There are still goals that I feel like we have as a group that we haven't hit yet. I feel like we've done more than we said we would do in a lot of ways. “So I tried to drink the guilt away.… I put unrealistic expectations on this album, and those tracks specifically, in hopes that they would kind of expedite the healing process.”Ībstract adds, “I feel like we've achieved everything. “The day the album came out, I just got consumed by guilt and it lasted for like two weeks,” he says. In some ways it was an act of self-preservation. For Joba, the heaviness of grieving for his late father on the record and talking about it in interviews was weighing on him to the point where he had to pretend that the album wasn't actually out in the world.
II.” But the process was an understandably difficult one. Working through his grief created the album's searing centerpiece, “The Light,” as well as its closing track, “The Light Pt. As a member of a group that traffics in raw honesty, Joba has always made himself especially vulnerable, often inserting candid dispatches about his struggles with mental illness into his verses. In particular, the death of Joba's father by suicide last year provided an emotional through line for Roadrunner. For the rest of my life, I'm going to be able to look back on this album and be like, ‘I did everything I could have on that album.’ Like literally exhausted myself.”
“I don't really care what anyone says or thinks. “This is the first album where I'm 150 percent in love with it,” says Hemnani. “They're not going to be out at the bar.”Įven though the album has far more guest artists-including A$AP Rocky, Danny Brown, and legendary R&B crooner Charlie Wilson-than any of Brockhampton's previous releases, it is also the band's most personal offering yet. “People are just going to be in their room taking in the music,” Champion reasons. “It was bigger hooks and trying to make just feel-good music.” Instead, the members decided to tone it down and focus on introspection, using the turmoil of the past year as raw material. “A lot of the stuff we tried to do earlier in the writing process was poppier,” rapper Matt Champion says. COVID, more than anything, forced you to be like, ‘Okay, you said you want to do this thing. “I knew there was another level, other stuff that I had to do. “I wasn't feeling 100 percent happy with what I was doing as a creator,” he says, when I ask what prompted him to be more visible. Producers would try singing and vice versa, which led to Manwa stepping into the spotlight as a vocalist for the first time. During jam sessions, they would often try on new roles within the band.
The guys were already living together when COVID hit, which allowed them ample time to experiment and dial in their sound. One of the criticisms often levied at Brockhampton is that their voracious appetite for new ideas has made their work feel structureless, as if they're trying a million different things in a million different directions.
In that way, they capture so much of what today's pop landscape looks and sounds like, as identity-fluid as they are genre-fluid. Even when they flirt with pop hooks or make soulful R&B joints, Brockhampton albums have always been, at their core, rap. That Abstract feels the group hasn't been given a certain level of respect within the hip-hop community is surprising, especially considering that rap is the foundation of their music.
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