Mac Miller’s death from an accidental drug overdose sent ripples across the rap community he helped cultivate. He was a kind-hearted collaborator and invested heavily in others’ growth, but his musical arc was left unfinished. In August of 2018, he put out Swimming, an album that was like a quantum leap in self-discovery. Then, a month later, at 26, he was gone, unable to realize that potential. Now there’s Circles, a posthumously released Swimming companion piece that gives his years of work a bit of closure. It’s the culmination of a career spent improving, a fitting epilogue to an aspirational life.
Miller had worked closely on early versions of these songs with composer-producer Jon Brion, who was committed to finishing the album after Miller’s death. It’s unclear how deep Miller was into the process at the time of his passing, but this sounds like a completed work, or as complete as it can be. “This is a complicated process that has no right answer. No clear path,” his family wrote in a letter on his Instagram. “We simply know that it was important to Malcolm for the world to hear it.”
If Swimming wasn’t Miller’s best album, it was certainly the one where he came into his own as an artist. There are moments on 2015’s GO:OD AM where his rapping is sharpest, 2014’s Faces accommodated his most ambitious ideas, and 2016’s The Divine Feminine is his most diverse and complete project, a testament to the community of musicians he’d established around him. But Swimming hinted at an artist who’d finally cleared his mind and found his footing. Circles provides some resolution and helps finish Miller’s final thoughts.
Miller seemed to envision Circles as the completion of a loop. “My god, it go on and on/Just like a circle, I go back to where I’m from,” he rapped on Swimming closer “So It Goes.” That record was about being fine on the surface while struggling with anxiety; this one is about knowing there’s something to be done about it. Both records are about working through depression, how the bad days are long and the good days feel fleeting, but the tone is more optimistic here. The imagery of a cluttered mind is a near-constant in Miller’s final songs. On the plucked single “Good News,” he likens the recovery process to spring cleaning, which feels fitting for someone looking to hit the refresh button. “Sometimes I get lonely/Not when I’m alone/But it’s more when I’m standin’ in crowds that I’m feelin’ the most on my own,” he raps on “Surf,” a poignant realization for someone who spent his last years surrounded by throngs of fans. But it comes with an epiphany, a sort of thesis for the album: “And I know that somebody knows me/I know somewhere, there’s home/I’m startin’ to see that all I have to do is get up and go.”
Circles never really opens up into a full-fledged rap album, content to push back and forth between lo-fi beat music and singer-songwriter indie folk, working almost entirely with live arrangements. After doing his most-ever singing on Swimming, he crosses a threshold into doing almost no rapping on Circles. That was the entire idea: two albums bringing balance to each other. The few songs that do have raps in them display his love of the form and improvement as a writer. On “Hand Me Downs,” he raps about moving carelessly and stumbling through the same patterns. “Hands,” the only full rap song, works through negativity while displaying the subtly knotty lyricism he fell in love with as a teenager.
Miller was always trying to balance being the guy who started Facebook’s first Big L fan page with his love for the nakedness of 1970’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. He didn’t live long enough to get to really reconcile those sides of himself, but as halves of a complete work, Swimming and Circles come the closest. Together, they establish the rapper-producer as comfortable in his skin, no longer out to prove to naysayers he could bar out. These are mellow, relaxed songs in search of that exact state of being. “‘Fore I start to think about the future/First can I please get through a day/Without any complications,” he sings on “Complicated.” It’s more Plastic Ono Band than Lifestylez ov da Poor & Dangerous—lots of guitars, some keys, light bass, the occasional synth line—but not beholden to any one sound.
The chill-out aesthetic won’t come as a surprise to those familiar with Mac Miller’s Space Migration Tour, which transformed the songs in his catalog with warm Internet-laced grooves from their days futzing with electronica and experimental jazz. He was a huge rap nerd but he also loved the prospect of playing with a live band. These songs feel like an attempt to smooth down his interests into something comprehensive, and Brion seems like the perfect person to usher them to completion. He serves as a co-producer on most songs, an additional producer on all the others, and his work makes the songs shapelier without compromising Miller’s vision for them.
When a young rapper dies too soon, fans start listening to their music much more closely, combing over their lyrics to find the writing on the wall. With Miller, you don’t have to dive too deeply. “God Speed” is rife with thoughts about going down a destructive path and on “Brand Name,” he wrote a disclaimer that proved tragically prescient: “To everyone who sell me drugs/Don’t mix it with that bullshit, I’m hopin’ not to join the 27 Club.” But Circles dispels any sense of fatalism in his music. He was still idealistic; in these songs, he is searching for a way to break the cycle, a way forward. It’s only appropriate that Mac Miller’s final musical act be one of self-reformation.
Buy: Rough Trade
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