The second posthumous album from modern US rap great Mac Miller transports you back in time to an era of discovery and adversity for the Pittsburgh native. Avant-garde, enlightening and audacious, the long-lost work is essential, thought-provoking and often painstaking listening.
It has been almost six and a half years since the untimely passing of Malcolm James McCormick, professionally known as Mac Miller. And yet his fire burns as brightly as ever. The vibrant Pittsburgh rapper, singer-songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist evolved swiftly and frequently throughout his decade-plus under the watchful gaze of US rap’s spotlight; from his early frat rap mixtapes to his mid-career marauding into a variety of musical sub-strands from jazz and R&B to experimentalism. Shortly before his death, Mac’s fifth studio album, Swimming, cemented his legacy as one of his generation’s most genuine and chameleonic rap forces. A sixth album and a companion to its predecessor, Circles, was shared in 2020 by his family’s estate, a soul-indebted look at the fresh terrains of sonic potency that Mac was exploring in his last months on earth.
But the release of this second posthumous album, Balloonerism, is different. Where Circles was an album that Mac would have eventually released himself, this new body of work is a collection of songs that Mac decided not to share when first written. Created around 2013 and 2014—the era of his second album Watching Movies with the Sound off and tenth mixtape “Faces”—the new album plays out as a dazzling glance into the depth of Mac’s catalogue, and the daring interior of his creative pursuits.
It’s fitting that the album’s title is not a bona fide word—more an idea, or a feeling. The record bolsters the trip-laden surrealism most closely associated with Watching Movies with the Sound off, but replaces the dramatisation and nihilistic bite of that work with an air of romanticism and melancholy. There’s portions of the record, especially within the opening quarter, where Mac’s voice is barely present, floating in and out of the watery, lucid soundscapes, as if attempting to find himself within a mirage that he has himself fabricated. Lyrically, there’s mediations on addiction, death, lost love, and a longing for childhood innocence, as a young Mac dealt with his increasing public notoriety whilst battling with self turmoil and confronting the cusp of adulthood. Collaborators include enigmatic bassist Thundercat, who spoke to Wonderland about the impact of Mac’s death for him personally last year, and SZA, whom Mac worked closely with during this stage of his career. The project comes accompanied by a short film made by visual artists and collaborators of Mac.
There’s gorgeous nostalgia sprinkled throughout the record’s gentle absurdism, oscillating the direct shades of Mac’s artistic persona. “Funny Papers” is the track most likely to bring a lump to your throat, with its bittersweet jazz-tinged piano and unassuming bars (“If I could just pay my rent by Tuesday / Bet I could be rich by April fool’s day” he muses in the hook’s inaugural lines). The sprawling 11 minute finale, “Tomorrow Will Never Know” is perhaps in some ways a homage to the closing track of The Beatles’ Revolver—after all, Mac was known to be a John Lennon disciple with multiple Lennon tattoos. The cut emits heterogeneous emotions, pensive yet rousing, obscure and oddly beautiful, an ambitious and fitting climax to the lost album.
Whilst it lacks the focus of his later work, Balloonerism is an imperfect odyssey into the mind of a searching soul. Its yearning pathos is both a signal of Mac’s shadowy depth and a showcase of his deep-seated emotional intelligence. Immediately quintessential to his wider canon, the new album is a snapshot in time, and a gift to be grateful for. Mac would have been 33 on Sunday. We hold on, together, ever tighter.
Listen to Balloonerism…
Words – Ben Tibbits