Post Malone has announced a new album, twelve carat toothache.
Speaking with Billboard, Malone said he’s been stressing the new LP, which will be the follow-up to his 2019 record Hollywood’s Bleeding.
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The new record will clock in at around 45 minutes, which would be his shortest to date.
But, Malone says, that’s just where he’s at.
“Trying to shove 20 to 25 songs, it doesn’t work. Talking to the label [it’s like], ‘Oh, if you have less songs, you’re not going to stream as much,’ but the whole thing is that you don’t want to compromise your art and your gut vibe on anything,” he told Billboard.
Reflecting on the pandemic and his creative balance, Malone added, “You think about everything at the same time, and it’s fucking overload. There’s a lot riding on the music. There’s a lot riding on just being able to keep making songs. And that’s hard to do because you’re like, ‘Fuck—I already talked about everything.’ And you kind of run out of ideas, and that’s scary shit.”
But, Malone says, he saw the proverbial creative light, as he did on his debut Stoney, “There was a switch that flipped, and it felt like I was making Stoney. I lost that, and the hardest part is getting it back. It ebbs and flows. It’s figuring out: ‘Just because I’m not inspired to do it at the moment doesn’t mean I’m giving up.’”
Malone added that the new tracks he’s written “speak more to how I’m feeling at the moment: the ups and downs and the disarray and the bipolar aspect of being an artist in the mainstream. I’ve made a lot of compromises, especially musically, but now I don’t feel like I want to anymore. I don’t need a No. 1; that doesn’t matter to me no more, and at a point, it did.”
Malone’s latest, “One Right Now,” which he released with The Weeknd, is the album’s confirmed debut single. Few other details are confirmed about twelve carat toothache at this time.
Photo: Tina Benitez-Eves