Astroworld Review

Every complaint about the first two albums applies here too, and none of them stick, because the sound is good enough that the objections stop mattering. Stargazing opens on a beat that changes personality halfway through, and the switch is the best single moment of his career. Sicko Mode pulls the same trick three times and becomes the biggest single of his career on the strength of the transitions alone.

Stop Trying to Be God stretches past five minutes with Stevie Wonder on harmonica, James Blake in the choir and Kid Cudi humming underneath, and it is the closest he comes to writing an actual song. Mike Dean's mixing gives the record a low end you feel in the chest and a top end that never sits still, and the guests, Frank Ocean and Tame Impala and Thundercat and Drake among them, are used as color rather than as billing.

The theme park gives him the thing he had been missing, a subject: a Houston that got demolished and a childhood he keeps trying to rebuild at volume. He is still not much of a writer. His own verses on Sicko Mode are the least interesting part of it, and the back half thins after Astrothunder. But he is a spectacular arranger of other people's talent, and here that turns out to be enough. Nearly everyone who reviewed it said so.