With each new release, the cult of Jelly Roll seemed to grow larger, and 2017’s Addiction Kills was no exception. In addition to notching three Gold-certified singles (“Wheels Fall Off”, “Hate Goes On” and “Only”), the Nashville rapper undertook a 29-city support tour that became the most successful of his career at that point. He achieved all this with scant attention from the music press, mainstream or independent. To spread the word about his music, the always charismatic Jelly Roll took to social media, sharing not only music videos and live clips but also diary-like posts that run the gamut from sombre reflections on incarceration to games of Jenga with his daughter, Bailee, and kayak trips with his wife, Bunnie XO (who he’d married in Las Vegas a year earlier). As Addiction Kills proves time and time again, Jelly Roll’s gift for speaking from the heart isn’t a press-relations move; it represents the very core of his music (which matured by leaps and bounds in the late 2010s). When he raps, “My mind’s like a permanent reel that’s flipping pictures/Of friends that’s no longer with us,” on the title track, he’s both mourning losses in his own life and calling attention to the ravages of substance abuse upon the working-class youth packing clubs to see him. At the time of the record’s release in 2017, Tennessee was in the midst of its deadliest year to date for overdose deaths (three-fourths of which would be attributed to opioids). Fans were beginning to hear their own struggles in Jelly Roll’s unflinching storytelling. He acknowledges as much in the blues-influenced “Sex Drugs & Pain”: “I’m not a politician,” he lays out. “I’m a singer with words/That represents every kid that came up from the dirt.” While the spectre of death looms over Addiction Kills, Jelly Roll seeks solace in Bunnie, who helped ground him at a time when he was living out of a van most days. On the aforementioned “Wheels Fall Off” as well as the patiently thumping “Heaven”, he paints himself and her as a Bonnie and Clyde-style duo whose ride-or-die romance burns like a welding torch. On other songs, including “I’m Lit” and “Hot Streak”, he’s content to keep on living the fast life like an outlaw, an image Jelly Roll would further cultivate on the subsequent release Waylon & Willie, the first of several collaborations with country rapper Struggle Jennings.