I stayed up for the initial release Thursday night and did my first listen through. Although it probably deserves an immediate second listen, off the bat I gave this album a 5.5/10. In other words, mid. Midtopia. Misstopia. This album was a bit underwhelming for me. It seemed like an experimental album heavily influenced by Kanye, but at points it felt forced. It reminds of Drake’s “Honestly, Nevermind” in a way. Nice effort, but kind of misses the mark. I must say I’m at the point where music is dying for me. My mom always said music died in the 80’s, and I think music died in 2018 for me. This doesn’t mean I will never enjoy new music, it more so means I’m always chasing that 2015-2018 “golden era.” But fuck it let’s get into some of the songs.

He starts out with “”Hyaena” and “Thank God” and after hearing these two tracks I was convinced we were in for his greatest album to date. They are quintessential intro songs for Travis. “Hyaena” begins and ends with the classic lengthy intro/outros we’ve seen on “Rodeo” and “Astroworld”. He crushes his verses on the these songs and I was pumped to listen to the rest. Then we get into track #3, “Modern Jam.” When he is actually rapping over the bass-heavy beat he sounds good. Everything outside of that is pure nonsense. Too many vocals and overall just overwhelming. Although, I can see it being a fun clubbing song if people still even do that. The next song “My Eyes” sums up the album perfectly for me, points of excellence but left me wanting more. “Gods Country” fucking sucks, don’t even bother. For a lot of the other songs I have things written down like: “Weird but fun” or “Confusing and unnecessary ad-libs and vocals” (notably “Sirens” and “LOVE”). I really wanted to love this album, and I enjoyed a good portion, but it was probably not worth the wait. All in all my favorites are “Know”, “Thank God”, and “Skitzo”. “Parasail”, “Delestro”, and “God’s Country” are duds for me.

We had a lot of features on this album like Beyoncé, Carti, Young Thug, Bon Iver, and Rob49 (who killed his verse on “Topia Twins”) Drake’s verse on “Meltdown” was solid, and Carti and Thug did their thing on “Fein” and “Skitzo”, respectively. But the best verse hands down goes to Sza on “Telekinesis” (also featuring Future). She sounds fantastic and wraps up the song beautifully. I love her and Travis as a duo.

UPDATE: I have been listening to this album while writing this and it’s better than I first thought. That being said I’m ending on a 7/10. Solid album but does not come close to Astroworld or Rodeo. My opinion overall hasn’t really changed, I just found that I enjoyed the songs I initially liked a lot more this time around.

So how did we get to me doing my first album review? Well obviously I love music, but I have really learned to appreciate it’s role in my life these past 6 months. As I have stated I’ve been in rehab for some time, and a lot of treatments do not allow any phones, laptops, iPads, etc. I.e. no access to music streaming services. However, in the three in-patient treatments I’ve been to (first being in 2018), we’ve had the opportunity to purchase an Mp3 player to download music. When I say Mp3 player I mean literal pieces of trash that are only capable of playing music. No wifi, no videos, no nothing. One of mine didn’t even have a fucking screen. Shit looked like those old iPods with just the play button. Side note: if you for some reason find yourself in need of an Mp3 do not get the Spotify Mighty, those things suck. Anyway getting this device was huge, not only could you finally listen to music, but you had to download each individual song off of a Youtube to Mp3 conversion site. Then of course followed the monotonous drag and drop process. Each song took about a minute to download. This sounds like a pain in the ass and it was, but it killed time. Killing time is the best thing you can do in rehab as things can get pretty boring. I would spend hours trying to figure out what songs I wanted to download. Eventually you get to the point where you start downloading things you haven’t listened to in years. “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” is still a banger btw. I even got back to my EDM days of 2015. I must say this thing (pictured below) has been an absolute life saver. I spent hours just sitting with myself listening to music, and my appreciation for it skyrocketed. It sounds corny, but I learned to actually listen rather than it being background noise as I mindlessly scroll through Tik Tok. The Mp3 has driven me to continue this practice of “just listening.” And now “just listening” has led me to share my unsolicited musical opinions in blog form! In the past I rarely stayed up to listen to a new album (let alone do a review), but it was super fun just listening and writing my thoughts down. For that I can thank the good ol’ Mp3 (which I will literally never use again).