Travis Scott – ‘Utopia’ review: lofty concept, shakily executed

31 July, 2023

Travis Scott - Utopia

Few artists dream on the same scale as Travis Scott. Once a prodigy under the tutelage of Kanye West, the Houston rapper became the ringleader for a wave of screwed and psychedelic hip-hop primed for buck-wild live shows. His last album, 2018’s ‘Astroworld’, was a blockbuster amusement park that broke free of West’s influence and made Scott one of the most marketable figures in hip-hop. He rode its success with chart-topping singles – including 2019’s ‘Highest In The Room’ – collaborations with Nike, PlayStation, McDonald’s and Fortnite. In 2021, a fatal crowd crush at his Astroworld festival led to 10 deaths and countless injuries and lawsuits. Last month, a grand jury decided he would not be indicted, and the rollout for ‘Utopia’ kicked into action.

From the title and his world-building roll-out, it’s clear that Scott is trying to top himself yet again. The album is accompanied by a feature-length film Circus Maximus, a now-binned concert at Egypt’s Pyramids of Giza and is teasing another ancient world-themed performance in Pompeii.

This, his fourth studio album, retreats to the brashness of early mixtapes ‘Owl Pharaoh’ (2013) and ‘Days Before Rodeo’ (2014) and has the same impulse to intersperse high-gravitas sounds with obscured vocals. You’ll be surprised what utopia looks like – the first of five cover artworks he revealed looks like an Armand Hammer album cover. In a recent interview, he stressed that “people need to see that Utopia is real”, and that even a utopia cannot be without a measure of darkness.

Where Scott invited hip-hop’s all-stars to join him on his previous album, on ‘Utopia’, he reaches across the spectrum to enlist pop superstars, trap’s A-Team, electronic mavens and alternative heroes. There’s a three-track run that jumps between beats from Boi-1da and Sweet, James Blake, The Alchemist and Pharrell Williams; it rivals OutKast’s ‘Stankonia’ for how it devours genres and settings into his world.

But Scott sounds maddened by the pursuit of finding that vague world. It’s reflected in how he puts himself in the throes of the quaking opener ’Hyaena’ and the cacophonous Zamrock of ‘Sirens’. “I’m just one angel away from blockin’ out the devil,” he raps on the stark ‘Lost Forever’. Across the runtime, Scott’s vocals are more expressive than ever, injecting atmospheres with guttural screams, howls and megaphoned professions to God’s power: “To the maker! Vibrator! Room shaker! Earth quaker! Annihilator!” on ‘Modern Jam’.

Scott’s tendency to split songs into multiple phases creates restless experiments in contrast. ‘Skitzo’ transitions from a relatively tame Young Thug verse to a beat from the Twilight Zone with reversed textures and paranoid strings. On ‘Lost Forever’, James Blake’s voice is bent to sound like an old Etta James sample and Scott spins it to glue with Westside Gunn’s militant onomatopoeia.

But ‘Modern Jam’ gives early signs of the record’s issues with forcing invigorating ideas into dull ones. Teezo Touchdown gives a spectacularly theatrical performance that sounds like André 3000 singing in a cabaret, but this is after one of the stalest performances of Scott’s career over a stiff drum loop that came from Daft Punk’s Guy-Man de Homem-Christeo, his first piece of music since the French duo’s split in 2021.

For all the market value of the feature list, whether Scott puts it to good use varies. With Beyoncé on the Afropop-infused hip-house of ‘Delresto (Echoes)’, he carves out progressions and space for each artist, but ‘My Eyes’ makes clunky cameos out of Bon Iver and Sampha, the latter of whom arrives to croon for an almighty three lines. This issue of underutilisation extends to sheer carelessness at times. What does it say that Scott has Drake allegedly dissing Pharrell on one track (‘Meltdown’), and Pharrell producing another song (‘Looove’) later on? Petty words from Drake aside, it speaks to a compulsion to have a vast list of names that impress on paper with no regard for if they fit into the larger concept.

While rapping Travis is more prominent but he has long, hungry-sounding verses that say very little, his deeper conscience speaking out rarely within a litany of monetary figures and luxury purchases. ‘My Eyes’ comes closest to sounding like reaching that higher ground with dreamy synths ringing out an achingly innocent melody before Scott references his “1000 on my feet” Cactus Jack Jordans. If getting to utopia means spending a grand on a pair of trainers according to Scott, then he sounds like an evangelist with ulterior motives.

On the snarling rage rap of ‘Fe!n’ Scott raps “I’ve been focused on the future, never on right now”, but that line exposes the fallacy of ‘Utopia’. By going back to the sound of his early work, Scott steps back into the gargantuan shadow of his mentor. Kanye West – particularly the mechanical abrasiveness and fragmented textures of 2014’s ‘Yeezus’ – is not just an inspiration but an apparition that looms over Scott’s identity on this album. Scott helped create ‘Yeezus’ so the sentimentality is understandable, but he can’t claim that record’s sound any more than Daft Punk, Mike Dean or Arca can. Whereas ‘Astroworld’ was the perfect theme for Scott’s music – we’re going to a theme park! – in trying to navigate a lofty concept like finding utopia, his ambitions have led him back to someone who was far more formidable at it.