album review: 'twelve carat toothache' by post malone

Let me preface this with something most consumers don’t ever want to acknowledge: the success of a lot of mainstream artists, be it popular, commercial, or even in some cases critical, can have a lot less to do with the album itself than everything around it. That might seem counterintuitive - a lot of folks buy into the false equivalency that if an artist is successful they have to be ‘good’, and the more success they get the better they must be - but that’s a fantasy constructed by a hierarchical culture propped up by the record label to further amplify their success stories and conveniently write off their losses. In reality, trends come and go, what might be successful today is a flop tomorrow, and it often has far more to do with how an artist is marketed, promoted, and framed in a media climate rather than the art they make - or to make it more explicit, in my opinion Drake hasn’t made a passable album since 2015, but thanks to savvy marketing, business, and the label protecting their investment, to the general public he’s a ubiquitous success story, and in this social media climate, immediate history gets written fast by the victors and it’s all the harder to correct the record.

But let’s be real: Drake has everything in his corner, he has a team and strategy where even if the music sucks the label won’t let him fail - he’s too big to fail. And it should be abundantly clear the vast majority of artists do not enjoy this privilege, especially if they have a predominantly pop audience and the label might not have the same faith the artist can shift with the times… or even if the artist is capable, the label might have other plans. Enter Post Malone, where after Hollywood’s Bleeding and the long-running success of ‘Circles’ in 2020, I had mostly made my peace with him as an artist - as he drifted further from hip-hop towards a wonky, smoked out pop trap monogenre sound, he paradoxically became easier to tolerate, especially as his writing seemed to consciously embrace melodrama and he proved in a live setting that he could sell it. It was never great - there was a ceiling in production and writing that I suspect would hold him back from the lightning in a bottle that was ‘Candy Paint’, and I think his label knew that - but he wasn’t a walking embarrassment anymore, and his appeal seemed established…

And then weird shit started happening. He released a single where he was slipping back towards hip-hop, notably with a Playboi Carti impression nobody liked. Then he had ‘One Right Now’ with The Weeknd that did well enough, but underperformed compared to the hits he racked up in the late 2010s. And then stuff started leaking out - that the album had been finished in April 2021, and that he was in contract negotiations with Republic for more money, and the label had decided to play hardball and say, ‘fine, you think you don’t need us to move units, good luck getting those hits!’ Now some of this is hearsay and incomplete information, we’ll probably not hear the full truth until years in the future… but for a guy who could rack up #1 hits and multiple album bombs, and where trap has not really faded in popularity, for him to be seemingly struggling this much without much warning seemed rough. Folks not in the know were calling this his flop era before the album even dropped, whereas I… did not want to go that far, but a project like this would be the test if Post Malone’s fanbase would come through, or if his foundation was shaky enough that Republic could either force him back on their terms or cut their losses. And given the buzz I’ve heard has been… let’s call it mixed at best, I was kind of dreading this - so did Post Malone surprise us all here?

…well, you can argue he did, but not in a way I think folks might have wanted. Make no mistake, if this was just Post Malone playing to what you’d expect, I would have put this in On The Pulse even despite his label nonsense, but this is a project hopelessly compromised and fractured in trying to satiate his label… and self-destructing in the sort of fashion that doesn’t make for an easy sell to anyone. In fact - and this is a comparison I saw getting made before it even crossed my mind - there’s a startling number of parallels between Twelve Carat Toothache and Machine Gun Kelly’s mainstream sellout, two messy and uncomfortable projects from white guys that at multiple points were regarded as jokes within the genres they inhabit and would rather be working elsewhere, where there’s been a notable drop-off in quality in vocals, production, and writing where when you pair it with the self-flagellating bleakness you find yourself wondering if they were in a fit state to release anything at all. But the more I’ve listened to this album, the more I can hear the creaking mechanisms behind it, where if there is a cry for help it feels a lot less desperate, and while this album has moments despite itself, it’s one that I found myself significantly cooler on overall, and I really want to explore the interesting failures as to why that is.

Now some of you who remember my mainstream sellout review, you might point out how I made the uncomfortable assertion that we don’t afford every artist vulnerability, so why am I affording Machine Gun Kelly of all people more tolerance for angst that I would Post Malone, who is clearly a better artist, right? Well, this is where framing matters - putting aside my frustrations with Post Malone’s warbling yowl, while he’s always had angst it’s been placed alongside the sort of sour edge that I’ve never liked. It’s the difference between a kinetic blast of rage and a slow burning wallow in resentment, which when placed alongside the sneering flex that I never bought into because he has to keep asserting that he’s a rockstar whose jewelry is worth more than people’s houses, Post Malone becomes a lot harder to like. This was a lesson that MGK learned from bloom when he realized it was a macho pose he couldn’t sell, and even on mainstream sellout he avoided a lot of braggadocious nonsense, or if it was there it was near-immediately undercut. So while mainstream sellout had its formulaic label concessions and confused rage, there was an arc that slammed into the pitch-black final third that felt like a culmination, especially if you know MGK’s history - it might not be a likable culmination or one that feels earned, but it could make a disturbing amount of sense.

Post Malone does not have that arc on Twelve Carat Toothache - put aside how he was coming off of the sort of backed success that many would never see especially in the mainstream, let alone MGK scrabbling for radio hits, the actual flow of this album is much more jumbled and slapdash. Some of this is riding off production issues that we will get into, but a larger issue is mood and atmosphere, where Post Malone might open up this album with ‘Reputation’ where he lashes out as much at the audience asking for entertainment when he’s clearly wallowing in bitter substance abuse and suicidal ideation, setting up a very dark mood very early… and then it swivels to a celebratory moment with Roddy Ricch on ‘Cooped Up’ that seems like an explicit refutation of all of it! Moreover, the more upbeat, pop-leaning cuts here like ‘I Like You (A Happier Song)’ don’t even seem to have much of that undercurrent of that greater darkness, so that sense of unease and creeping dread feels undercut as soon as it starts to form, all the more notable when the melodies feel more major-key and Post Malone’s rougher delivery doesn’t fully carry over - you’re undercutting the wrong emotions here! Take a song like ‘Lemon Tree’, where despite a really solid underlying melody and a nice guitar pickup, the cracking, ugly vocals are near-impossible to overlook - but it’s not a consistent performance across the album, so you’ll get songs with a cleaner, more polished presentation that feel more radio ready in the multiple attempts to remake ‘Circles’ like ‘Wrapped Around Your Finger’ and ‘When I’m Alone’ and it leads to a weird, discordant feel that’s less disjointed breakdown and more ‘I have to include these songs to satisfy some very obvious agendas’.

That’s one of the reasons why I brought up the label disagreements early on - because once you know about them, you can’t stop hearing how they impacted this album. Placing ‘One Right Now’ with The Weeknd at the end of the project to goose streaming numbers despite it completely not fitting whatsoever. The fact that Roddy Ricch, Doja Cat and Gunna drop verses that are more notable that the cosigns are here rather than anything they actually say. The presence of Kid LAROI on ‘Wasting Angels’ which to everyone’s credit lead to a frankly stunning vocal arrangement on the outro that might be one of the few moments that comes close to matching Post Malone’s most grandiose moments… but given how similar their voices come across, you have to wonder if folks at Republic or Mercury are worried that Kid LAROI might be able to crib from their formula at a better price; hell, there are more than a few moments here that are throwing some passing glances at ‘Stay’, which is a pivot that’s not exactly a good idea for Post Malone who coming off of Hollywood’s Bleeding had a sound you could tell he liked. It’s why Fleet Foxes are brought onboard to basically supply backing vocals for ‘Love/Hate Letter to Alcohol’, probably the closest this album texturally gets to the best songs from the last album and is a cool inclusion simply for how immense it feels… but what are the odds that Post Malone likely had more songs like this that leaned even more heavily on folk or country and got vetoed in the process by a label nervous that the hits aren’t here?

But that’s the rub: I’m not sure the hits are here anyway, especially in comparisons with the best hooks from Hollywood’s Bleeding! Oh, there’s a decent number of melodic compositions where it seems like they’re set up to go off on pop radio… but then you get to the production and realize there’s been a downgrade, less because of a change in personnel and more because you can tell a specific sound was being pushed - more spare, focused on oily, wiry synths and blockier percussion that comes across as cooler and glossier. Now in theory this could work - whether you like his delivery or not, he’s got the personality and layered vocals to carry a mix, especially if it leans on organic texture like the occasional touch of strings or guitar - but Hollywood’s Bleeding pulled together its swampy monogenre sound by leaning on saturation and a thicker atmosphere, where conveniently you could smooth over some of the rough edges in vocals and production. Twelve Carat Toothache loses that advantage and not only do Post Malone’s rougher vocals stick out, so do some of the questionable production choices: the inconsistent vocal mixing and autotune, the oversaturation of reverb, the ugly weedy elements in the cheap-sounding percussion of ‘I Like You (A Happier Song)’ and ‘Insane’, the off-key oily burble of ‘I Cannot Be (A Sadder Song)’ and ‘When I’m Alone’ that sound awful even if the groove is there and Post Malone is trying. And that’s the weird thing: whenever there’s not a guest star that brings down the energy - giving me the impression that these were all label concessions - Post Malone doesn’t sound like he’s coasting here, he at least sounds like he cares, but the winning pop cuts just don’t have the same lustre no matter how hard he tries to hammer them out. If anything they sound more like skeletons of ideas that maybe with a more robust mix and a bigger budget could have amounted to more…

Or maybe not, because now we have to get to the writing, which is where this album falls flat on its face. I’ve said for years that even on the great Post Malone cuts there’s a ceiling when it comes to his lyrics - probably not a good thing given how much he wants to lean on being the angsty singer-songwriter type - and this album exposes just how hollow it all can feel, whether he’s trying or not. Thematically, it’s clear Post Malone is in a bad space post-breakup and he’s abusing a lot of drugs and alcohol to get over it - none of which is new - and as such he’s lashing out, some at the audience who want him to commodify his pain, sometimes at the girl where he clearly wants to be whatever the hell she wants because he’s very much not over her, but all of it feels fruitless. And building off some self-awareness, he also seems to recognize that he was clearly at fault at least partially for the breakup - beyond the alcohol abuse there’s ‘When I’m Alone’ where he describes his cheating and hard living and asks the question of ‘who’s to blame’ that she’s gone, of which I hope is rhetorical because the answer is him! But this is alongside tracks like ‘Insane’ which is full of the same partying debauchery, or the vacant ‘One Right Now’ where he can just bring another girl in, where on ‘I Like You (A Happier Song)’ he says he’s going to pull some other guy’s girl ‘like a hammie’ - and yeah, there’s a bunch of corny lines like this that reveal Post Malone’s pitfalls as a writer yet again. But without a coherent arc across the album, and with the intended darkness established so early and so bluntly on ‘Reputation’, and with songs like ‘Euthanasia’ and ‘Waiting For A Miracle’ going even further as he wants his death to be painless as he prays for a miracle to save himself and he’s doing it all for that audience and don’t you feel bad for it… if you’re going to take the audience to this place, it doesn’t feel earned. You set up the stakes so bluntly at the very beginning and proceed to consistently undercut them, there’s little in the way of deeper introspection as to why, where even if the writing feels a bit more descriptive and poetic like with all the fruit on ‘Lemon Tree’ or the barfight he lost on ‘Love/Hate Letter to Alcohol’, it’s all a little too measured and competent to register as a breakdown that goes here, and it’s a bigger struggle to buy into the drama. To make the Machine Gun Kelly parallel again, a lot of folks got really angry when he made ‘sid & nancy’ on mainstream sellout for going to that place and feeling really tasteless, that it was not earned, but the writing on the album getting there was slapdash and vivid enough that the build-up felt real in a gut-churning way. For Post Malone, the mood and motivation feel mechanical to me - not trying to invalidate his emotions and fears, but they’re placed alongside the pop concessions where you can tell he’s trying to make hits because he’s trying to re-up for a better contract, and it makes already simplistic and broadly sketched writing feel even more hollow.

And that might be what’s more disappointing about this album, and a deeply frustrating one to discuss because it’s so obviously compromised. Unlike MGK, there are multiple moments here that show a glimmer of a more expansive, genre-bending album where Post Malone could have outright succeeded - but that makes the, pardon the pun, mainstream sellout moments all the more bland and obnoxious, especially alongside everything else here - it’s a compromise that undercuts any sincere darkness, if you’re going to fail in a downward spiral, at least fail with conviction! Now some will say that the hollow mainstream cuts are part of the point - they’re deliberate failures in the album’s context, exposing the audience to this nihilistic reality - but knowing the reality behind this album’s creation, alongside the garbled sequencing where the voice note sample of ‘Euthanasia’ as a coda is not enough to redeem ending the album with ‘One Right Now’, I can’t buy into that interpretation, especially when the production is such a failure in cultivating that atmosphere. As for the label situation… you can argue Post Malone gave Republic the singles they want, but none of them rise to the level of ‘Wow’ or ‘Circles’ or ‘Goodbyes’, and I think they know that too. In a way, it makes sense Post Malone titled this Twelve Carat Toothache, where thanks to his success the toothache might cause him personal pain, but not be noticeable or drive us to care, mostly because he’s still flashing that grill.

What might be more revealing is that while he’s intending it to castigate his audience, drive us to pay attention to his moans of pain, it sounds like a cavity that’s gone unfilled… and I’m not sure it’s worth the appointment.