Montero

It is nothing short of iconic.

It hits an impressively eclectic sweet spot between hip-hop and pop, leaping confidently from trap beats and martial horns to grinding, distorted hard rock; from music that recalls early 00s R&B to stadium ballads. The genre-hopping is unified by melodies. Song for song, Montero has more hooks – and stickier ones – than any other big rap album thus far released in 2021.

Close your eyes as you listen to Montero and you can almost feel the rainbow confetti falling from the ceiling and sticking to your tears. This album isn’t the creation of a gimmick-spinner. It’s an album bursting with technicolour heart.

Montero delivers in droves, a powerful realization of self that boldly places sexuality, honesty, and vulnerability at the fore.

‘MONTERO’ excels the marketing spin by delivering one of 2021’s most daring, riveting, and honest pop statement.

Lil Nas X set out to make a crossover pop album with “MONTERO” and succeeded.

He may know damn well how to deliver a banger, but also when to tone it back a bit too. Though it may not all hit hard and there are some sonic kinks that could’ve been ironed out, when it does hit, it’s impossible not to be swept up.

Lil Nas X has little interest in deconstructing the conventional structures of a pop song or the traditional narrative arc of an album: He clearly wants these songs of queer yearning to be legible to the mainstream. Working mostly with the production duo Take A Daytrip — who favor melodic hooks and bright, flashy sounds — “Montero” funnels the more fluid and outré aesthetics of SoundCloud rap into familiar pop-musical shapes.

The music throughout MONTERO suggests that Nas X has a very bright future ahead of him.

At its best when he gives us a glimpse of the man behind the memes. ... For an artist that has conquered the rap world, Nas proves to be surprisingly adept at pop.

He proves that he is a fully-fledged, multifaceted person who can do it all, and has all the makings of a modern yet ever-evolving pop star. He just remembers to have a fun, honest time while doing it.

The end result sounds like a distillation of contemporary popular music, the kind of blockbuster pop album following the much larger footsteps of Ariana Grande’s Dangerous Woman or Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream, albeit not as polished.

Everything’s he’s done has led to this engaging debut record, a work that allows his inner self to shine.

Even with occasional missteps, the album fulfills the promise of a new kind of pop star: an out, Black rapper and singer who combines his omnivorous, genre-hopping music, forthright lyrics, and social media savvy to triumph in an industry that threatened his authenticity from the jump.

Lil Nas’s expressions of anxiety and self-doubt are served with honesty and tenderness, as well as some awkwardness.

He has the most fun when the record is at it’s most playful and absurd.

For every guitar-driven bop such as That’s What I Want, there are times when Hill resorts to mainstream genre cliches rather than razing convention as he did on Old Town Road.