Howdy! Welcome to the first edition of whatever this is. I haven’t written anything personal (or truly anything that’s not for my job) in literal years now. I hope it’s at least mildly coherent. This one isn’t really a review, but let’s roll with it.
BROCKHAMPTON x THE FAMILY.
Kevin Abstract laid his beloved boyband to rest this week, his eulogy a solo album released in Brockhampton’s name. He may not have been able to save the band, but he put it out of its misery by taking on their penultimate album alone, presumably (though maybe in small part) to comply with a contract that required them to crank out two more albums before calling it quits. The group released a final album featuring their six performing members the next day.
What Abstract — real name Ian Simpson — accomplished through The Family is a return to the vulnerability that made Brockhampton so successful in the first place. This is “their” best album since the Saturation Trilogy (2017-2018) and his best since American Boyfriend (2016).
He may not have written this album as a gift for Brockhampton fans, but for those of us who connected to their debut and the subsequent trilogy, this is closure. For me, personally, it’s a tsunami of nostalgia for a time when America’s hardest-working boyband unironically cured my depression.
I went into political exile January 16, 2018. No, not really — but I did flee to Canterbury, England after finding myself on the periphery of a national controversy the previous month. It was the toughest time of my life, having OK’ed a reckless and incendiary column about the illegitimacy of whiteness in my college newspaper that ended up being panned by the New York Times and on very dangerous white nationalists’ radar in my neighborhood and across the country.
A few weeks after the column upended my life, Brockhampton dropped the third and final installation of their Saturation trilogy.
I was skeptical at first. Abstract is from my hometown. We had mutual frenemies. We (and much of the band, like Matt Champion and Merlyn Wood) traded the Houston suburbs for San Marcos, a scrappy little college town, right around the same time. At some point, I even matched on Tinder with Joba and Romil Hemmani, another member of the band and one of its producers, respectively. But for some reason, I found it difficult to see people with such similar upbringings to mine succeed. I refused to listen to them.
I gave in when the dreary English rain infected me with homesickness that felt terminal. I needed to devour any slice of home I could get my hands on and ended up watching their entire Viceland documentary series “American Boyband” in one sitting; seeing footage of The Woodlands and San Marcos was restorative. I ate up their full discography the next day. I was obsessed.
Brockhampton seemed like the most unalienated group of musicians I had ever come across at that time. They were pumping out content with such speed and ferocity (three legitimately great albums in six months!) because they were essentially a commune that was entirely self-sufficient and not tied down to any major record label. They set up shop in the Brockhampton Factory, a rundown shack in the South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles, squeezing their roster of musicians, producers, their graphic designer, webmaster, manager and stylist into this small home and just did their thing with such utter joy. It was dope.
Much of what made the Saturation Trilogy special is present in The Family. For starters, the album is soaked in sonic references to the person responsible for the band’s inception: Kanye West. “Who would've thought we made it off that damn forum?” Abstract spits in the opening track “Take Me Back,” referring to the band having met on a Kanye West fan forum called “Kanye To The,” which is a reference to “Through The Wire” from College Dropout, a clear influence for “Take Me Back” along with Ye’s “Touch The Sky” from Late Registration, two albums that are present through The Family in its entirety, from its heavy use of soul samples to its immense vulnerability.
Vulnerability and nostalgia are Brockhampton and Abstract’s native tongues, but Abstract lays it all on the table in The Family like he’s never quite done before. He admits that the members of the boyband hardly talk anymore, he owns the fact that he was incredibly toxic throughout the latter part of their seven-year stint and struggled with alcohol abuse, and, perhaps most notably to fans, he admits that the band distanced themselves from him in large part because he decided to reconnect with Ameer Vann, a disgraced member of the band who was kicked out right after the group signed its record deal with RCA (which Abstract references in the closing song, “Brockhampton,” saying: “I wish I knew the day that we signed it would change shit.”) having been accused by several women of physical and emotional abuse.
Frankly, that’s when Brockhampton fell off. It was clear from their fourth album, Iridescence, that Vann’s (completely deserved) expulsion weighed on the members of the collective immensely. Their fifth album was uncharacteristically aggressive, which at the time seemed like an overcompensation for having lost what Vann brought to the music: a hard attitude that gave the group its edge. He was also the face of Brockhampton in that his face was literally the cover of every Saturation album. As Abstract’s closest childhood friend, his departure seemed to suck the joy out of everything Brockhampton would go on to do, and his absence would always remain front and center, haunting every release. Just as quickly as they put out three albums, they experienced every stage of what it means to be public figures, for better or worse. They would never be as popular as they were or could have been. As Abstract aptly declares on “Gold Teeth,” “you can't become unfamous, your clout just starts fading.”
Now, instead of letting the past weigh on them the way it did post-Ameer, Abstract has given them the gift of closure. “I wouldn't take nothin' back even if I could rewrite the past,” he says in the closing track before showing each member the love that he still has for them as they each move on to their solo projects.
Joba, you the most musical motherfucker
Matt, I know you a perfectionist but now you free
Dom, ain't nobody fucking with you lyrically
Merlyn, can't nobody match this ni**a’s energy
Bari, the world 'bout to see who you finna be
Ciarán, you brought the truth out of me
I was living in a fantasy
The next chapter is everything that we said it would be
This next chapter is everything that we want it to be
The show's over, get out your seats
Like Abstract, I don’t regret a single thing that led me to become alienated and depressed that winter in England. I came to terms with those decisions and laid it all to rest a long time ago — but the fallout really sucked. Onwards and upwards, Kevin. We can look back on the Saturation era with nothing but love now.