The Life of Pablo Review

He called it a gospel album and it opens like one, a choir and a child's voice and a beat that arrives like sunrise. Then it goes everywhere. Famous is a dancehall flip with a huge hook and a line so ugly it has followed him ever since. FML and Real Friends are the most honest writing he had done in years, a man cataloguing his own paranoia and the friendships he has let rot.

Waves and Ultralight Beam belong on any list of his best work. The problem is everything between them. Whole tracks feel like demos left in, the sequencing is arbitrary, and the album was still being remixed on streaming services weeks after release, which turned a record into a moving target. As a set of songs it is rich. As an album it never resolves into anything, and the writing swings from devastating to careless inside a single verse.