BROCKHAMPTON's "GINGER" Experiments with Grief
"America's Favorite Boy Band" is back with their most thoughtful and mature record yet.
But something different is happening on the rap collective's fifth album, released just shy of iridescence's one-year anniversary and two days before Saturation II's second birthday. The group has always been adept at manipulating a record's pulse, slowing down and spiking up on a whim, but GINGER operates on a single palpable arc, offering an emotional rise and fall that flows through the project. BROCKHAMPTON's central performers—Kevin Abstract, Matt Champion, Dom McLennon, Merlyn Wood, Joba, and bearface—seem more interested than ever in building a new world for themselves, through their storytelling, their brags, their vocal grit, and their sometimes jarring honesty.
"NO HALO" gives off the distinct feeling of a door being slowly opened rather than kicked in. It's a smooth, muted start, meant to be the first step of something more meaningful. Joba's working overtime with his gorgeous vocals and charming lyrics, while Merlyn crafts some of his most thoughtful and mature thematic material. bearface settles well into his role somewhere between BROCKHAMPTON's resident crooner and a syrupy auto-tuned siren (first seen on iridescence), while steadily employing his braggadocio. Abstract and McLennon spend the entire album competing comfortably for the best verse—Dom has become more confident in his poetic turns, and it's become apparent that the quality of a BROCKHAMPTON album is directly proportional to how much Kevin raps. Even Matt Champion, the group's adorable slacker, gets a chance to try out a new vulnerability. His usually laconic verses are bolstered by newfound urgency in lines like, "Tell me, goddamn, what God made me for? / I don't even love no more / I don't even trust no more."
The boys seem like they're throwing everything they have into GINGER from the jump—and the same goes for BROCKHAMPTON's ingenious producers, Jabari Manwa and Romil Hemnani. They craft the album's tracklist into a thrilling tightrope walk that bounces between sparseness and symphonic indulgence. GINGER feels extremely intentional. The album's lyrics oscillate constantly between insecurity and bravado, celebrating how far the band has come while acknowledging what it took to get them there.
It's a testament to just how much GINGER is in BROCKHAMPTON's control, as they flip the same Three 6 Mafia sample on two separate tracks, and both manage to strike listeners differently. "HEAVEN BELONGS TO YOU" includes the first interpolation, which comes in the wake of an offhand verse from slowthai, the British rapper and new BROCKHAMPTON affiliate. The iconic call of "Break Da Law" feels like a sonic centerpiece.
The album's hyper-subjectivity falls away on "DEARLY DEPARTED," which directly addresses the biggest blight in BROCKHAMPTON's history: the departure of Ameer Vann. Vann, a founding member of the group and longtime friend of Abstract and Champion, was accused of sexual and emotional abuse by several women in May 2018; within a month, the group let their fans know Vann was no longer a part of BROCKHAMPTON and apologized to Vann's victims. "DEARLY DEPARTED" is shot through with disorientation and fury. It provides the kind of lyrical and sonic gut-punch that defined iridescence, but it remains carefully reined in over the course of its four-and-a-half minutes. "I must keep creatin' truths and hooks to get up out of this hell for myself," Abstract promises, speaking more to himself than the listener. "They stretch the truth longer than the Nile / Eyes full of evil, mouth full of vile," Champion warns, with some anger creeping into his lax flow. McLennon's rage hits the hardest and cuts deepest, as his screams close out the song: "Pass the weight off to your friends and never face the truth / Because you never learned how to be a man...You could talk to God / I don't wanna hear, motherf*cker."
Since Vann's departure, the group's music has been more focused but also far more troubled, as they've been forced to reckon with the meaning of the legacy they've only just accrued.
GINGER is really an album about grief. It's a mess: a self-contradicting, painful grind that falters as often as it moves forward, with Frank Ocean-indebted tracks like the titular "GINGER" feeling a world away from buoyant cuts like "BOY BYE." It's also beautiful and purposeful in its messiness, and that's the point. GINGER understands that growing up—which is what's at stake on this album—is an imperfect and ongoing process, and “America's Favorite Boyband" has a lot to wrestle with. In the wake of fracture and confusion within the band, iridescence was a decisive shock to its system, an overhaul of everything that had come before it. GINGER is the next chapter in that story, a recollection of the past in sound and writing that's brave enough to look towards the future.