Danny Brown : Stardust
Danny Brown has never been afraid to experiment. His career thus far has been a sequence of left turns, defying the expectations both of the mainstream rap listening audience as well as the hip critical audience. While, say, uknowhatimsayin¿ may not be as strong a record as Atrocity Exhibition or SCARING THE HOES to my ears, the fact that he has never rested on his laurels nor repeated himself is something I can’t help but find admirable. I had forgotten this; HOES, with its frenetic metallic chaos, made me expect he was finally setting in to the sound of Atrocity that most especially pleased listeners like me only to suddenly release Quaranta, a dark and meditative record. I should have learned my lesson and expected Stardust, his newest, to throw me for a loop. And yet I did not.
Opener “Book of Daniel,” both with its name and its lyrical focus on music as a chronicle of his life rather than a coherent preplanned project, lulls you into a false sense of the aesthetics of the record, leaning on a near-prog rock set of gorgeous strummed guitar chords. The title track, the very next song, shatters this expectation. The skittering electronics feel trapped somewhere between IDM and hyperpop. It is here that we also are introduced to our constant companion through the record, Angel Prost of hyperpop duo Frost Children providing spoken word performances. What follows is what can best be described as Danny Brown’s a year and a season late take on brat summer, with the particulars of his hyperpop and glitchcore collaborations here mirroring most Charli’s own club-oriented direction of the genre rather than the schizoid digital prog of 100gecs.
The album takes on this shocking dual character. The production lays this cold digital bed, decked with these slashes of color, that shifts drastically depending on whether it’s Danny’s rapped vocal taking lead or one of his many collaborators. When his voice is going, it’s difficult not to see the evolutionary DNA for this record all the way back in the weirdo rhymes of XXX and the lysergic approach of Old all the way to his increasing integration of avant-garde electronics. When a guest vocal takes lead, however, it can feel jarring, like Danny’s record is being yanked away from him. “Flowers,” for example, feels like a high-quality Charli B-side from the brat era (in the alternate universe where she didn’t supersaturate us with that material) when the vocal from 8485 establishes a club pop cool, only to be burst apart by Danny’s frantic post-Andre 3000 rap a la “Bombs Over Baghdad” over a beat shift that feels caught between Skrillex and Aphex Twin. It can be and often is jarring; unlike SCARING THE HOES, which felt of a single piece through its frantic almost hardcore punk sensibility and intensity, Stardust feels often at war with itself, unable to decide between the club or the headphones, the digital avant-garde or an almost LMFAO sense of comedy rap.
Time will be kind to this record. While its aesthetic Molotov cocktail is admittedly hard to handle, especially if you are long-time fan, the boldness and adventurousness of the record likely will age well. Right now, it’s perhaps a bit too easy to connect the dots between the avant-garde contemporary texture of electronic and club music and this work, making it feel maybe a year late to the punch. But in the context of Danny’s own work alone, it showcases another creative turn now 20 years into that chameleonic nature. Sure, a track like “Green Light” is, for lack of a better word, perhaps a bit too TikTok emo to not make me cringe, but we also have a miniature progressive rap epic in “The End,” punning a bit on the opening gesture of referring to this record and his life as a book. It’s this track in particular that excuses and justifies the occasional previous aesthetic missteps. “The End” eschews a chorus-driven structure, instead evolving verse by verse, tying together threads and sonic elements sprinkled across the record in a way that lands it finally in a sense of cohesion. The way this mirrors Danny’s recurrent image, one he’s referenced across his whole career, of mental illness and madness, the way a mind can at once be splintering in front of you either by neurochemistry or trauma or addiction, while at the same time being necessarily whole is enough to consider this project a success. You, like me, may struggle to enjoy the particulars of the hyperpop elements integrated into his sonic world, but I challenge you not to appreciate it, especially knowing his next record likely will sound nothing like this one either.
Label: Warp
Year: 2025
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