Take it all or leave it
By Kiran Baucom
I’ve been waiting for the album to drop with half-bated breath all summer. It was supposed to be here months ago, back when it was still called PUPPY and back before founding member Ameer Van had been hit by sexual abuse allegations. Those accusations arrived via Twitter thread in the middle of May. By the beginning of June, the group had parted with Ameer, cancelled the remaining dates of their US tour, and delayed PUPPY’s release indefinitely. The next few months offered haphazard glimpses of the band’s new direction: the release of four new singles, the sudden reinstatement of their tour dates, and the announcement that PUPPY had been scrapped for a new album, titled the best years of our lives.
By September, the tumultuousness of the summer had left me unsure of what to expect from this long-awaited project. After yet another change, it’s called iridescence now, which, of all the proposed names for this fourth album, at least feels the most honest. There’s a kind of undefinable energy that colors BROCKHAMPTON’s sound, a light that is undeniably vibrant but also unceasingly changing, impossible to pin down. To a certain degree, this quality can be attributed to the structure of the group itself. ‘America’s favorite boyband’ is a sprawling 14-member collective of lyricists, producers, and designers. With so many and such disparate voices represented, the group’s music is inherently ever-contradictory and constantly evolving. But the strength of 2017’s SATURATION trilogy lay exactly in the group’s ability to weave together the multitude of its members’ visions to produce sounds that are both distinctly striking and internally cohesive.
When I first sat down and listened to it the Friday afternoon of its release, this was my greatest disappointment: all of the simple subtlety and carefully complex cohesion that made me fall in love with songs like ‘GOLD,’ ‘SWEET,’ ‘STUPID,’ and even the summer single ‘1999 WILDFIRE’ were missing. Too many of the songs are simply overwhelmed by sound, and discordant ones at that: aggressively distorted bass kicks, siren wails, revving engines, and the dark hum of a synthesizer all overlay and clash into one another track after track. From ‘NEW ORLEANS’ to ‘BERLIN’ to ‘DISTRICT’ to ‘J’OUVERT’ to ‘VIVID,’ the constant grind of noise makes palpable the vocalists’ emotional chaos, but it also constantly threatens to overwhelm and drown out the already crowded verses.
By far the most emotionally impactful moments of the album come when the sound is stripped down to its bare essentials and the deftly curated bars of the six main lyricists are given space to shine through. The emotional center of the album comes halfway through on ‘WEIGHT,’ which Kevin Abstract opens with a painfully honest and vulnerable testimony about the anxieties of fame, his concern for the mental health of his fellow bandmates, and his struggle coming to terms with his queerness in high school. Kevin’s verses, as well as those that follow from Joba and Dom McLennon, are framed within a simple yet evocative blend of string instrumentals, rich piano chords, and a reserved drum break. It offers a sharp contrast to Merlyn Wood’s pulsing anger in the preceding ‘WHERE THE CASH AT’ and the destructive chaos that follows in ‘DISTRICT.’
But, where on first listen these abrupt emotional shifts between tracks felt reckless and incongruous, I’ve gotten closer to understanding and appreciating them the more I replay the album. The summer that gave birth to iridescence was, after all, the most turbulent and disorienting that the band has ever experienced as a group. It would seem an act almost amounting to betrayal for them to release a project that didn’t reflect that. iridescence isn’t so much an attempt to prove the group’s artistic abilities and potential for mass appeal in the wake of losing Ameer as it is a justification of all their conflicted feelings in the wake of that loss.
In the first verse of the final track, ‘WEIGHT,’ Kevin raps in a steady voice tinged with something like melancholy: ‘you don’t understand why I do what I do, so let me do it / get the hell on, let me do it, get the hell on, let me do it.’ The song is my favorite from the album, in part because I think it finally strikes that perfect balance of raw energy and reserved control, but also because of Kevin’s words. They offer an invitation to trust him, to believe in this band in all of its multi-colored complexity, and to follow this journey through to the end. The final outro ends with both a nod to BROCKHAMPTON’s past and a look to their future: ‘you are now about to experience / these are the best years of our lives.'