“My name is Murs,” the chatty rap veteran introduces himself on A Strange Journey Into the Unimaginable, “and I’ve had a rough couple of years.” He’s not exaggerating. If Murs has kept an uncharacteristically low profile in recent years, now we know why: He was withering a divorce and a grueling custody battle, and by his account barely getting by. He cried every day for a year, he recalls on Unimaginable’s harrowing opening track, and just when things were looking up and he and his fiancé were expecting a baby boy, another blow: His son was stillborn.
Murs has always been an unusually candid memoirist, oversharing even the most mundane details of his life in a matter-of-fact flow, yet none of his nearly two dozen albums has ever touched on anything so heavy. And on Unimaginable’s opening tracks, he doesn’t shy from uncomfortable details. “It took me years to get to this point where I don’t want to die every day,” he raps on “Melancholy,” and even now, “I’m not too high; I’m not too low. I’m just here.” On the leadoff track “The Unimaginable” he lays his pain even more viscerally, mimicking the halting breathing of a panic attack. Murs recognizes there’s power in voicing his grief, even if others don’t want to hear it. “I mention the death of my son because it’s something that’s not talked about,” he explained in an interview. “You’re never prepared for it. Friends don’t call you to talk about that because no one knows what to say.”
Those first couple of songs warn listeners that they’re in store for a very rough listen. “This is not really music, it’s me dealing with my thoughts,” Murs stresses. Unimaginable is not Murs’ own A Crow Looked at Me, though. Once he gets some of the weight off his chest, the record brightens considerably and becomes more or less another Murs album, albeit a better than average one. Listeners who stopped paying attention to Murs sometime between his third and his sixth full-length with 9th Wonder may not have noticed when he signed to Tech N9ne’s Strange label several years ago, but here he embraces the new surroundings, recruiting the label’s house producer Michael “Seven” Summers to produce the whole thing. It’s hardly a radical departure—Seven’s jazzy soul and updated boom bap isn’t really all that different from 9th Wonder’s—but Seven gives some of these tracks a looser, live-band feel, and those drums, pianos, saxophones and acoustic guitars lend the record welcome warmth.
For returning fans piqued by the album’s backstory, Unimaginable offers a reminder that Murs is still pretty funny. On “Same Way” he brushes off a cold reception from his girlfriends’ friends and family: “I know what your family saying on the down low/And all your homegirls high key hate me though they still use my login for the HBO.” He leans even more overtly into the comedy on “Superhero Pool Party,” a throwback to the madcap rap of old-schoolers like the Sugar Hill Gang and Biz Markie. Batman won’t take his cape off in the pool; Professor X falls out of his wheelchair; She-Hulk shows up with some “bomb guacamole same color as her skin”—that sort of thing. It’s basically a three-minute dad joke, but he sells it by committing to the lunacy.
Inevitably, nothing on Unimaginable makes as much of an impression as those sorrowful leadoff tracks, which are so potent and heartfelt you can’t help but wish there were a few more of them. But sometimes less is more, and Murs deserves credit for refusing to turn his grief into something performative, a thought he shutters at on the album’s opener. “If I could take all of my tears and cry them into a chain/I wonder how many million more followers I’d gain,” he raps, “I could turn all this salty water that fell from my eyes into some diamond carats/Then when I cry in public I could finally do so without having someone tell me I should feel embarrassed.” Murs rarely preaches, but on this point his insistence is inspiring: Don’t ever let anybody stop you from grieving on your own terms.
