10 hours ago
6
When Danny Brown spoke to the Guardian in 2023, he was promoting the near simultaneous release of two albums, his own Quaranta and Scaring the Hoes, a collaboration with Jpegmafia that commenced with perhaps the year’s most diverting opening lyric: “First – fuck off, Elon Musk.” Both albums had been recorded in what sounded like desperate circumstances.
Brown had long played on his image as a drug-guzzling maniac, too crazed to be contained by any of hip-hop’s standard generic boundaries: posing for photographs with his hair wildly backcombed, his missing teeth on full display, his tongue out and his fingers in devil’s horns, telling interviewers “I’m just waiting to die – everything after this point is, like, whatever”; referring to his songs as “trauma dumps” and calling them things like Adderall Admiral, White Lines, Dope Fiend Rental, Need Another Drink and Die Like a Rockstar. By the time he made Quaranta and Scaring the Hoes, however, he was in serious trouble: “blackout drunk” when recording the former, “in pain all the time, throwing up and shit” during the making of the latter. By the time of the interview, he’d been to rehab and got sober: ostensibly a happy ending, but Brown struck a note of caution. “I’ve seen so many artists get sober,” he said. “And their music sucks.”
Even the track listing of Stardust suggests this is an album made under very different conditions to its predecessors. The post-rehab positivity of song titles Lift You Up and 1L0v3myL1f3! isn’t intended ironically. Apparently written from the perspective of an invented character called Dusty Star, a “90s-era pop star” who nonetheless sounds remarkably like Danny Brown, the lyrics contain appealingly chaotic swagger, eclectic reference points – at one juncture, he goes from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to Winona Ryder’s 2001 shoplifting charge in the space of two lines – and evidently heartfelt advice: “You’ve only got one life so stick to your goals.” There are moments that look back to a past when the songs’ protagonist had, as guest Angel Prost puts it in one of a number of spoken-word interjections: “You resign yourself to delinquency, quirkifying your life.” Elsewhere, What You See offers a lengthy, rueful apology for past behaviour, quoting Outkast’s Ms Jackson along the way.
But Brown’s rhymes are nowhere near as conflicted as those on Quaranta, an album on which even the wildest boasts were immediately undercut by expressions of loneliness and torment. And the supporting cast on Stardust – 12 of the 14 tracks have guest stars – skews far more heavily towards names from the hyperpop underground and various other niche electronic hinterlands than it does to hip-hop: Frost Children, 8485, Underscores, Jane Remover et al.
This isn’t entirely uncharted territory for Brown – his 2013 album Old was liberally sprinkled with production credits for maximalist electronic auteur Rustie and he’s talked about his regret that he never got to work with Sophie – but the results are remarkably arresting. There are moments where Stardust sounds more poppy and obviously hook-laden than Brown has ever done before. You could just about imagine the house-influenced Copycats or the 8485 feature Flowers on the radio, were it not for Brown’s nasal, yowling voice: powerful, perfect for adding a snotty edge to his hugely entertaining brand of cartoonish threats and brags – “I ponder going bonkers and knocking out your chompers” – but very much an acquired taste.
Equally, however, Stardust is more than capable of dealing in bracingly confrontational blare. 1999 is a painfully trebly, glitching chiptune at a gabber-like pace. For 1l0v3myl1f3!, his newfound positivity is backed by a beat that sounds like someone playing an old happy hardcore track on a turntable with a knackered stylus and occasionally dips into half-speed drops that, while electronic, have something of a metal song about them.
Occasionally, the switch between pop mode and chaos happens mid-track. The End features not just Zheani, a corpse-paintedformer model from Australia best known for her 2023 track Bring Wet Cunt, but ta Ukrainka, the latter an example of Brown’s ability to find collaborators in the farthest reaches of the internet: she’s a Polish indie-pop artist who seems to be quite obscure even in the universe of Polish indie-pop. Her sweetly mellifluous voice acts as a foil to Brown’s warp-speed flow, in much the same way as the backing track’s pillowy synths and gentle piano figures smooth out the ferocious drum’n’bass break. Then, midway through, the whole thing erupts, Brown’s vocal fighting with a nightmarish mass of chattering sampled voices.
It’s one of a number of moments that might provoke a sharp intake of breath on the part of the listener, which is presumably the point. “I made it here against the odds, now I do it all for you,” he swaggers on closer All4U. He sounds like a man who knows he’s beaten not just his demons, but his fears: a demonstration that Brown’s edge has not been dulled by sobriety as he worried it might.
This week Alexis listened to
Lankum – Ghost Town
A cover of the Specials’ classic that begins as if Lankum thought the original was too upbeat for its own good, then midway through transforms itself into … a banging dance track. Unexpected.
