The features list for Danny Brown’s new album Stardust hit like a crisis for anyone left whose image of Brown is fixed on drug-addled despair and dusty beats, listeners who can’t fathom him going from working with Kendrick Lamar and Earl Sweatshirt to new-generation electronic wizards like femtantyl and Frost Children. But what connects Brown’s work over the years is less a specific sound palette or take on prestige rap than the throbbing, raw emotion—the way he shot his voice up to paranoid delirium on “White Lines” and turned the no wave-inspired clown fiesta of "Ain’t It Funny" into a desperate meltdown. Over a decade ago, Brown was getting giddy over Rustie’s ebullient EDM-rap festival chaos and linking up with Charli xcx. He’s always picked his next moves like he’s yanking from a magic hat.
Stardust is Brown’s first album fully sober, and it’s the product of spelunking down the hyperpop rabid hole. This exploration began during the pandemic, when Dorian Electra showed him the Subculture party series, which is normally in LA but was now being held over live stream. After he left rehab, listening to underscores’ imaginary-town odyssey, 2023’s Wallsocket, reignited his passion for music. He slowly befriended the wider network of young producer-performers, some of whom began in the digicore scene but have tried to ditch the genre label, refusing to be static, a nomadic fever they shared with Brown. He featured on their songs and took inspo from Jane Remover’s maniacal microgenre dariacore for his 2023 mixtape with JPEGMAFIA, Scaring the Hoes. Stardust marks Brown’s full transformation into dance diva, his own 2020s version of Pop 2 that folds all his current obsessions into a freak-flag-flying ode to life and love. It’s a fun and unwieldy spectacle—at times shaky but always full of heart.
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.
It’s tempting to call Stardust cutting-edge because Brown hasn’t released an album like this, but a lot of it isn’t. A few of Brown’s previous songs with Stardust collaborators are crazier than their counterparts here: ”Psychoboost,” “M3 N M1N3,” and “Shake It Like A” come to mind. Maybe it’s a byproduct of this album’s upbeat, victorious tone, but most songs are entry-level genre experiments as opposed to Brown fully defacing and deterritorializing the electronic styles. The whooping house of “Lift You Up” and diet Don Toliver drift of “RIGHT FROM WRONG” don’t leave much of an impression. Some instrumentals seem forcibly molded into a rappable form, which Brown then steamrolls with positivity mantras instead of switching up his vocal tactics to match the unhinged sound.
Critics joke about how turbo EDM and hyperpop can be impenetrable to anyone over 25, how becoming “unc” turns Auto-Tuned moans into repellent noise. But taste is less about generational preferences than about being open to the tantalizingly unfamiliar. Stardust works best as a kind of grassroots community statement, an elder statesman—a role he’s always played—teaming with a bunch of underground talents because he admired their swag. His story anchors the constantly mutating computer bleeps and relay race of features. “Back when I was in the thick of it, used to dream of days like this/Didn’t know I could make it here… Man this rap shit saved my life,” he sighs on the closer “All4U,” which samples Jane Remover’s “Twice Removed” but relegates their presence to an ecstatic background haze; the spotlight lies on Brown as he mumbles in disbelief, stupified by his luck. It’s a love letter to rap and the people who made him excited about creating again. It’s saccharine, maybe a little pat, but the emotion in his voice makes it hard not to feel fuzzy.
