Mac Miller Balloonerism

Posthumous rap albums can often feel opportunistic: indiscriminate grab bags cobbled together for one last payday. But Balloonerism—the second album from the beloved musician since his death in 2018, released two days ahead of what would have been his 33rd birthday—is far from an assemblage of cutting-room floor scraps. Culled from a single week of extended jam sessions (according to close collaborators), the album is considered to be Mac Miller’s “lost project”, recorded between his 2013 album Watching Movies with the Sound Off and his 2014 mixtape Faces—arguably the most pivotal year of his creative evolution. “It is a project that was of great importance to Malcolm, to the extent that he commissioned artwork for it,” read a statement from Miller’s estate confirming the official release in fall 2024, noting the unofficial bootleg versions that have circulated through the years. There’s only one voice besides Miller’s across Balloonerism’s 14 deep and dreamy tracks—that of SZA, his long-time friend, who appears on “DJ’s Chord Organ,” a heady track credited to Miller’s production alter ego Larry Fisherman that borrows a chord organ once belonging to lo-fi folk hero Daniel Johnston. Otherwise, Miller goes his own way, probing life’s great mysteries with modesty and good humour. The rattle of a tambourine echoes through the album, produced in part by Thundercat, as do Miller’s preoccupations with death as a concept, a puzzle, a voyeuristic spectacle and, finally, life’s ultimate trip. “What does death feel like?”, he wonders repeatedly on “Rick’s Piano”, believed to have been recorded at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio. And on the hushed and haunting epic “Tomorrow Will Never Know”, he looks down at himself from a distant God’s-eye view and arrives at the enlightened conclusion: “Living and dying are one and the same.”