That song ends with a conversation between Glover and his young son about love-sweeter than it sounds on paper, chilling given the juxtaposition. Played in the background, “47.48” sounds like a locked-in house band the lyrics are actually about a crushing and ever-present violence, and the tension mesmerizes. He has learned to use this inscrutability to interesting effect on the screen, but very seldom, so far, on his studio albums.Īt its best, 3.15.20 Trojan horses some of that terror into happy surroundings. Glover seems to toggle back and forth between not caring about the artifice of celebrity and mimicking the pose of someone who feels that way. His headlining set at last year’s Coachella felt stiff at first, but gave way to emotional monologue fragments about his father’s passing and about Nipsey Hussle’s, and some sincerely cathartic performances. He released Because the Internet-a rewardingly messy album with a sly thematic complexity-alongside a bleak screenplay about the suddenness of death. He announced his departure from Community with a series of notes handwritten at a Residence Inn (“I’M SCARED PEOPLE WILL FIND OUT WHAT I MASTURBATE TO”). As time went on he became more withholding, on record and in public performance. He began the decade making clumsy post- Graduation rap, defensive and full of treacly confession. Yet it always feels as if Glover is in the middle of a game of tonal Russian roulette. He made the leap from sitcoms and mixtapes to superstardom, all while seeming to reject what superstardom requires. And contrary to internet rumor, he did not become the next Spider-Man, but he was cast in the Lion King remake and a Star Wars spinoff. He released more music to increasing critical acclaim (or at least diminishing disdain). The 36-year-old, who grew up a Jehovah’s Witness just outside of Atlanta and began writing for Tina Fey’s 30 Rock just as he was graduating from NYU, starred in another NBC sitcom, Community, before creating one of the decade’s most original screen projects in Atlanta. Dahi, unsurprisingly, says that some early versions of songs had a kind of “ The Love Below energy”: “12.38,” which features a nearly four-minute documentation of a mushroom trip, is sort of a riff on André 3000’s “ Vibrate.”ģ.15.20 comes after a decade of unqualified success for Glover. But it’s not exactly tethered to the present, either. So the album-titled after the date it was originally streamed online, most of its song titles mere timestamps-is not a clear retro pastiche like 2016’s “Awaken, My Love!”, which mined ’70s funk with occasionally dazzling results. There are times (“32.22”) when he sounds like Travis Scott clearing his throat before breakfast, and others (the excellent “42.26,” previously released as “Feels Like Summer”) when Glover lulls you into a simmering hypnosis. These songs, which were recorded over several years with the Inglewood producer DJ Dahi and Glover’s longtime collaborator, the Swedish composer Ludwig Goransson, move from pulsing four-on-the-floor exercises to Prince-lite.
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