It seems that Eminem is not the only rap artist retiring his alter ego with a final release this summer. After five albums, 14 mixtapes and five EPs, the time has come for Donald Glover to bid adieu to Childish Gambino, the actor’s hip-hop persona, who crashed on to the scene with his unconvincing debut studio album, Camp, in 2011.
Gambino’s most notable release was This Is America, his Grammy-winning single from 2018, a stylistically freewheeling, ultrapolitical indictment of Trump’s United States that was accompanied by a memorable video, but each album has been surprising in its own way, a Venn diagram of hip-hop, soul, funk, experimental R&B and even rock, weighted differently on each release.
His fifth studio album is no different. The follow-up to 3.15.20, his famously unfinished album from 2020 (later “reimagined” as Atavista), is the soundtrack to a film of the same name, starring Glover as a man who joins forces with a woman and her son in a strange postapocalyptic world ravaged by prehistoric creatures. Bando Stone and the New World is altogether more polished, although, as you might imagine from that plot summary, it’s no less chaotic.
The best songs here are the ones that don’t attempt to be too clever. The epic soul-rock of Lithonia is an early highlight, told from the perspective of Cody LaRae, a character from the film. The finger-clicking 1980s soul of Steps Beach, its easy-going acoustic strum embellished by the glimmer of keyboards, is enjoyably schmoozy. A sample of The Prodigy’s Breathe is woven into the aggressive, ravey R&B of Got to Be, one of several tracks that draw parallels with the likes of The Weeknd and Frank Ocean.
Yoshinoya, meanwhile, is a rap takedown of his haters (“I’m allergic to this rap shit / Made a song but spent more time writing the caption”). In the Night is a woozy love song featuring the English R&B singer Jorja Smith; Dadvocate is a bittersweet document of fatherhood (“I wanna be the hero but now I’m under pressure / Why it gotta be like that?”)
Still, as with his previous work, there are too many moments when Gambino’s ambition – or perhaps his ego – leads to tedious self-indulgence. The album has a surfeit of sprawling, seemingly pointless tracks, such as the breezy, Khruangbin-featuring psych-rock track Happy Survival or the banal We Are God. These are songs that may work well as filler on a soundtrack but make for frustratingly stop-start listening in the context of an album.
If this really is Childish Gambino’s swan song, it’s as bold, brash and unapologetically singular as anything he’s done before – but one to sit back and admire rather than be consumed by. Perhaps that was Glover’s intention all along.
