Lil Baby and Gunna used to be the tightest duo in Atlanta. This week Baby finally said out loud where things stand between them, and the short version is the two are not good, but nobody is getting a public show out of it.
He said it on “Popcast,” The New York Times pop culture show, sitting down with Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli ahead of his new album “Fresh,” which drops November 6.
“We can not like each other but we gonna play it cool for y’all. It’s like an unspoken thing.”
Lil Baby, on Gunna
“Whether I like them or they like me, it’s like we all gonna be on that personal vibe,” Baby said when Gunna’s name came up. “We got a problem? We can handle our problem off the internet, in person, just us.”
He kept coming back to Atlanta. “I’d rather have that beef or problem personally because we’re really like the ones who hold it down for the town,” he said. A public war between the two of them, in his telling, just makes both of them look bad.
The split goes back to December 2022, when Gunna took an Alford plea in the YSL RICO case and walked out of jail while the case against Young Thug and the rest rolled on. The two had been everywhere together since “Drip Harder” in 2018. By December 2024, Baby was telling Charlamagne Tha God flat out that he and Gunna had no relationship anymore, and nothing he said this week walks that back.
He also shut down the other story that follows him around, the idea that he fell off. “To me, I don’t have fall-off periods,” he said. Nothing changed, he argued, between the years he went without a hit single and now, with his Pharrell-produced single “Dead Fresh” moving. “When would I be in a slump? It don’t change that you put out a hit.”
So no reunion, no diss record, no timeline war. Whatever is left between Baby and Gunna stays between Baby and Gunna, and “Fresh” lands November 6 with the question still hanging over it.
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