Mac Miller’s posthumous album is a wonderful, if unsettling, reminder of a talent lost
Posthumous albums often seem to have goosebumps engineered into the mix. Balloonerism – the second Mac Miller record to be released since his death, aged 26, in 2018 – feels spookier than most. It comes billowing out of the speakers on strange, loose scattered clouds of woozy reverb, jazzy keyboards and trippy percussion. Snatches of studio banter crackle through the static like dreams and memories; Miller’s voice coils softly around notions of death like smoke rings.
“F*** the future … What does death feel like?/ I wonder what death feels like?” he queries on the penultimate track “Rick’s Piano”. The echoing bar room keys belong to revered producer Rick Rubin, who worked with Miller on his 2018 album Swimming and also supported him in his attempts at sobriety. According to the Mac Miller estate, though, the material on Balloonerism was created as a full-length album around the time he released Faces in 2014. It was a project “of great importance” to him, the estate says, even as other projects ultimately took centre stage.
Balloonerism certainly feels complete and cohesive, unlike your typical bucket-scraping rattlebag of audio oddities thrown together to con extra cash from grieving fans. But it’s also weirdly spacious. Much of its power comes from the deep pocket in the record’s percussion. It opens with a desert-swept jingle of tambourine, maraca and distant skimming of drum skins before a tensely tapped hi-hat leads us into “Do You Have a Destination”, which immerses listeners in a woozy-soul bath of a groove.
Miller brags about “supermodels in his swimming pool” before admitting that he feels “invisible” – all the trappings of his success feel trivial. “Am I K? F*** no,” he says as daydreamy noodlings of keys, electric guitar and backing vocals swirl around him. The mood lifts a little (think cocktail hour) in time for advance single “5 Dollar Pony Rides”, a cool splash of a track across which a liquid bass line leaps and dips. “Can I give you what you want? ... Can I give you what you need?” Miller asks.
The album’s midpoint turns soupy, as its dense instrumentation starts to feel a little disorienting; those jazz-style keys continue to slosh through “Stoned” and “Excelsior”. Miller is an ear-snagging storyteller, even when it’s from another perspective. So on “Stoned”, he sings of a woman who was “never a groupie … In love with the music … She makes up her bed like she makes up her stories”. Later, on “Rick’s Piano”, he tells of another woman who “spend her paycheque on that lingerie, she scared to put it on/ She never let her boyfriend see her in a thong … The best is yet to come.” SZA drops in for “DJ’s Chord Organ”, which builds from sustained blasts of nautical accordion to incorporate her ethereal vocals.
Miller mixes up the texture again with “Manakins”, ushering in a flurry of bombastic harps before it evolves into psychedelic Beatles-indebted sludge. “‘Cause I see the light at the end of the tunnel/ It feels like I’m dyin’, dyin’, dyin’/ I’m dead,” he drift-raps like a man floating face-down. The album ends with the consciously Fab Four-referencing “Tomorrow Will Never Know”, on which Miller mumbles “living and dying are one and the same” over a knotty loop of electronic bass.
At times, the tracks loosen up to the point of unravelling completely. Yet Balloonerism remains a rather wonderful, albeit unsettling, reminder of a talent lost.
