Following 2022’s Twelve Carrot Toothache, an album that failed to really break any new boundaries for Post Malone as an artist, he is back with his toned-down effort Austin. Whilst this project seems initially like a welcome mature step in a different direction, with a notable lack of features suggesting a more personal set of songs, for the most part, Austin is more of what Post Malone is known for. Austin provides a healthy mix of pop tracks with tongue-in-cheek lyrics that reference the rapper lifestyle, mixed in with a few ballads that feel purely digestible at their worst and genuinely meaningful at their best. There are moments of heart and pathos to be found on Austin, and whilst the rest of the album is far from bad, it commits another sin that Post Malone has been guilty of in the past, simply being fine.
Perhaps Austin’s biggest mistake is putting its best track first. ‘Don’t Understand’ is a sombre track that strikes a particularly emotional chord for an opening song. The opening mellow guitar notes, supported by Malone’s reliably echoing and wistful vocal performance, sets a striking opening filled with paradoxically human emotions and heartache. The lyrics do not revolutionise the ballad by any means, but the simple yet affecting chorus establishes themes of reflection and feelings of confusion that Austin is trying to reach.
Sadly, the album cannot entirely live up to this opener. Its next track, ‘Something Real’ goes for a comparatively poppier tone that loses the simplistic beauty of what came before it. The lyrics lose their punch. Despite retaining painfully real messages underneath surrounding his own self-image, love and all the troubles that come with expressing it, Malone undermines this with moments of crudeness that stick out. The operatic backing vocals do a good job of stabilising the track, elevating it to a lofty height that injects any emotion lost through the lyrics. It feels like Austin loses the confidence to be a deeply melancholic album and becomes worse for it when it does.
What follows are a series of admittedly infectious beats across a, too long seventeen track list that creates the typically buoyant tone of previous Post Malone records, whilst including instances of human emotion underneath the rhythmic guitars and drums. Austin knows when to lean on its instrumentation to add an extra punch of modern alternative pop. When the instruments are allowed to break out of the album’s default musical safe place, however, especially on tracks like ‘Sign Me Up’ and ‘Socialite’, Austin becomes the album it should have been all along – a grown-up evolution for Post Malone that relies less on stale rap synths and more on quieter moments of catharsis. When Austin leans into these softer beats, and Malone himself doubles down with his pained vocal performances and moans, the album truly lives up to its potential.
The second half of the album is a stronger display of Post Malone’s ability to infuse soul into music. Including a few fun lo-fi tracks like ‘Speedometer’, inoffensive cuts that would fit perfectly in any club setting, Austin’s back-half finds its footing with its echoed mixing, even if the songs have the tendency to be overly produced and distracting from their bleeding emotional core. This over-reliance on loading tracks with stylish sound effects can get in the way at times, felt particularly in ‘Texas Tea’, an empty track that adds nothing lyrically or thematically. When the production works, and stops leaning on flashy musical tricks, Austin finds itself, and the results are monumental for Post Malone’s future as an artist.
The last few tracks see Malone at his most bare both lyrically and musically. The closing track ‘Laugh It Off’ is a referential song that gives Malone the opportunity to express his frustrations at his own image and his own emotions. The longest track on Austin, it gives the required room to explore the themes that Austin opened with, with some enjoyably raw and uplifting instrumentation to help deliver instances of power to Malone’s pained performance.
Austin is not fully the album it could have been. Its few filler tracks weigh down the runtime and the poppier tracks feel like already explored territory. Whilst an improvement on Twelve Carrot Toothache, Austin holds itself back from matching the depths of Malone’s impressive performance across the project. Despite this, Austin is still a refreshing step in the right direction, that will impress his fans whilst alluding to a new path that he can pave with future projects, if only Post Malone realises that he has the ability to stoke the kind of cleansing melancholy that stays with a listener long after the album finishes.
Words by James Evenden
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