Astroworld

This is the sound of a musician who has worked to forge an entire world, an empire, around himself--we can peer in, but from afar, guessing at his motives and life behind the velvet rope.

Astroworld shows the evolution of Travis Scott as an artist and is his most refined, imaginative, and rage-worthy project yet.

The album's trap-psych spaciousness blends so that most of Astroworld plays out like a single long, spectacularly mixed track.

If Astroworld suffers from any sin, it’s a nearly endless ambition.

Travis manages to create a substantial body of work that begs to be served as a whole, rather than just bite-sized pieces.

The modulation and echo treatments on the vocals, combined with the frequently torpid tempos, nonetheless make Astroworld ideal for being pumped through an (18 and over) amusement park's sound system near closing time, when the challenge of hitting all the rides has started to turn into an overindulgent, overheated chore.

His third studio album, Astroworld, feels like the grand opening of a vision that took a half-decade to perfect, still using the same psychedelic synth warps, diamond-cut drums, and reptilian hooks that initially skyrocketed him to stardom.

Scott could have easily made another distorted, debaucherous project like his previous two albums, but by emphasizing his vocal performances and finding the best middle ground he ever has with his bevy of superstar collaborators, he’s made Astroworld a theme park worth revisiting whether you came in as a stan or a skeptic.

While Astroworld has some slight flaws, the project is Travis' best, most-progressive and most-well-rounded album to date.

Astroworld is no Rodeo or Birds In The Trap Singing McKnight, but it’s a beautiful creation of sonically striking sounds.

Malone is an unmistakable presence on his songs, his otherworldly croon an essential element to his genre-hopping sound. Despite the considerable leaps in quality taken on Astroworld, it still doesn’t feel like Scott can muster that level of individuality.

Astroworld mostly holds itself together despite its aggressive number of moving parts.

The music might take your breath away, if the worst of the lyrics don’t make you roll your eyes. He’s very good at what he’s good at, but he’s not what you’d call well-rounded. Still, not everyone who has something to say, says it in words.

An hour of ambitious song structures, disparate vocal and instrumental performances, and lyrical esoterica concerning Houston, tied together by Travis Scott’s affection for autotune and lowest common denominator rhymes and flows. Which isn’t particularly characteristic of a great rapper, but is more or less the ingredients of great music.

It is his most fully realized album, but also the one that most strikingly situates Scott as secondary to his collaborators. ... For all the interesting things that can be found on Astroworld, it is still way too long and can sound so uniform that it loses your attention.

At 17 tracks, Astroworld is not without filler--the 21 Savage feature “NC-17” is tiresomely sophomoric, while “Can’t Say” and “Houstonfornication” never really take shape--but rarely does the album feel lazy or uninspired.

Unfortunately, Scott doesn’t keep the envelope pushing up for the whole album: a seven-song stretch in the back end is vintage Travis with its zoned-out, hypnotic throb. However, the rest marks the most interesting music of his career, Scott no longer just looking the part of a brilliant artist, but sounding like it too.