Teezo Touchdown gives a spectacularly theatrical performance that sounds like André 3000 singing in a cabaret, but this is after one of the stalest performances of Scott’s career over a stiff drum loop that came from Daft Punk’s Guy-Man de Homem-Christeo, his first piece of music since the French duo’s split in 2021.įor all the market value of the feature list, whether Scott puts it to good use varies. On ‘Lost Forever’, James Blake’s voice is bent to sound like an old Etta James sample and Scott spins it to glue with Westside Gunn’s militant onomatopoeia.īut ‘Modern Jam’ gives early signs of the record’s issues with forcing invigorating ideas into dull ones.
‘Skitzo’ transitions from a relatively tame Young Thug verse to a beat from the Twilight Zone with reversed textures and paranoid strings. Scott’s tendency to split songs into multiple phases creates restless experiments in contrast. Across the runtime, Scott’s vocals are more expressive than ever, injecting atmospheres with guttural screams, howls and megaphoned professions to God’s power: “To the maker! Vibrator! Room shaker! Earth quaker! Annihilator!” on ‘Modern Jam’.
“I’m just one angel away from blockin’ out the devil,” he raps on the stark ‘Lost Forever’. It’s reflected in how he puts himself in the throes of the quaking opener ’Hyaena’ and the cacophonous Zamrock of ‘Sirens’. There’s a three-track run that jumps between beats from Boi-1da and Sweet, James Blake, The Alchemist and Pharrell Williams it rivals OutKast’s ‘Stankonia’ for how it devours genres and settings into his world.īut Scott sounds maddened by the pursuit of finding that vague world. Where Scott invited hip-hop’s all-stars to join him on his previous album, on ‘Utopia’, he reaches across the spectrum to enlist pop superstars, trap’s A-Team, electronic mavens and alternative heroes. In a recent interview, he stressed that “people need to see that Utopia is real”, and that even a utopia cannot be without a measure of darkness. You’ll be surprised what utopia looks like – the first of five cover artworks he revealed looks like an Armand Hammer album cover. This, his fourth studio album, retreats to the brashness of early mixtapes ‘Owl Pharaoh’ (2013) and ‘Days Before Rodeo’ (2014) and has the same impulse to intersperse high-gravitas sounds with obscured vocals. The album is accompanied by a feature-length film Circus Maximus, a now-binned concert at Egypt’s Pyramids of Giza and is teasing another ancient world-themed performance in Pompeii. Last month, a grand jury decided he would not be indicted, and the rollout for ‘Utopia’ kicked into action.įrom the title and his world-building roll-out, it’s clear that Scott is trying to top himself yet again. In 2021, a fatal crowd crush at his Astroworld festival led to 10 deaths and countless injuries and lawsuits. He rode its success with chart-topping singles – including 2019’s ‘Highest In The Room’ – collaborations with Nike, PlayStation, McDonald’s and Fortnite.
TRAVIS FRAGMENT FREE
His last album, 2018’s ‘Astroworld’, was a blockbuster amusement park that broke free of West’s influence and made Scott one of the most marketable figures in hip-hop.
Once a prodigy under the tutelage of Kanye West, the Houston rapper became the ringleader for a wave of screwed and psychedelic hip-hop primed for buck-wild live shows. Few artists dream on the same scale as Travis Scott.
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