During St. Louis producer Metro Boomin’s adolescent years, the rap landscape in his hometown could be generously described as a ghost town. Nelly’s explosion to diamond-level superstar status facilitated a shift to pop and country, leaving the STL hip-hop scene sputtering in his wake—as if the biggest company in town had upped sticks. Searching for music to fill his teenage days, Metro turned his attention to Atlanta. It was the late 2000s: Tall Tees were on their way to becoming an endangered species. The hard-nosed, coke-laced raps and menacing pianos of Gucci Mane and Jeezy rubbed shoulders with a growing strain of party music that extended the tradition stoked by snap icons D4L and Dem Franchise Boyz a few years earlier. By the time Metro moved to Atlanta in the early 2010s, the club sounded like a brackish mix of candy-coated flexes draped in synths and hi-hats, as well as drug-trade tales backed by thundering 808s—and for some reason, everyone was wearing H&M jeans.

Over the next decade, Metro would become the go-to hitmaker for rap’s most ambitious stars, culminating in last year’s dual collaborations with Future, WE DON’T TRUST YOU and WE STILL DON’T TRUST YOU, which grafted Southern trap accoutrements onto blockbuster-rap scaffolding and also roped their producer into an extended run as a supporting character in the Drake-Kendrick beef. Suffice to say 2024 was a high-stakes year for Metro Boomin. But the new Metro Boomin Presents: A Futuristic Summa (Hosted by DJ Spinz) drops us into another world altogether: a crystallized memory of a night out in Atlanta in the mid-2010s. Bucking the trend of Metro’s recent projects, A Futuristic Summa attempts to capture the essence of an era when the biggest concern was getting into the club before 11 o’clock: a bright, airy mixtape stocked with saccharine melodies and nostalgic cameos. The 24-track, “double-disc” exhibition is imperfect, limited by the ceiling of sentimentality, but its earnestness manages to clear the bar for being strictly fan service.

Gone is the self-serious maximalism that bogged down parts of Metro’s double collaboration with Future (and even extends to 2022’s Heroes & Villains and 2023’s Spider-Man soundtrack). A Futuristic Summa feels looser, tapping into the joyous havoc that fueled his best beats of olds—think of the interaction between the wailing vocal sample and booming 808s on “I Serve the Base”—but applying that ingenuity in the service of a far lighter tone, as though Metro were trying to reverse engineer Rich Kidz and Travis Porter beats brick-by-brick. The appeal is obvious from the folksy, accordion-like synths that greet you on “I Want It All,” the first full song. Melodies swirl and fly with delirious freedom on “They Wanna Have Fun,” where Travis Porter, Gucci Mane, and Young Dro riff on Cyndi Lauper’s classic pop hook before co-producer Zaytoven’s signature organs appear in the back half. None of these beats are likely to rank among Metro’s all-time strongest, but the deviation from the buttoned-up, cinematic path he’s been on is a welcome one. When I close my eyes, I can almost see the Project X party montage.

A Futuristic Summa revives Metro’s dormant ability to bring out the best in artists not named Future, and some of its guests clearly haven’t had this much fun in a long time. Young Dro’s intensity elevates everyone in his radius. The way the 46-year-old emcee switches from laid-back to triple-time spitting (“They Wanna Have Fun”) and incites a call-and-response without breaking stride (“WTF Goin”) makes it feel as though he’s rapping to get another record deal. Effort begets effort: Roscoe Dash’s smooth crooning seamlessly feeds into a reinvigorated Quavo imploring the ladies to twerk on “Butterflies (Right Now),” and on standouts like “Drip BBQ” and “I Like That,” Waka Flocka Flame, J Money, and 2 Chainz meet the occasion like they’re going bar-for-bar in a freestyle circle outside a gas station.

A nostalgia project such as this one reaches its saturation point when the less-impressive moments make you wonder why you’re not just switching to the original reference. Extended, momentum-killing stretches lurk throughout Discs 1 and 2 like landmines. Young Thug’s lethargic energy ensures that “Birthday” never gets off the ground (hard to imagine that song soundtracking your party), and an endless barrage of melodies in the same vocal register from Meany, Skooly, and Lil Baby turns “Don’t Stop Dancin” into a chore. “Issa Party” feels as though everyone tried to recreate Rich Kidz’s “My Partna Dem” from memory, while the inane refrain of “My Lil Shit” fastens to the beat’s high-pitched beeps in a manner that’s probably a little irritating to dogs and small children. You know it’s not really 2010 because over a decade ago, none of these tracks would’ve made the cut.

That’s the risk of the rose-tinted ethos of A Futuristic Summa, which tries to squeeze much of the past two decades of Atlanta trap into one big box. You can see it working when newer talents like YK Niece and BunnaB more than hold their own alongside the likes of Gucci Mane, Travis Porter, or Skooly—when the fusion of past and present proves that Atlanta’s rap scene remains an artistic beacon, just as it was for Metro as a teen. But there’s no stasis in a scene that cycles through styles and personalities this quickly, leaving you to wonder who among the ranks of this sprawling double album will be soundtracking the city’s future summers. The issue’s neatly synthesized in the final seconds of Disc 1, on “Still Turnt (Forever B$Shot),” where an excitable voice beckons to Metro: “We need some of that real music back, that old Atlanta back, man/We need some of that futuristic lean,” he says. It’s nice to visit the cotton-candy comfort of the past, but the answer for “what comes next” can’t simply be “more of the same.”