Is Kanye West's 'Donda' Album Any Good? Here's What The Reviews Say
After a series of preview events that have generated social media attention as well as controversy — the latest being Kanye bringing out Marilyn Manson and DaBaby on stage at a listening event — Kanye's long-awaited album "Donda" is finally out. Is "Donda" a return to form for Kanye or is it an over-bloated album that listeners can skip? Here's what critics are saying.
"Donda" Is Way Too Long And In A Dire Need Of An Edit
At one hour and 44 minutes, "Donda" is incredibly — and unnecessarily — long. There is no artist in the world capable of making a flawless record that spans nearly two hours — Kanye included. There are plenty of seeds of what could be good ideas here, and some legit great tracks, but had he taken a little more time to edit things, this could have been a classic — focussed, poignant and powerful.
[NME]
[E]ven if "Donda" recalls some of the out-there textures of "808s & Heartbreak," it's no "808s." "Donda" doesn't have that sharpness of focus, that bleak melodic force. It doesn't move the same way. The album is also way, way too long, and it often blurs into the background, transforming into spartan and architectural background music. If you put on "Donda" while you're reading or cooking or cleaning your house, you might sometimes forget that you're hearing a Kanye West album. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. West understands how to deploy electronic minimalism, how to make mood music.
Though There Are Flashes Of Brilliance Throughout The Album
"Donda" is a messy and indulgent splurge of an album. It's sometimes interminable, sometimes irritating, sometimes moving, sometimes beautiful. But even at its most tedious, "Donda" is never predictable. For the past few years, West has mostly brought car-crash spectacle to the world. "Donda" is still car-crash spectacle, but it's car-crash spectacle as art, rather than just as plea for attention.
"Donda" is the best Kanye album since "Pablo." It features the single worst verse on a Kanye album by anybody since Jay-Z on "Monster." (Relax, it's not him.) It features, for a few fleeting moments, the best singing Kanye himself has ever done. It is an often-bruising divorce album, an intermittently stirring devotional album, a feature-heavy bacchanal that mostly avoids random DJ Khaled-style listlessness, and a relentless torrent of Kanye-style lyrical groaners of both the Good Bad and the Bad Bad variety.
The Featured Artists Are The Ones Who Truly Shine
The guests, however, are "Donda's" clear highlights. Roddy Ricch and Baby Keem croon and shout their way to owning their respective songs, but Texas vocalist Vory shines, his wavy melodies lingering like a ghostly presence on his handful of features. Veterans Jay Electronica and Yonkers trio the Lox match West's contemplative poise on the great "Jesus Lord pt 2."
The harsh fact is that the best verses on Donda don't come from Kanye. Brooklyn drill rapper Fivio Foreign lights up the stirring Off the Grid with lyrical grenades about his face tattoos being a marker of truth. Baby Keem mixes worship with the dark carnality of the mosh pit with his Auto-Tune-driven verse on Praise God.
Though The Inclusion Of Marilyn Manson And DaBaby Is Problematic, To Say The Least
Cosigning DaBaby — who apologized for slapping a female fan in 2020 and has spent the past month getting kicked off festival bills for making homophobic remarks onstage at Rolling Loud Miami in July, deleting an apology for the latter in early August — would be thorny enough. But Marilyn Manson is facing lawsuits from four different women who say he sexually assaulted them; 15 women, including "Westworld" actress Evan Rachel Wood, have publicly stated that he abused them. (Manson has vehemently denied all these charges; on Saturday night, Wood offered a musical rebuttal of her own.) Adding these guys to your album at the 11th hour is empty provocation. It's bringing Marilyn Manson door to door trying to shock people. It's musical clickbait. It sucks.
It soon became clear, with the premiere of a new version of the "Donda" song "Jail" — "Jail Pt. 2" on the album, that West brought these two miscreants aboard as fellow public figures persecuted by the politically correct mob, blah, blah, blah. Perhaps in the context of West's latter-day turn to born-again Christianity, he also means to hold DaBaby and Manson up as sinners like himself, who need to be granted the compassion and redemption of God's love; this is, after all, a running theme on "Donda." I could almost sympathize with that. But in the counterbalancing context of Kanye West's perpetual jackassaholism, and given the extreme provocation of these two choices compared to all the other fallen souls West could have selected to elevate, it's hard to buy that any spiritual mission mattered to him nearly as much as the payoff in trolling — the points it scores in the never-ending game of Everybody Pay Attention to Kanye.
[Slate]
It's Not Kanye's Best Album, But It's One Of The Better Ones In Recent Years
"Donda" is not a great album. It's nowhere near a great album […] The exuberant, inventive Kanye West of "College Dropout" and "Late Registration" is long gone. So is the Kanye West of "808s & Heartbreak" and "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" and "Yeezus" — the towering figure ready to use his vast platform to twist rap spectacle into strange and beguiling new shapes. What we now have is sullen-billionaire Kanye West, an inveterate cool-hunter who, at his best, can ride various waves and present himself, however briefly, as a main character in a chaotic rap landscape. But the best version of that Kanye West shows up on "Donda," and the result is easily his best album since "The Life of Pablo."
I am also compelled to admit that on many levels, "Donda" is the best album that West has made in a half-decade. Which, granted, is not saying a lot. It's spotty, lacking in range, monotonous in its tone and production techniques, and above all so obnoxiously longwinded as to display a total disregard for listeners' limited remaining lifespans, with 27 songs that total an hour and 48 minutes. And the final four of those (taking up some 22 minutes) are just versions of earlier songs with some alternate guest features switched in, because West couldn't make up his mind. But is it his first album since "The Life of Pablo" that totally convinces you it was made by the person who made "The Life of Pablo"? Yes, it is.
[Slate]
These Are The Tracks Worth Listening To
On "God Breathed," one of the very best songs, the album's MYP guest, the singer Vory, stands in for West when he sings: "They hearts are filled with greed / Okay, now they want the old me." The thing is, for worse and (mostly) better, we've got the old West on "Donda."
[Variety]
One undeniably excellent moment is "Believe What I Say," which utilises Lauryn Hill's healing coos from her classic "Doo-Wop (That Thing)" for a more uptempo soul song, on which West reminds himself not to be dragged down by fame. It's the record's most restorative moment, just like "Ghost Town" was amid an otherwise uneven "Ye" (2018).
"Donda" standouts like the soulful "Jonah" or the soaring "Pure Souls" work because they tap into the energy of the 2021 zeitgeist, but these moments are few and far between, set adrift in a confusing sea of post-marital anxiety and surface-level religious ideation.
And The Tracks That Are Skippable
"Donda" ends with four extended or alternate versions of songs on its tracklist, including "OK OK," "Junya" and "Jesus Lord." There's also a new take on "Jail," but was unplayable at the time of release, likely due to West's insistence that DaBaby's verse not be removed from it. These takes aren't vital or particularly insightful into the rapper's process and would have been better served being saved for a bonus EP or extended edition of the album in a few months' time.
[NME]
"Jail" has an arena-rap grandeur to it, all chunky power chords and a legit scream-along chorus ("Guess who's goin' to jail tonight?") and enough forward momentum that you barely notice that the drums don't kick in until the last 30 seconds. But that's the song with the low-energy Jay-Z verse ("God in my cell, that's my celly / Made in the image of God, that's a selfie") that kept getting added (allegedly just hours before the first Atlanta show) and subtracted, and that's the song with DaBaby and Manson fouling up the remix. (DaBaby accuses his detractors of taking food off his daughters' table; Manson at least has the grace to be all but inaudible.) Not a good sign when C-minus Jay-Z is your best-case scenario, but them's the breaks.
TL; DR
The rapper's 10th album follows an odyssey of delays and bizarre not-quite-release parties, the result merely punctuated with moments of brilliance
[NME]
Listen To The Album
Image credit: Kenny Sun
