He worked through two dozen string arrangements for the silky “Skin” late one night only to arrive at a brashly tinny sax line. He was executive-producing his next proper studio album, with a self-assurance and a compositional heft missing from the sensory overload of Faces, and a wellspring of outside productions solicited for GO:OD AM.
#THE DIVINE FEMININE ALBUM MAC#
Over a few more studio visits over the next few months, it became apparent that Mac Miller was not just fooling around with new sounds. The Divine Feminine came to life in the background, Miller crafting, picking, sewing, and embellishing beats on the fly outside of the pressures and formalities of an album. I heard early bits like the heavenly Ty Dolla $ign chorus from the finished album’s “Cinderella” and the video-game synths Washington Heights producer Vinylz contributed to “Planet God Damn,” but otherwise, Mac was more concerned with helping coach records from EDM/R&B songstress Njomza and singer-songwriter Dylan Reynolds, both signees to his Remember Music imprint. The Divine Feminine was originally conceived, Mac told me last year, as one half of a clandestine double-EP release that would quickly follow GO:OD AM and highlight the opposing ends of his creative spectrum: the whip-smart rapper and the melody-conscious lover. By the following week’s end, The Divine Feminine, a collection originally envisioned as a SoundCloud freebie, is the No. They’re exhausted, anyhow, from a press run that ultimately carries them through appearances on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, a Pittsburgh Steelers home game, and a battery of interviews in between. I’d intended to tiptoe into the nagging question of whether the two were dating, but I think I get my answer when, after I’ve exhausted my questions, she makes her way over to his lap to say “Good job.” We almost head out on the street to see whether we can ruffle feathers by walking into a store to buy the album, but the blight on New York City record stores rules out the possibility. Our interview, on the day of The Divine Feminine’s release, causes a bit of a stir in the office: Mac doesn’t tell me ahead of time that he’s bringing Ariana Grande along, and her appearance in his small detail gives a shock. But the new music eschews the grit and frost of New York autumns and winters in favor of a lovesick, funk-forward lightness effected in part because the project began on a lark, but also, it would appear, because he is seeing someone new. The brand-new The Divine Feminine is his “New York album” insofar as it was conceptualized and recorded in large part at a few studios around the city, with the help of piano and production whiz Aja Grant, of the Brooklyn soul act Phony Ppl. He’s just moved back to Los Angeles, the city where he nearly wrecked his life holed up in a mansion and recording facility living a dream of musicianly excess. He steps into the New York Magazine office on a brisk September Friday under similar circumstances - new house, new album - but the particulars are different. He also revealed that the album initially began as an EP, but he found that as he got deeper into the material, he had to further “shed light on the topic.The first time I met Mac Miller he’d just moved into a beautiful new Brooklyn apartment and completed a new album - last year’s end-of-summer wake-up call GO:OD AM - which presented a hard reset from the previous year’s drugged-out mixtape Faces. “It’s an album that’s all about the journey that is love,” he told Lowe and the vibe of the first single fits into that concept. On The Divine Feminine‘s first single, “Dang!,” the rapper is in a more crooning, reflective mode as he sings of the allure and confusion that comes with a relationship over a smooth funk groove. “And just kind of like how that mirrors the soul of a woman, and you know, like Mother Earth and falling in love with the universe.”
“It was actually a concept that was told to me about just the energy of the world being a female energy, the energy of the planet,” Miller said of of the album’s title during his interview with Lowe.
Miller’s fourth studio album will include features with Kendrick Lamar, Cee-Lo, Robert Glasper and others. The album will be released in the fall and he also premiered the first single “Dang!” during the show, which features Anderson. He announced The Divine Feminine during an interview with Zane Lowe on Beats 1 Radio on Thursday. Mac Miller has unveiled details about his forthcoming album.
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