Travis Scott has been busy, what with the release of fourth studio album Utopia in July, subsequent “Utopia x Cicrus Maximus” world tour, and his collaborative Audemars Piguet watch. It's a real tour de force, no pun intended, culminating in the final element of Scott's return to form since 2021's Astroworld tragedy: the revival of Cacti, his hard seltzer brand.

On December 20, Scott sat courtside for an NBA game at the Barclays Center clutching a can of his discontinued Cacti seltzer, prominently displayed with outwards-facing logos for photographers to see.

Scott wasn’t just casually drinking some expired seltzer he found laying around, either — the rapper apparently hosted a private Cacti lounge at Barclays during the game, a surprise brand activation that invited select VIPs to grab their own can of Cacti, complete with the requisite merch.

This is a Travis Scott project, after all — there's always merch.

Later in the game, Scott’s Cacti can was knocked over by an errant ball, spilling seltzer everywhere and inspiring

You literally cannot pay for this kind of marketing — okay, maybe you can but, either way, it gave Scott something to joke when he visited Jimmy Fallon's TV show a day later.

Scott mentioned that the spilled drink in question was indeed Cacti, his Anheuser-Busch-produced seltzer brand. and the crowd awarded him some applause for the namedrop but to Scott's credit, he didn’t push the drink any more than that.

Still, the way that Scott's can just so happened to explode onto the court — in full view of the camera, naturally — provided a perfect opportunity for a promo, had Scott wished to take it.

The fact that Scott didn't mention Cacti’s relaunch suggests that the brand's rebirth is still under wraps, really.

Consider that Scott didn’t mention the Cacti lounge at Barclays or that he probably had a veritable cooler of the stuff on hand so he could replace his Cacti can immediately the first was knocked over.

Scott is all about long-term teases after all, especially when it comes to his albums and Nike sneakers, but this is surprisingly low key even for him.

He was sipping Cacti courtside at the Knicks and namedropping it on Fallon during a much-hyped tour, for crying out loud. 

But the quiet nature of any assumed comeback for Scott’s spiked seltzer hasn’t gone unnoticed by Scott devotees well-trained in tracking the rapper's aforementioned slow-burn teases.

They noticed that the Barclays Cacti seltzer lounge showcased new branding for the Cacti cans and that some of Scott's new tour merch tied into the Cacti relaunch, with one black hoodie wearing the Cacti logo on the front and a map of his “world tour” on the back, a play on the seltzer’s tagline: “out of this world flavor.”

There haven’t been any posts on Cacti’s Instagram page since September 2021, two months before 10 people died and around 300 more were injured during a crowd crush at Scott’s Astroworld concert. Cacti and other Scott-backed products were immediately pulled from the market after the tragedy. 

"After careful evaluation, we have decided to stop all production and brand development of Cacti Agave Spiked Seltzer," said Cacti manufacturer Anheuser-Busch in a statement in the wake of Astroworld 2021. "We believe brand fans will understand and respect this decision."

By 2023, however, the beverage producer seems ready to get Cacti back up and running as Scott continues to tour.

To be clear, it's not confirmed that Anheuser-Busch is even still the maker behind Cacti, as it does not currently list Cacti on its website among the other hard seltzer brands that it produces, though that's not hard evidence either way.

It does make sense that Cacti would eventually come back, though, as it was quite popular and reportedly on the way to profitability just after its release thanks to Scott's rabid following.

This isn’t the first time that Cacti has resurfaced since its discontinuation in 2021 after Astroworld.

In 2022, the Cacti website and social media accounts were quietly reactivated without any new activity.

The Cacti site, built in Shopify, currently only shows a spinning Cacti logo and a password prompt, so there isn't much to go off of there. Scott similarly hasn't posted about Cacti on his personal Instagram page or the Cactus Jack account.

However, the subliminal marketing push that Scott began in December 2023 suggests that Cacti is gearing up to return in 2024, which makes sense from a business perspective — the hard seltzer market is still on the rise.

Cacti's return would be the final pre-Astroworld revival to bring Scott full-circle; besides a few magazine covers, everything else that was postponed following the Astroworld tragedy eventually saw release with hardly any public pushback, if any.

If there was ever a "right" time for Scott to revive Cacti, now is probably it.