What Comes After the After-party?
Post Malone, now thinking clearly.
post malone’s first three albums were a careful juggling act. Stoney (2016), Beerbongs & Bentleys (2018), and Hollywood’s Bleeding (2019) brought catchy melodies and a country-rock wail to production that gave them legs on hiphop radio while appealing to enough pop and rock fans to coast on
Top 40 stations. This worked better than anyone could have imagined. Our patron saint of pilsners blessed us with paeans to partying through our sadness (and happiness), serving the kind of drinking anthems that get Bud Light to sponsor a divebar tour on which you could catch Posty cracking a bottle in the middle of an emotive guitar solo and crooning through the chorus with a beer in the air, a mirror image of his audience.
Yet we have no illusions that he’s just like us. His father worked for the Dallas Cowboys; there are people who think Post is a rich kid doing hip-hop cosplay. His meteoric rise sparked accusations that he was using rap as a stepping-stone to mainstream notoriety. Showing up to the video for his 2015 breakout hit “White Iverson” with gold teeth and cornrows didn’t help. Still, his voice—the way genres collapse into a median sound as the notes fall from Post’s mouth—is undeniable. The yearning, bleating tone in the Stoney highlight “I Fall Apart,” the disaffected delivery in the gilded Beerbongs hit “Rockstar,” and the patient ascent from tired low notes to lilting and lovely ones in the reassuring Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse soundtrack gem
“Sunflower” are the keys to the kingdom.
Post’s fourth album, Twelve Carat Toothache, tries to escape the formulas undergirding his earlier works and the pressures of being the life of the party. Like his releases before it, Toothache opens with a dark acoustic tune about the pitfalls of drinking. “Reputation” bristles at the singer’s public image as it worries about the long-term effects of nights whiled away on blunts and beer pong: “Take my own life just to save yours / I got a reputation that I can’t deny/You’re the superstar, entertain us.”
After that, Toothache deploys most of its radio fare in a six-song stretch that feels like Post is settling up business. “Cooped Up,” with Compton star Roddy Ricch, toasts to reconnecting with friends over cold ones. In “Wrapped Around Your Finger,” Post considers drunk-dialing an ex over a poprock track, and “I Like You (A Happier Song)” is a bubbly Doja Cat collab destined to dominate rhythmic-radio playlists; “I Cannot Be (A Sadder Song)” brings Gunna along for a breakup tune with wounded-ex-boyfriend energy that bleeds into the next track, “Insane.” Post makes this kind of music feel effortless. Smirking, slurring, and snide, “Insane” is also giddy, a reminder that the genesis of this batch of songs was a series of psilocybin trips Post took during a Malibu retreat. In the video, the singer just trots around a pool with a cigarette.
There’s a tension between this album’s overt pop moves and songs in which the artist pokes at his own constraints. After “Insane,” Toothache runs as far from a conventional hit as it can, foregrounding ambitious folk, rock, and choral songs before dropping the massive Weeknd collaboration “One Right Now” near the end. As though we’re losing the signal of a radio station on a trip out of the city, the vocals get gruff and the feels get sadder. The beats drop out. The rappers disappear.
Halfway through the album, in “Love/ Hate Letter to Alcohol,” Post laments feeling pigeonholed by the success of songs about pain and coping by drinking. As he questions his commitment to an image it hurts to uphold, Fleet Foxes singer Robin Pecknold fills out the track with harmonies that cascade through the mix like showers accompanying a thunderstorm. (Post gets along with a bigger crowd of musicians than one might think: Pecknold met Post some years ago and tucked away a melody with his new friend’s name on it in the event the superstar should ever ask.) “Wasting Angels” luxuriates over fluttering keys, choir vocals, and a euphoric spot from the Kid Laroi, synthesizing pop, rock, and hiphop. Suddenly, Toothache stops pitching bangers and starts building showcases for Post’s instrument, songs in which the voice carries most of the melody. They aren’t all winners—“Euthanasia” feels slight, not minimal—but whenever Post gets ahold of your heartstrings, you’re finished. From “Wasting Angels” to “Waiting for a Miracle,” you begin to see how the kid with the mean Bob Dylan impression and the cloud-rap sensation and the pop maximalist can all be the same guy. The through-line is the raw, gorgeous chorus.
Stripping the songs down reveals an impressive range in Post’s voice. He wants to pass freely between genres as his music demands instead of trying to be a point where they converge. On the surface, that may make Toothache a less immediate pleasure than his last album, but you could already tell the guy was getting restless on that one. He spoke about Los Angeles on Hollywood’s Bleeding the way the Weeknd did on After Hours, highlighting the grit beneath the glamour. Post has been living on a compound in Utah ever since (though his Malibu retreat may imply that his quiet place is a little too quiet). He has had some time to step back and rethink the way he presents himself. Toothache is an album half full of songs in which Post Malone meets the biggest pop and rap stars on their level and half full of thoughtful deconstructions of the artist’s own trademark sound and image.
Amid the hospital-room tranquility of “Euthanasia” and “Waiting for a Miracle,” Post ponders physical death while carrying out the figurative death of the old reckless him. He sings of paradoxes and contradictions, and the greatest of these is his own career. He just had his first child. He’s doing Disney theme songs and collaborating with Wizards of the Coast and the Pokémon Company. He wants to settle down to make more challenging art. Twelve Carat Toothache dreams of a future in which Post writes fewer songs like “Takin’ Shots” and “Zack and Codeine” and more like “Stay” and “I Fall Apart,” in which he can discuss what’s on his mind instead of what’s coursing through his bloodstream. He is redrawing his boundaries, and it could cost him fans. Does he care? ■