Brockhampton - The Family Album Review

This album is a therapy session. That label gets tacked onto countless meditative, introspective albums each year, but unlike, say, Kendrick Lamar’s Mr Morale and the Big Steppers, an album about therapy, The Family feels like accidentally hearing your neighbor’s telehealth appointment through the thin walls of your apartment. You don’t have half the context, it gets grating after 20 minutes, and while you hope it helps them, it certainly does nothing for you. Whereas Mr Morale addresses both personal and societal traumas that could be felt even by those that haven’t experienced them, The Family is so insular in its self-referential focus on the sad state of the band, that its appeal is restricted only to those seriously invested in not just the band’s previous work, but the members of the band themselves.

That being said, I am (or at least was) invested in the journey of the countless members of Brockhampton, a journey I’ve been following since 2018 when I dove into their three-pronged hostile takeover of the music scene, the Saturation trilogy. These albums were unprecedented, an eclectic swirl of hip hop, rock, R&B, and pop, with an infectious, energetic mix of authenticity and enthusiasm. In 2018, they followed up their now beloved trilogy with the dark, criminally underrated Iridescence. What this album lacked in fun, it made up for in intensity, striking a unique balance between vulnerable and vicious. Brockhampton’s appeal was in its willingness to experiment with new ideas, and its diverse roster of rappers, singers, and producers. These two features are sorely lacking in their new album The Family, released several months after the band broke up.

This project solely features the group’s founding member, Kevin Abstract, and plays out more like an art piece about the band than an album by the band. At just 35 minutes, The Family delivers 17 short songs filled with chipmunked soul samples, wistful lyrics, and underdeveloped ideas. Songs like “Southside,” “Prayer,” and “Boyband” epitomize the worst of this project, delivering sub 2 minute messes lacking structure, cohesion, or variety. These songs would be disappointing as interludes, let alone full songs. “Basement” plays out like an Iridescent C side, delivering a dark aesthetic that collapses beneath underwritten lyrics and a lack of energy. Tracks like the opener “Take It Back,” “Gold Teeth,” and “Big Pussy” show glimpses of Brockhampton’s brilliance, but their great ideas are never given enough time to breathe. At 2 minutes and 20 seconds, “Big Pussy” rushes through multiple beats, each of which could be the foundation for a great song, but rather than developing a single one, the song just mashes them all together. There are some diamonds in the rough though, like the angelic “Good Time,” and the equal parts melancholic and hopeful closer “Brockhampton.” Kevin also brings some of his cleverest lyricism (“Felt the temperature change when we dropped ‘Heat’”), but frustratingly, he never drops a quotable about anything other than the band's previous greatness, or the band’s current collapse. The Family is an album stuck in the past, too nostalgic for the band’s better days to carve a creative path forward.

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This review was originally written and published for Tastemakers Magazine