A Westside Gunn release is a rotating gallery of luxury, violence, and divine intervention. If Pray for Paris was an ornate medieval fresco, then 12 is a faded Renaissance sketch scrawled in blood, where its beauty is worn into the fabric of its imperfections. Billed as the final installment of the Hitler Wears Hermes series, the album arrives as a last masterstroke. It’s a tapestry of cocaine rap mythology, haunted by Karl Lagerfeld’s ghost and soaked in the dust of Buffalo, New York's streets.

Gunn has always treated rap like haute couture, approaching it as a creative director who understands seasonality, exclusivity, and the fleeting nature of glamour. His rhymes are painted like textured brush strokes across a rugged canvas. They are loose yet deliberate, moody rather than momentary. On 12, more than ever, he moves like an apparition in his own house. Across the release, he lets his Griselda Records collaborators fill the space between survival and thriving, stepping in only when necessary to sign his name in gold leaf. There are no grand statements or sweeping goodbyes. Only the sense that Gunn has done exactly what he set out to do.

Stepping into Gunn's final exhibit, you are greeted with Boswell, the first full-length track. It is five minutes that are haunted by horns with a cypher of voices: Estee Nack’s bilingual barrage, Stove God Cooks’s witticisms, Gunn’s nasal luxury-speak. The production, crafted by Daringer, Conductor Williams, and Camouflage Monk, is stripped down. Its drums? Often absent. The samples? Fractured, ghostly. The beats? Curling around the verses like the smoke of a Cohiba Behike in a member-only speakeasy.

The hallucinatory Veert drifts with a loop that is so hypnotic that it sounds like the memory of a song rather than the song itself. Contrast this with Adam Page, a track dripping with 90s vibes—something playing during a Menace II Society drive-by or after midnight on GTA Radio. 055 feels like a gospel delivered in the back of a Rolls-Royce Phantom, where Stove God Cooks declares: “Praise Fly, praise Stove, praise both” with a voice cracking open as scripture rewritten in blow—the gospel of the gutter, where dope bricks are relics and high fashion is holy vestment. And then there’s Dump World, a finale where Gunn’s voice floats over Conductor Williams’ aching composition, his ad-libs punctuating the beat like gunshots in an avant-garde gangster film.

12 feels like a modern-day Supreme Clientele. Like the Ghostface Killah classic, it is world-building through bricks of surrealist imagery, fragmented memories, and fine art bars. Also, like Ghostface, Gunn prioritizes aura over narrative, stacking images of high-end hedonism with gut-wrenching street wisdom. But where Ghostface wove a blaxploitation fever dream, Gunn’s approach is steeped in a minimalist opulence that feels more curated.

Gunn has long seen himself as more Basquiat than Biggie, and 12 cements his evolution into a full-fledged tastemaker. Across the album, he’s showcasing the next wave of street artists. Stove God Cooks is the most frequent guest, mixing sharp-tongued irreverence and theological weight. Estee Nack's verses are chaotic, unravelling like the frenzied brushwork of a Twombly painting with Brother Tom Sos and Elijah Hooks reflecting on the fringes of its canvas. Gunn appears in flashes. Both inherently present and absent, he is like the house's architect who chooses to live outside its walls. In fact, Outlander is the lone track where Gunn stands alone. Bathed in woozy horns, it’s not a eulogy nor a curtain call. It’s a final lap through his own gallery, where the echoes of old cyphers refuse to fade.

If this is the last Hitler Wears Hermes, it is the rarest piece in a collection that has turned street rap into a movement of fine art and felony raps. So, will Gunn retire? Maybe. Maybe not. As 12 shows, he moves at his own pace (being his third release in five months, that pace seems pretty fast). But one thing is certain: the museum is built. The exhibits are hung. And the curator’s silhouette lingers in the doorway.