Sick Boi

Sick Boi is the second studio album by Welsh rapper Ren. It was released on 13 October 2023 through The Other Songs as his first studio album in nearly eight years, following Freckled Angels (2016).

Background
Sick Boi is an entirely self-written and self-produced record that sees Gill "drawing from a lot of things that [he has] worked on over the years". He personally described it as a "victory" over his health and viewed it as empowering to "pull something off like this", as he spent the previous year living in Canada to undergo medical treatment for his chronic diseases. The album delves into the "agony of his struggles" and offers listeners a "perspective that most people don't have". Gill challenged himself to create a "hiphop only" record which came out as a "kaleidoscopic, genre-spanning effort" that focuses on his personal struggles, according to the rapper. In an interview with NPR, Gill revealed that the project was partially inspired by a "hyper-polarization" that is going on in the world according to him, leading to a "division" that hinders humans "to progress as a species". Talking to the Official Charts Company, Gill named "The Hunger" and "What You Want" as the oldest tracks on the record that he had sitting around "for a while". However, when he tied the record together, the songs "made sense".

Critical reception
Sick Boi was critically well received, with Robert Christgau hailing Ren as "a rapper whose articulated singsong combines startling clarity with polysyllabic vernacularity" and unlike much of anything he had heard before. Writing for Clash magazine, Robin Murray called the album a difficult but "often inspired" and thoughtfully composed work. Wayne Carey of Louder Than War named Sick Boi as "album of the week", saying that Ren produced "the most ambitious" album they had heard in years. Carey called the project a "mammoth" that offers a "harsh tale" of health.

Commercial performance
On 16 October 2023, this album was placed at number two in the midweek charts with Rick Astley's Are We There Yet? being the number one album in the first chart update that the Official Charts Company released for the week. For most of the remainder of the week, Astley was number one in their updates, with Ren being only 133 sales behind Astley when the update was issued on Wednesday. At that point it was decided that a £4.99 digital version of Sick Boi would go on sale via Ren's website on the Thursday, with a number of exclusive tracks, securing 4,533 more sales on the last day of tracking and the number one spot when the Official Albums Chart was released on 20 October 2023. In the end Sick Boi clocked up a sales total of 18,653, including 6,226 CDs, 2,036 LPs and 8,619 digital downloads, putting him 6,996 copies ahead of Astley, who debuted at number two.