Loud mac miller youtube full#

And his growth here is of a different type-toward a patient spirituality, toward being okay with stasis for the purpose of self-care. Miller’s ability to locate and lock into unique, catchy flows and melodies is still extremely evident-particularly on the invigorating “Hands.” Brion deserves some credit for constructing blue-grey textures to match Miller’s somber mood. Circles is perhaps too small in scale to be Miller’s final masterpiece it doesn’t exhibit the mammoth musical growth that listeners had come to expect from him from album to album.īut it’s still compelling in its own drowsy way. But Circles exists somewhere in the hazy middle, capturing neither the harrowing lows of Swimming nor the euphoric braggadocio of GO:OD AM.Īnd aspects of the album leave behind the nagging suspicion that Miller, if he had lived, might have completed it differently: he might have re-written generic placeholder lyrics (“I don’t know where I been lately but I’ve been alright”) and brought more life to instrumental parts that often sound like demos.

Loud mac miller youtube full#

Miller often talked about wanting to have good days and bad days-to embrace the full and agonizing spectrum of human emotion. If Miller’s new subdued attitude was healthier for him, it also put something of a wet blanket over his creativity. In direct contrast, Miller sleepily croons on “Surf,” “People, they lie / But hey, so do I” before delivering a new Zen-like mantra: “There’s water in the flowers / Let’s grow.” On the defiant and brash 2012 single “Loud,” Miller had announced “People lie, numbers don’t,” and cited sold-out shows and Billboard numbers. Regret is a huge theme on Circles, with Miller constantly alluding to past mistakes his lyrics and turn to aesthetic sparseness can be read as an attempt to distance himself from a previous frenzied or craven mentality. “Ever since I can remember I been keeping it together / But I’m feeling strange,” he murmurs on “Hand Me Downs.” On “Hands,” he reprimands himself, as if to shake himself from a stupor: ”Why don’t you wake up from your bad dreams / When’s the last time you took a little time for yourself?” He was admittedly taking opioids in the months leading up to his death, and Circles certainly feels like an album made on downers: his lyrics lack clarity or specific targets, and at times he seems to be singing at a remove from himself. But he employs his vocal chops with confidence and charm, and his comparative lack of vocal strength actually lends poignancy to an album haunted by anxiety and drift. On “Hand Me Downs,” one of the album’s strongest songs, he effortlessly slides up to high notes with a husky sweetness before dropping back down to tiptoe over syllables with his trademark playful drawl.

But on Circles, he puts his unadorned singing voice front and center, lending the album a casual and startling intimacy. Miller used to hide his wavering voice under a phalanx of filters, pitching effects and doubled vocal tracks to the point that he was sometimes unrecognizable. Streaming audiences have followed these artists to the spaces between musical walls: the genreless playlists Pollen and Lorem are two of the most popular discovery hubs on Spotify. The current Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper, Roddy Ricch’s “The Box,” is sung all the way through many other artists, from Tyler the Creator to Dominic Fike to Brockhampton to Rex Orange County, have found the sweet spot between indie rock, hip-hop and soul. It may seem initially strange for one of the world’s most talented rappers to take his cues from rock, but Miller’s inclinations fit into a larger trend over the last few years in the hip-hop world of imbuing rap cadences with melody. “We simply know that it was important to Malcolm for the world to hear it.” The album was ultimately completed by the veteran producer Jon Brion, who worked with Miller extensively before his death. No clear path,” they wrote in a statement on his Instagram page when they announced the forthcoming album. Because he envisioned Circles as a companion to his previous album Swimming, released in August 2018, his family was left with an agonizing decision about whether to finish and release it: “This is a complicated process that has no right answer.

Miller was well into the recording process of Circles when he died in September 2018 of an accidental overdose. Mac Miller nice too though.”īut there’s not much rapping at all on Circles, his sixth (and presumably last) studio album released posthumously on Friday.

Miller, born Malcolm James McCormick in 1992, rapped with a restless determination: to outrun his initial reputation as a white frat rapper to distract from his anxieties and addictions to amuse himself and his friends and to gain the respect of his idols, which he did: as Jay-Z admitted on Twitter, “Black people really magic.