(It also starts to make sense that he’s said that Fleet Foxes are his favourite band of all time.) It’s the sound of growing up, and it’s the sound of him being at his most open. Unlikely as it would have seemed, it sounds like Tame Impala, Washed Out and there’s even a bit of The XX about it. “Seasons change and our love went cold / Feed the flame ’cause we can’t let it go” he sings in a yearning voice. You’ll have already heard lead single ‘Circles’. On the opening title track, he tells a lost love, “ You never took the time to get to know me / Was scared of losin’ somethin’ that we never found.” That shadow looms large over the album.
Not many people would think to pair the odd couple of Travis Scott and Ozzy Osbourne on a track together but on ‘Take What You Want’ the Prince of Darkness asks, “Why don’t you take what you want from me?” as a Sabbath-like guitar shudders jaggedly in the background and Scott tells us, “I need some more reasons to live out this evening… Been sippin’ forever and just taking whatever.”Īs those lines suggest, Posty seems in a bad place relationship-wise (maybe it’s that curse again?). So, yes, it’s an album of weird and wonderful combinations. This cavalcade of star turns only helps to add to the idea of this as a mixtape – although they sometimes upstage the main man himself. And he’s been really busy going through his WhatsApp contacts to ask for star turns – there are guest spots by everyone from Ozzy Osbourne and Future to SZA to Halsey, as well as writing credits for Kanye West and Father John Misty. It’s a (deep breath) synth-pop-rock’n’roll-bedroom-indie-trap-hip-hop-break-up album. These are albums made as playlists that skip seamlessly between styles.Īnd never has this been truer than on ‘Hollywood’s Bleeding’.
But Post Malone is the post everything star the kids have called for, a musician made for the internet-age a goofball chameleon instinctively skilled at understanding the ways genres can merge together. It’s led to questions of how much he means it, man. In that sense, Posty is a very modern star – he’s able to skilfully cherry pick from different genres. Yet, even as he was dismissed as a one-hit wonder after breakout single ‘White Iverson’, he was able to prove doubters wrong, following it up with hit after hit, huge chorus after huge chorus. His first two albums, from 2016’s ‘Stoney’ to 2018’s aforementioned ‘Beerbongs…’, aimed to prove that point, swinging between trap and hip-hop to country and pop. “I just want to be a person that makes music.” Posty, it’s clear, doesn’t care a goddam thing about genres. “I don’t want to be a rapper,” he said last year. With his scraggly-hair, scribbled-on beard and face etched with ‘Always Tired’ and ‘Stay Away’ tattoos beneath his eyes, he may cut an unlikely megastar, but Post Malone is undoubtedly one of the biggest rappers on the planet right now. All 18 songs from his second album ‘Beerbongs and Bentleys’ charted in the US.
Despite the fact that he’s cursed (no, really – when he touched the Dybbuk box, the world’s most haunted object, a run of bad luck, including his house being robbed, ensued), Austin Richard Post has had a stratospherically successful few years.