Vince Staples – Vince Staples

Written By: JD Bullock

In this album Vince paints a very dark picture. With less performative beats and a much shorter album than usual, Vince lets you really feel the lyrics in every song. Kenny Beats’ production skills really shines on this album and Vince matches the beats with a deliberate and dark tone. He shys always from in any way glamorizing his past life and instead talks about loss and heartbreak. Although the album was very melancholic you still get that classic Vince Staples sound because of his great ear for production and witty bars.

The album has a very cohesive sound to it and even the skits tell a complete story. From the very first song Vince shows you how connected he was with his friends and how life in a gang made him lose them very quickly.  You can really tell that Vince and Kenny Beats are close friends because of how raw Vince is on every single song. He tells you things like he isn’t conformable meeting fans because he’s so paranoid and really just afraid of things going to worst. Vince has touched on emotional things before but never like this and the production matches his every word to the point to where you can see that Vince and Kenny must have been working for a long time to make sure it did. The lack of hard beats on this album also allowed Vince to try out melodies which he has never even touched on in his previous work. ‘Lil Fade’ is without a doubt the highlight of this project and you can see how much Vince’s flow has evolved in the three years since his last album.

There will be people who complain about the length of this album but It’s better to have a concise and poignant album like this over ninety minutes of rambling. This is an amazing piece of work with such great storytelling to the point where on ‘Sundown Town’ You feel like you are actually there. This was a more sincere take on his past work, and it gets you really hyped for his next project which is supposed to be dropping soon. This was a paradigm shift for Vince Staples