The album is dotted with sonic intricacies throughout-fluttering guitar lines, showy samples (the deathless hook of Uncle Luke’s “I Wanna Rock (Doo Doo Brown)” on “Sicko Mode”), enough gooey synths to fill a share-sized Milky Way-providing a Magic Eye-level of texture: It might all seem the same from afar, but blur your perspective just enough and the details reveal themselves. “Astrothunder” ripples with contributions from Thundercat and John Mayer, the former dialing back his frenetic jazz-funk to a percolating crawl, while “Stop Trying to Be God” plays host to the record’s most involved vocal take from Scott, with wistful harmonica lines (courtesy of Stevie Wonder) and swirling keys surrounding his voice. It's the epitome of the Travis Scott experience.įeaturing a coterie of guest stars representing pop’s upper echelon (Drake, the Weeknd, Frank Ocean), big-ticket indie’s creative brain trust ( Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, James Blake), and newest-wave rappers ( Gunna, Sheck Wes, Juice WRLD), Astroworld also boasts the most potent production of Scott’s musical life so far. “Psychedelics got me goin’ crazy,” he lolls over the spooky and beautiful “ Stargazing,” his voice sounding like a sentient iTunes visualizer as he nods to Houston legend Big Moe and shouts out Ellen DeGeneres. As far as trippy-sounding hip-hop goes, Scott is operating at something of a gold standard here, out-hallucinating fellow stylist A$AP Rocky’s own recent blotter-blotted efforts. The album takes its name from a since-shuttered amusement park in his hometown of Houston and often resembles a humid day spent at a carnival: sticky, sweet, bustling with activity, and packed with cheap thrills that still feel a tad overpriced. Such is the case with Astroworld, unquestionably his strongest release to date. But last year’s full-length collab with Migos member Quavo, Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho, felt driftless and tossed-off by comparison, suggesting a weird paradox embedded in his career thus far: For someone so reliant on others to properly perfume his own work, Scott seems to be most engaged when he’s able to solely take credit for it. The album that song appeared on, 2016’s Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight, captured Scott in the process of refining the rougher edges of his sound, with bolder hooks and a slow tilt towards streamlined song structures. A 2015 Deadspin post titled “ Travis Scott Is Worse Than Iggy Azalea” made the case for Scott as a canny cultural plagiarist-a notion that became somewhat more fortified the following year, when he was accused of essentially stealing the framework for the Young Thug and Quavo collaboration “Pick Up the Phone” from Thug himself. This has, of course, made him a divisive figure in hip-hop circles and elsewhere.

If Yeezus embraced by-committee creativity as a means to an end, Scott has taken it several steps further by allowing such an ethos to define his very artistic being. He’s wielded his own influence over areas of pop culture- Drake’s 2017 “playlist” More Life was arguably as influenced by Scott’s revolving-door A&R approach as it was by the evolving fluidity of the album format-even as he remains indebted to mentor Kanye West, whose titanic 2013 album Yeezus (to which Scott contributed) was its own ultra-collaborative, cut-and-paste monster.

Astroboard review