Bando Stone & The New World

This record feels like the perfect summation of Childish Gambino’s always-on, internet-driven data-overload experimentation. It’s a work of maturity and vision, out-pacing his peers to deliver something vital, and true to himself.

On his last musical hurrah, Glover has made a record as otherworldly as his other outings. Yet, ‘Bando Stone and The New World’ stumbles slightly – where its sonic variety is exciting, it lacks a clear sense of cohesion or theme compared to his previous work – making it a bittersweet farewell to the legend of Childish Gambino.

While he may have grand notions of his own artistry, it often – in Atlanta, or in his very best music recordings – lives up to it. Bando Stone may be the work of a man high on his own metaphorical supply. But more likely than not, you’ll end up high on it too.

Bando Stone & the New World may not be his best album - it was always going to be impossible to dislodge “Awaken, My Love!” -- but it serves as a fitting summation of all the good-to-great music that has been released under the Gambino banner and might even give some clues as to where he's headed next.

Bando Stone... really is just an excuse for Glover to flex his acclaimed range, with a mishmash of tracks that presumably gel with moments in the movie given the snippets of dialogue peppered throughout. The price of this lost cohesion is that the man really does have the range to pull all this off.

He still lacks emotional commitment as a rapper, offering weakly swaggy bars like “I’m gonna make a billie like I’m Eilish” on “Talk My Shit”. Honeyed melodic shadings like “Dadvocate” and the emo rock oriented “Lithonia” are more compelling. [Sep 2024, p.60]

Glover fares better on his own terms, as on the sultry funk of In the Night, the R&B balladry of Steps Beach and the Latin jazz jam of No Excuses, but these tracks feel lost amid his genre-hopping. On his final album, Glover throws everything at the wall but little sticks.

Glover is clearly better than he's ever been in almost every regard; his rapping, singing and everything in between feel refined to a point they never have. The issue is that, without the movie, there's no connective tissue between these songs, as great as the majority are. For now, Bando Stone & the New World exists as a collection of songs that are mostly great, but lack any real sense of cohesion between them.

When it works, he can still cook up something masterful. .... However, some of Gambino’s ideas would have been better served if he just hired Weezer or Pusha T to deliver them. .... Even if the exploratory Bando Stone doesn’t get Glover another Grammy and Number One for the road, you can tell he’s walking away happy, fulfilled and no longer childish.