Utopia Review

The circumstances hang over all of it. Five years since the last album, a crowd crush at his own festival that killed ten people in between, and a record that answers none of it and does not really try. What arrives instead is scale: nineteen tracks, more than thirty producers, Beyonce and Bad Bunny and The Weeknd and Playboi Carti and Drake and SZA, and a guest list that keeps changing the subject.

The best of it is genuinely thrilling. Fein is two notes and a chant and it worked on people for two solid years. Modern Jam, with half of Daft Punk on the board, is the strangest thing here and the one that sounds like a decision rather than a purchase. Meltdown and Delresto are big and well built. Then the problems. The abrasive industrial palette is lifted from Yeezus, and reviewers said so on day one, not as praise.

Scott is outrapped by nearly every guest who shows up, and the sharpest criticism of the album is also the plainest: he curates brilliantly and raps ordinarily, and across seventy three minutes that gap never closes. It plays as a run of set pieces rather than an album. The response ranged from best work of his life to shiny and hollow, and the distance between those readings is the record itself.