Post Malone’s Twelve Carat Toothache album review — misogyny sabotages sympathy

Every Post Malone album has at least one song where our hero plunges into the black depths of despair. On the US singer-rapper’s 2016 debut Stoney, it came during “I Fall Apart”, in which he weeps copiously in his luxury car while downing shots of alcohol, after being ditched by a woman whom he lavished with gifts (“All this damn jewellery I bought/You was my shorty, I thought”). He cheers up over the course of the album, which closes with a vision of an irrepressible Posty popping champagne, rocking his own “goddamn jewellery” and hopping out of his car “looking so pretty”.

His triumphalism was rewarded: Stoney’s fusion of hip-hop materialism, emo angst and rock hedonism made a star of the Texas-raised vocalist. Its 2018 follow-up, Beerbongs & Bentleys was an even bigger hit. It opened with him suffering a bad attack of paranoia and sleeping with a handgun by his bed. Fame was to blame. “Sometimes feel like I got no friends,” Posty sang. But once again his mood improved in subsequent tracks, buoyed by a diet of luxury consumption, casual sex and intoxicants (including his favourite lager, the insipid Bud Light). 

The same emotional dynamics unfolded on 2019’s Hollywood’s Bleeding. By then, Malone was one of the brightest stars in US music. Big names from the worlds of pop, rap and rock turned up to guest on his songs, among them Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj, Travis Scott and Ozzy Osbourne. Moody beat-making and singsong melodies gave the Posty package an attractive heft.

Twelve Carat Toothache is the 26-year-old’s latest instalment of gilded pain. Opening track “Reputation” provides a recap of his stage persona. “I was born to raise hell, I was born to take pills,” he cries in a dramatically quavering voice, enhanced by special effects such as reverb. Sonorous piano chords thud away like a can of Bud Light rolling around the floor of one of his supercars. The producer is Louis Bell, a regular collaborator whose run of eight US number one singles since 2018 makes him one of the most successful hitmakers working today. Four of them were Post Malone songs.

Their partnership locks back into a solid groove on “Love/Hate Letter to Alcohol”, a well-wrought melodrama about a drunken binge with a surprisingly effective guest appearance from indie folk-rockers Fleet Foxes. But the album’s overall sound is glummer and more torpid than its predecessors. The lyrics are also particularly downcast. Having quoted Kurt Cobain in “Reputation” (and declaring “I was born, what a shame”), Posty contemplates ending it all at the barrel of a gun in “Waiting for a Miracle”.

These are bleak sentiments indeed, but what impels them is unclear. Celebrity is fingered as a source of unhappiness, but that sits awkwardly with the songs’ glamorisation of designer watches and ultra-expensive beds. Women are another source of drama, but here the chauvinism and even misogyny that recur in his work sabotage any sympathy. “Bought you a new face, you should call me ‘Dad’, baby,” he tells a cosmetically treated companion in “One Right Now”, a duet with The Weeknd. More than any allusion to depression or alcoholism, this is the moment when the album really cries out for the attentions of a decent shrink.

★★☆☆☆

‘Twelve Carat Toothache’ is released by Mercury Records/Republic Records