This might be a late review, but GNX was never just an album. Coming off one of the most historic battles in rap history, it arrived as something the city actually needed, a document of Los Angeles getting back to itself.

The album will be remembered less for the timing and more for what it represented. Kendrick pulled from all corners of the city. AzChike, Dody 6, Hitta J3, Peysoh, Wallie The Sensei, YoungThreat. Underground LA names who had been putting in work long before the mainstream caught on. He brought SZA in twice. He gave Roddy Ricch a verse on “Dodger Blue.” The tracklist reads like a city in conversation with itself.

Then there is “Wacced Out Murals,” where Kendrick opens the album alongside Deyra Barrera, a Regional Mexicano artist. That detail mattered. Not because it was a statement, but because it felt natural. The mariachi-influenced sound did not feel grafted on. It felt like it belonged, which says more about how Kendrick actually listens to LA than any interview could.

“TV Off” with Lefty Gunplay went on to win Best Rap Song at the Grammys. Lefty, a Guatemalan-Mexican-American rapper from Baldwin Park raised in Southsider culture, became the first Latino artist to win that award. He said afterward that breaking into rap as a Latino in LA is hard, and that he wanted the win to mean something for Black and Brown unity. Kendrick knew what he was doing when he made that call.

GNX will age into a classic. Not just because the music holds up, but because of what it captured. A specific moment in West Coast culture, after the beef, after the pandemic years, when LA finally felt like itself again.