Lil Tecca turned 17 just days before releasing his debut project We Love You Tecca, and unlike other teen rappers who have bounded up the charts in recent years, he looks his age. He’s not 17 in Riverdale casting years. He presents as an actual high schooler, complete with braces and glasses that look straight off of a CVS rack—a pointed departure break from the outsized stylist budgets and Manic Panic color palettes of rap’s biggest, youngest stars. That’s about where the distinction from his peers ends, though. Tecca’s look may be unique, but his sound isn’t.

The Queens-born rapper rhymes in the melodic patter of New York sing-rap phenom A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, with a flow that splits the difference between Chief Keef’s gruff irritability and Gunna’s glycerin slickness. He’s got a strong voice and natural instincts, and although his flow is completely secondhand, it’s precisely pitched to the moment, especially when his songs glower their way into Juice WLRD incel-rap territory. That rapper looms especially large over We Love You Tecca. Juice WRLD’s producers Nick Mira and Taz Taylor helmed Tecca’s breakthrough hit “Ransom,” and he contributes the album’s only guest feature, on a remix of that track.

Tecca’s success story has played like a smaller scale echo of Lil Nas X’s, another internet-savvy young rapper who built a listenership online too big for major labels to ignore. After millions of streams on SoundCloud and a viral video for “Ransom” on the taste-making YouTube channel Lyrical Lemonade, Tecca inked a deal with Republic Records, making him labelmates with Drake and Ariana Grande. His rise may not have stirred an all-consuming debate about genre classifications or resuscitated Billy Ray Cyrus’s career, but it’s always impressive seeing an artist so young cut through the industry’s yellow tape so quickly. Some rappers grind their whole lives for their moment. Tecca netted his between Xbox Live sessions.

Still, he could benefit from putting a little more work in. It’s not for nothing that Tecca harps about guarding his flow on “Ransom,” because throughout We Love You Tecca he clings to it like a tennis player trying to fake his way into the pros with only one serve. That flow sounds fantastic on “Ransom,” and even better as it figure-skates through the tuneful “Shots.” But Tecca wears it into the ground over the course of the album’s repetitious 40 minutes, especially in its second half, as his tracks bleed into one endless rewrite of each other.

Tecca’s most glaring deficit, though, is how indifferent his lyrics are. His songwriting consists entirely of repeating genre tropes he’s absorbed through osmosis. “I got twin Glocks, turn you to a dancer,” he threatens on “Ransom,” but annotating on his lyrics on Genius, he concedes that’s a fabrication (”I don’t have no straps for nobody,” he writes). That’s not a problem in and of itself, but some conviction or imagination is, and Tecca doesn’t even bother to disguise how empty his recycled boasts are. In his Genius footnotes for the lyric “She know I got the Fendi, Prada when I hit Milan,” he admits he doesn’t wear designer clothes, either. “Just fitting what works together,” he comments. “I have never been to Europe or nothing.”

Even great rappers cut corners and lean on filler sometimes, and even the best ones repeat themselves. But the reward of rap music in the quantity over quality age is those little glimmers of inspiration that somehow work their way into even the most mechanical exercises: the unexpected punchlines, the uncharted trains of thought, the WTF moments, the zigs that come where there should be a zag. Those are the moments that make the redundancy worthwhile. We Love You Tecca doesn’t offer many of them.