Theo Gerson ‘27
Donald Glover, popularly known as Childish Gambino, has been a worldwide music sensation for the past 16 years. But sadly, we have arrived at Glover’s final album under the name Childish Gambino. As he said to The New York Times, Glover’s reasoning for his departure is that, “It’s not fulfilling. And I just felt like I didn’t need to build in this way anymore.” While his last album has just been released, we still have Childish Gambino for a little while as he performs the album on “The New World Tour.”
Childish Gambino’s final album is titled Bando Stone & the New World. The album is named after Glover’s upcoming film in which he will be acting and directing. The movie follows the adventure of a musician, Bando Stone, in a post-apocalyptic jungle world where he ends up meeting a woman and her child. If you listen closely to most of the songs in Gambino’s new album, you can hear sounds of bushes rattling, animal noises, and even some lines that may be in the actual movie.
The album includes 17 new songs and is one hour long. Personally, I absolutely loved this album. It has a perfect combination of different music genres, including R&B, Pop, Hip-hop, Rap, Rock, and Indie. The album has one or two skips, but overall is amazing. My two favorite songs were “Lithonia” and “Yoshinoya.” “Lithonia” was Gambino’s lead single and is the most popular song on the album, with over 50 million Spotify streams. “Yoshinoya” is my other favorite song from the album because it sounds similar to past rap music from Gambino, and is just overall a great song.
Overall, this album is really good and I highly recommend listening to it. It may have some songs that are a bit slow like “H3@RT$ W3RE M3@NT T0 F7¥” and “We Are God,” but it has great music and was a great album for Glover to say goodbye to Childish Gambino with.