Ty Dolla $ign’s Beach House 3 opens with “Famous,” an acoustic number that mulls over people’s desires to see their names spelled out in capital letters on Sunset Strip marquees, to watch their likenesses pop up two-dimensionally on flatscreen TVs. “They wanna sign autographs,” he sings slyly. You know: “All the important things.” It’s a curious meditation for Ty—a man whose career can be measured by its proximity to serious stardom, but has lacked the type of massive breakout he has sometimes helped to orchestrate for others. So it’s not surprising when “Famous” turns a bit caustic: “They don’t wanna work all day/They wanna make it overnight.”
The South Central-bred singer and producer is not an artist on R&B’s fringes sneering at the pop stars. Since he emerged in 2012, Ty’s been churning out would-be hits with dizzying ease. The original Beach House mixtape (co-hosted by a pre-stardom DJ Mustard) showed Ty—and D.R.U.G.S., the production collective of which he was a key part—had a knack for radio-ready, delightfully sleazy R&B. A trio of successful singles followed: the Jeezy-aided “My Cabana”; the tortured, irresistible “Paranoid” (which featured B.o.B); and “Or Nah,” slinking and conspiratorial.
Those songs and an early string of mixtapes, including the second Beach House installment, garnered Ty a significant following, and placed him in various high-powered sessions as a writer, producer, and collaborator. When it came to his solo career, though, he had to hurry up and wait. There were some misfires, but Ty mostly maintained a steady stream of guest turns and test balloons. Finally, in the fall of 2015, a debut album called Free TC hit shelves. Named for his incarcerated brother, the record was packed with stars and had a radical musical diversity, from plodding, post-Dre processionals to frenetic pop, from minimalist SoundCloud R&B to defiant guitar with Babyface. It was anchored by “Blasé,” a Future- and Rae Sremmurd-assisted song that embedded itself in L.A. radio and didn’t leave for well over a year. Free TC debuted at No. 14 on Billboard.
And so Beach House 3, released almost exactly two years after Free TC, is a superbly refined collection of songs, carefully crafted and smartly cast. It doesn’t have the longer thematic crescendos of TC, but is even more ruthlessly listenable, stacking hooks on top of hooks and flitting between an array different, pop-viable aesthetic frameworks. The five different interludes with “Famous” in the title could have served as the scaffolding for a career-making hit for a young artist from Toronto or Miami, but instead exist here as tossed-off asides. This is in step with the rest of the record, where songs revel in low stakes and stay within themselves. To wit: a duet with Jeremih, “Dawsin’s Breek,” feels decidedly minor next to other cuts on the album, and yet its hook—“I’ve got a brand new coupe”—is impossible to dislodge from your brain.
Though he adapts to almost any collaborator, Ty is at his best when he’s with his long-time cohorts. “Ex,” which reunites Ty with YG, is breezy and propulsive, and features a superb turn from the Compton rapper (“I’m on jet skis with naked bitches”). “Don’t Judge Me” nearly reunites the team from “Blasé”—sans Slim Jxmmi—and repurposes Future’s flow from “Relationships” into a motivational anthem of sorts. (At the end, Future even breaks into his Big Rube impression.) And when Ty and Wiz Khalifa trade verses over Pharrell’s beat on “Stare,” each sounds rejuvenated.
For all the bids at Billboard, Beach House 3’s finest song is its last, the tranquil, metronomic “Message in a Bottle,” where a flat circle of house parties and Hennessy lead him, inevitably, to make FaceTime calls to exes. It would be a one-note idea in most other hands, but Ty’s talents as a musician are leveraged too well: his gravelly voice, his preternatural attention to detail, his willingness to kill his ego and let the worries about his liver creep in. It’s exactly what makes Ty Dolla $ign’s music so rewarding: the crevices in between hits are filled with angst and world-wearied regret. There’s the party, and then the hangover.
