Given that fans and the music industry had largely punted any moral conundrums by not addressing the charges against this singer and rapper — which included aggravated battery of a pregnant woman — at times it felt like reporting and criticism were the last outlets available to address his grim, seemingly unstoppable ascent.
It was thankless work, and almost impossible to do in a satisfying manner.
Some of the questions that hover over “Skins,” XXXTentacion’s third full-length album and the first released since he was killed in June at the age of 20, are the same, and some are new. Unlike his first two albums and the reams of music he released on SoundCloud before them, “Skins” barely leaves a mark. The ideas aren’t original. The record is short — clocking it in at just 20 minutes — but feels extremely threadbare.
On his previous albums, XXXTentacion was working through the molting of genres in real time — hip-hop, emo, R&B;, indie rock. He borrowed from them widely and merged them intuitively, part of a generation of young performers dismantling the frameworks they were handed. He had a gift for channeling disaffection; the texture of his recordings was disarmingly raw, which led to wide, rabid embrace.
There is some of that here, but only in fragmentary form. Lonely emo guitar leads off “Staring at the Sky,” and the hook, such as it is, has XXXTentacion singing, “I was staring at the sky/Singing toxic lullabies” with pop-punk cheek. “What Are You So Afraid Of” sounds like a sketch of an Iron & Wine song. At the end of “One Minute,” the only song featuring a guest — Kanye West — XXXTentacion howls in disorienting metalcore style. West does more rapping on this track than XXXTentacion does on the whole album, capturing the paranoia of a year in which he has been pilloried for his politics and for embracing collaborators with problematic records: “Now your name is tainted, by the claims they painting/The defendant is guilty, no one blames the plaintiff.”
In a handful of moments, XXXTentacion’s capacity for tapping into anxiety and emotional thunderstorms makes for something compelling, like on “Train Food,” an extended allegory about death, or perhaps a reckoning with having been abused: “Trying to scream for hope, just a shoulder that you can lean on/But ain’t nobody coming/So you scream on and scream on and scream on.” It’s harrowing, and also delivered casually, which renders it even more disturbing.
If he is addressing the criminal allegations he faced during his life here, it is only in oblique ways: On “Guardian Angel,” he raps, “I apologize, ‘cause I couldn’t see the pain in your damn eyes.”
But since XXXTentacion’s death, the Miami-Dade County state attorney’s office has released a graphic recording of him seemingly admitting to crimes in a 27-minute tape made around the time of his 2016 arrest. That audio is far more potent than anything on “Skins,” and once you’ve heard it, it is hard to hear much else.
That probably will not affect the fervor with which “Skins” will be received. XXXTentacion’s devoted audience needs to be fed, opening up the question of how much music can be wrung from the files he left behind. But “Skins” is undercooked in the same way as the other songs released since his death: “Arms Around You,” a chaotic and directionless spit-and-glue collaboration with Lil Pump, Maluma and Swae Lee; and “Falling Down,” a light-touch recording he made over a snippet of Lil Peep’s music
If the goal is simply to share whatever XXXTentacion left behind, releasing his raw files would be more effective, and come with lower expectations. The songs on “Skins” are shards, sketches. Even calling them demos feels generous. In an age where a quick audio clip on the Instagram explore page can ignite a career, and in which faithful audiences press play on a streaming service and never press stop, that may be adequate. But these spare parts do not add up to a legacy. And they don’t erase memory.
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XXXTentacion
“Skins”
(Bad Vibes Forever/Empire)
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.