Shy Glizzy’s Fully Loaded, the album preceding Covered N Blood, is marked by heft. It’s 19 tracks long, boasts some of the highest-profile features of the rapper's career (Young Thug, Rick Ross, and Lil Uzi Vert, among others), and, as Glizzy told Apple Music at the time of its release, was intended to show the world that he’s a hitmaker in his own right. Its follow-up, then, is an exercise in restraint—just 12 tracks, with two featured guests (YoungBoy Never Broke Again and 3 Glizzy) and a style of production far more reserved than what Fully Loaded had to offer. Frequent collaborator Geraldo Liive is of course here, and their conspicuously mellow “Volcano” will surely have a place amongst Glizzy’s best work one day. Sonny Digital is responsible for the plodding “Panicking,” and Turbo The Great provides trunk-rattling 808s for the MC’s sports metaphors on “Quarterback Glizzy.” Elsewhere, Glizzy takes a moment to honor dearly departed Los Angeles hero Nipsey Hussle on “Ridin Down Slauson,” and then one of his personal OGs on “Prime Tyme.” In all, it's a solemnly reflective affair, even in the instances where Glizzy acknowledges his own recklessness, as he does on “How I'm Coming,” rapping, ”I look back at my past and see how much I really had/Went on a lot of missions, I ain't even rock a mask.”