadpan funny, then it is back to teeth-bared aggression. That can be uneven, sure, yet the mixtape logic feels honest to how Members Only came up. If you ever caught them on a chaotic festival side stage or in a tiny Florida room, this sequencing tracks with that memory. The highs crackle, the lows pass quickly, and the collective momentum keeps pulling you along.

What I like most is how many textures the crew squeezes out of a narrow toolkit. A lot of these beats ride the same palette of guttural bass and skeletal percussion, but small choices keep it fresh. A vocal pitched a notch too high, a drum pattern that cuts three ways, a hook that barely shows up then vanishes. The brevity helps. Even the shoutiest cuts do not overstay their welcome. In a world of playlists where attention wanders fast, this moves at the speed of the scroll without feeling empty.

If you collect modern rap on wax, you probably already search for Members Only vinyl and other Members Only albums on vinyl just to have a snapshot of that South Florida wave on the shelf. Vol. 4 sits right in the middle of that story, the bridge between a scene’s wild rise and the hard reality that followed. I have seen people ask for Members Only Vol. 4 vinyl or try to buy Members Only records online because they want that raw bass to rattle the room in a different way. Fair warning, this stuff was born in cars and clubs, so if you do find it spinning at a Melbourne record store tastemaker night or buried in a crate of vinyl records Australia collectors trade, expect heads to turn when those subs hit.

Vol. 4 is not a tidy memorial and it is not an easy A to B album. It is a document of a crew refusing to dim the lights. That stubbornness reads as love. The music surges, stumbles, and surges again, and in the process it captures a moment that was never meant to be domesticated. If you care about the Florida underground that crashed the gates in the late 2010s, this belongs in that timeline. It is messy. It is alive. It is Members Only, exactly as advertised.