I distinctly remember the first time I heard a Danny Brown track. It was probably 2011, I heard the mixtape XXX – and was fascinated and excited by this falsetto, by this weird sound that didn’t conform to the zeitgeist, but rather built its own world completely naturally, between “Adderall Admiral” and “Blunt After Blunt”. Then came “Grown Up” in 2012, this monster single full of humor and lightness. Where Kendrick Lamar dealt with the trauma, the rapper from Detroit seemed like his humorous, if no less dark, counterpart. It should come as no surprise that the two rappers, who celebrated their breakthrough at about the same time, have been closely linked ever since: as different as they are, they are so similar that they naturally occupy a whole class of their own.
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But Danny Brown’s was never the really big stage. Instead of playing the Superbowl halftime show, he is now doing a comedy radio show from Austin, Texas; he has been releasing his records since ATROCITY EXHIBITION, the third hit, on the British electronic indie Warp Records, where Aphex Twin and Squarepusher are usually at home. And with his sixth solo album STARDUST he proves again why he is at home in this environment: his chameleon-like nature is turned up to full speed again, and every song seems to highlight a different facet of his skills as a rapper. The well-known, hyperactive falsetto. The Storyteller. The technically skilled rhyme master for whom double times represent the least challenge. And all identities in between and outside.
With STARDUST, Danny Brown shows how this wisdom can sound translated into rap
But he’s not alone: On almost every track, except for the fantastically over-the-top “Starburst” and the club banger “Lift You Up”, he collaborates with a wide variety of underground and up-and-coming artists: Frost Children from Missouri on “Green Light”, the hyperpop princess Underscores on “Copycats”, the Ukrainian artist Ta Ukrainka and the Australian Zheani on “The End”.
STARDUST spins kaleidoscopically ever higher, ever higher, before it ends in the dreamy “All4U” with Jane Remover – but at the center is always Danny Brown like an impresario and curator of the different sound worlds held together by him and his bars, who plays around with drum’n’bass and jungle, hyperpop, Golden Age of HipHop and noise and lets all genres and disciplines flow into one another to form a unique whole, somewhere between untreated ADHD, Coping with the present, experimental art and really great fun.
On the previous album, QUARANTA, Brown, in his early forties, dealt with his thirties and, above all, his new sobriety. On STARDUST he proves that not only is it not detrimental to his creativity, but that it can catapult it into completely new spheres. “You still have to have chaos within you in order to be able to give birth to a dancing star,” says Nietzsche’s major work “Also Spoke Zarathustra.” With STARDUST, Danny Brown shows how this wisdom can sound translated into rap.
This review first appeared in Musikexpress 12/2025.