Pomegranate Seeds: 5/10
So it’s come to this. Post Malone, the iconic late 2010s mumble rapper, bested only by Drake and Eminem in genre popularity, is now a country star. And a damn effective one at that.
We can face it: Posty is a pretty bad artist. Back in his rap days, his lyrics were bottom of the barrel, his flows copy-and-paste, and his voice was autotuned to grimy mundanity. Yet his success depended solely on his wizardry at writing catchy hooks and his superb trap production. His hits “rockstar”, “Better Now”, and “Congratulations”, among others remain some of the most streamed songs in the genre. Hardly a reason to duck out.
Yet Posty had a nature for drunkenly ranting against his hip-hop peers, and his egregiously ironic comments that the genre “lacks people talking about real shit” while still holding the type of lyrical prowess that would lead a filthy rich white dude from Texas to rap: “Never know when someone come and try to take my life/ I’ve been sleeping with the .45 like every night”. Once the term “culture vulture” started getting thrown around, he had to bolt.
After already dipping his feet into emotionally charged pop balladry with Billboard number 1 hits “Circles” and the Swae Lee-assisted “Sunflower”, Posty went all in singing. However, his fourth album, Twelve Carat Heartache, was received with a wide shrug from music listeners. So, accordingly, two years later, he swapped to rock with the almost unlistenable AUSTIN. It seemed as though, along with Ed Sheeran and Katy Perry, Malone had slid down into the depths of 10s nostalgia.
Count 2024 as a revival. Just as it became cool to be country again, and as artists like Morgan Wallen and Luke Combs thrived, Posty miraculously decided to “stick to his roots” and hop on board the profitable country train (just two months after he had rode the Swiftie train by landing a verse on Taylor’s “Fortnight”).
So that’s how you get an album like F-1 Trillion, which neither has the spirit of better country albums to compare nor will it please a good chunk of traditional Posty fans. But it sure is catchy.
The pounding drum-bass of the lead single “I Had Some Help” is as pleasing to the ears as Morgan Wallen’s passionate gravitas-filled guest verse should be for country devouts. Meanwhile, “Pour Me a Drink” with Blake Shelton is an unshakeable earworm, and “M-E-X-I-C-O” with Billy Strings recalls the fast-paced ditties of bluegrass yore. Plus, he manages to bank in a Dolly Parton collab on “Have The Heart”.
It should be beneficial to mention that Posty is pretty much being carried through this entire album. Out of the sizable 18 tracks, 3 alone are without a guest feature. And those are perhaps the least memorable parts of the whole deal. Anytime Posty does appear on the album, it’s brief and almost devoid of emotion or character, often mimicking his fellow new set of collaborators. You could’ve played me most of the album with no context and I would be guessing whose project it was.
Yet rather than being inconsistent, F-1 Trillion is anything but. One of the most headachingly annoying issues about it is how basic it is, from the overproduced sprawl that is the music itself to even the blueprint for the songs (Posty verse, chorus, guest verse, chorus, bridge, chorus).
But more than any other album by Mr. Malone other than 2019’s Hollywood’s Bleeding (where some songs could actually be considered good?), F-1 Trillion is not very head-slapping to listen to casually. At least not more than songs with bars like “You said you loved me just moments before/ why’d you lie?/ what the heck?”.
Pomegranate Seeds: 5/10
Standout track: “Pour Me a Drink” feat. Blake Shelton
Skip: “Losers” feat. Jelly Roll
