This is a comeback story: a former “junkie, alcoholic” who lost control, now recovered and reborn, embracing the bliss and identity-making potential of music like never before. It’s a classic hip-hop underdog narrative, and this is very much a rap album, just adorned with a Splice pack’s worth of pixie-lated dust. Rave music is often associated with druggy abandon, but for Brown it seems more about the heady rush of joy conjured by whizzing tempos and neon synths. In “Book of Daniel,” the first of two Quadeca collabs, he puts himself on rap’s Rushmore (alongside Kendrick and Earl) and shits on clickbait rappers, all while describing how he survived the days of “drinking till [I] passed out” and urging you to be your truest self. “Fuck punching in, I’mma write til my wrist breaks,” he declares. “Don’t have a care in this world/About what anybody thinks.. When the fat lady sings/Just know you lived your dreams.”
It’s obvious that rap’s perennial eccentric would find kinship with the new vanguard of outsiders, corroding pop with Skrillex frag-bombs and all-out howls. These pals crowd around Brown at every crazed corner: Digicore darling 8485 throws a heavenly halo over the trance-rap cut “Flowers”; Texas oddball JOHNNASCUS yells ferociously over the apocalyptic “1999.” Brown gets unexpectedly poignant on “What You See,” which starts like a Vanisher bonus cut before he confesses how he used to be a power-abusing horndog. “I was at your daughters’/Doing anything that I can/Just to try to get they bra off/I’m sorry Ms. Jackson,” he raps as Quadeca cries like a wounded sprite, or maybe Brown’s pained conscience.
While technically a concept album—Frost Childen’s Angel Prost scatters poetry narration throughout, and Brown plays a character seemingly modeled on himself named… Dusty Star—Stardust sounds better as a choose-your-own-rave texture-taster. He strikes a neat balance between hooky and whacked-out weird on highlight “Baby,” which came from Brown linking up with underscores and playing her Dizzee Rascal’s “I Luv U”; the grime GOAT is one of his big influences. You almost wish the oozy minimalism of the bubblegum bass sections between every verse never coheres into a full-on beat with unnecessary clutter. The freak-streak crosses over into “Whatever the Case,” which sounds like producer Holly rewired a “goofy ahh” TikTok beat for a ballistic WarioWare minigame. Brown’s zigzagging pogo flow works best in this mad-lab mode where it’s not just rap plus hyperpop—that’s the case on the title track, whose grating helium-squirrel synths siren feels custom-made to filter sensitive listeners—or Danny Brown plus the secret sauce of his chosen collaborator. It has the broken wonkiness of an “OPM BABI,” something any sane person would be scared to rap over.