Impressions from the posthumous album of the artist, who devoted the final stage of his creativity to psychotherapeutic music about how to live is healthy.

Posthumous albums are a thing to which there are always a lot of moral questions. Up to and including whether the label and family have the right to leave the artist’s name on the cover if he didn’t make any final decisions. There are sketches like this left over, but which ones did he consider to be finished and which ones did he intend to rewrite and not release in this form under any circumstances? Did the material pass the “This is too frivolous song for a posthumous release, it violates the vibe, screw it” type of elimination, when you can’t ask the author’s opinion anymore? Whose work is it more: the late artist who recorded a few drafts, or the heirs of the musician and the producer of the album, who decided how to interpret and present it according to their cultural level?

With posthumous releases it is better not to have any expectations and my tactic with Mac Miller’s album “Circles” was exactly that – although the first single “Good News” was as reassuring as possible: it was a very finely produced, duly sad track that was in the mood of, it seems, any fan of Malcolm.

But why that long first paragraph – the point is that “Circles” listens like the perfect posthumous album. It’s sad, touching and delicate, light and spiritual – already after two minutes of the starting track “Circles” one might shed the first tear. But that’s not how Mac Miller intended it, is it?

Yeah, you can’t take away the fact that Mac died in the middle of working on this record. “Circles” was meant to be the second part of “Swimming” – it would be two psychotherapeutic releases, where the first one would reveal that the lyrical hero had to learn to swim in order not to drown, and the second one would reveal that he was always walking in circles – that’s the meaning of the idiom swimming in circles. “People say they want to live forever – it’s too long for me, I just want to get through the day.” – it would almost be a passing line if it didn’t come from the other side of the world today. Obviously, Mack did not invest these and other such rimes with the fatal significance that they have now, and from which one can never escape. He didn’t, I suppose, because his posthumous material doesn’t reveal him to be a depressive melancholic: rather, he seems to be an ordinary and perfectly lively guy, not without problems – how many are there?

“Circles” is an insanely beautiful record – fans, I think, are already ordering some memorial vinyls, so suitable for that. If we were talking about movies, it would be impossible not to throw in the term “fanservice. As much as modern rap “ain’t no fucking music,” that’s how much “Circles” is music! At the same time Mac reads rap only episodes – in fragments of two or three tracks; in others he sings (and even recorded a cover of Californian psychedelic-rock band Love). And the music sounds like it was composed by 50-year-old rockers (and it is! The producer of the album was Jon Brion, who had done “Swimming” and was already doing this project as the main creative unit).

“Circles” is unlike any of Mac’s albums – but whose intention it was, we’ll never know.