But on Circles, he puts his unadorned singing voice front and center, lending the album a casual and startling intimacy. Miller used to hide his wavering voice under a phalanx of filters, pitching effects and doubled vocal tracks to the point that he was sometimes unrecognizable. Streaming audiences have followed these artists to the spaces between musical walls: the genreless playlists Pollen and Lorem are two of the most popular discovery hubs on Spotify. The current Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper, Roddy Ricch’s “The Box,” is sung all the way through many other artists, from Tyler the Creator to Dominic Fike to Brockhampton to Rex Orange County, have found the sweet spot between indie rock, hip-hop and soul. It may seem initially strange for one of the world’s most talented rappers to take his cues from rock, but Miller’s inclinations fit into a larger trend over the last few years in the hip-hop world of imbuing rap cadences with melody. “We simply know that it was important to Malcolm for the world to hear it.” The album was ultimately completed by the veteran producer Jon Brion, who worked with Miller extensively before his death. No clear path,” they wrote in a statement on his Instagram page when they announced the forthcoming album.
Because he envisioned Circles as a companion to his previous album Swimming, released in August 2018, his family was left with an agonizing decision about whether to finish and release it: “This is a complicated process that has no right answer. Miller was well into the recording process of Circles when he died in September 2018 of an accidental overdose. Mac Miller nice too though.”īut there’s not much rapping at all on Circles, his sixth (and presumably last) studio album released posthumously on Friday.
Miller, born Malcolm James McCormick in 1992, rapped with a restless determination: to outrun his initial reputation as a white frat rapper to distract from his anxieties and addictions to amuse himself and his friends and to gain the respect of his idols, which he did: as Jay-Z admitted on Twitter, “Black people really magic.