In the ever-changing music landscape one of the recent trends has been artists releasing albums that are much shorter than the standard length and are more like EPs as they clock in somewhere around 30 minutes. Whether it’s the run of G.O.O.D. Music releases, the Beyoncé and Jay-Z project, Black Thought’s solo debut or the last two projects from Freddie Gibbs, these albums have shown us that you don’t need to have 25 songs to get people to listen and, in fact, you might be better off giving fans a small serving of quality rather than an overstuffed meal that just leaves you feeling exhausted. Aside from the tightness of these releases helping lend to their critical acclaim, the idea of albums being important again may be an unintended yet much welcomed byproduct of this movement.
In the last decade or so, first with the rise of iTunes and then with the introduction of streaming services, the album has somewhat fallen into irrelevancy as listeners can just shuffle through single songs now easier than they ever could previously. iTunes let people purchase only the songs they really wanted from an artist and with streaming services you don’t even have to put up that dollar for a track so you’re even more free to just skim through an album and “favorite” the songs you want to hear again. This has resulted in people claiming to be huge “fans” of an artist without knowing anything outside of that artist’s hit singles and it’s allowed for artists to just toss records up on Soundcloud or one of the major services without having to release an actual album. Cardi B blew up off the success of singles such that people didn’t even really care if they got an album from her so long as she kept giving us heat. Meanwhile due to the way streaming numbers are calculated some artists saw a way to take advantage of the system by releasing enormous projects that mostly contained filler but since they included the hits the project still did numbers (look no further than the Migos second album which has something like 25 songs and clocks in at around 2 hours).
All of this has been brutal to witness for people who value the album format for its ability to capture a theme, tell a story, or just to represent a complete body of work from a well-respected artist. A hit single is fine, but that full length project is what used to really define an artist’s skill as it could elevate them from one-hit-wonder status to established veteran. But in the number-driven industry the album was starting to feel like a dead artform as people don’t have time for a whole project, especially with the subscription model of streaming services allowing for access to every new album it’s like everyone is competing for the same group of listeners.
Two things have come out of all of this. The first is the surprise album as there is not much of a need to promote an album for months when as long as it’s on the home screen of Tidal or Spotify then the people will know about it. The second though, at least in recent months (and last year with Gibbs’ “You Only Live 2wice”) has been these short albums. What’s especially worth noting is how in recent years you saw the discussions of artists be about their hits whether it was Cardi, the Migos (who admittedly did drop a fire album with “Culture”), Young MA, Fetty Wap (his debut album was basically just a greatest hits) and countless other artists who were known off the strength of some hit singles but who most fans couldn’t point to deep cuts on an album (if they even had one) to further solidify that artist’s talent. Now what’s happening is you’re seeing the discussion be about the full albums we’ve gotten recently from Pusha T and Jay Rock and Nas. It’s not that we wouldn’t have reviewed these albums or dissected them if they were 14 songs and 50 minutes but snap judgments would have dominated rather than attentive assessments. In some ways it really just comes down to a time thing. With everyone so busy in this fast-paced social media world you’re more likely to give an hour-long album only one listen before moving on to the next one but if it’s only 25 minutes then it’s easier to let it ride out a couple times since even that still won’t even be a full hour’s worth of time dedicated. Even just that second listen can change the way you hear a record as you might go in with certain expectations and your initial reaction might be based off those expectations whereas if you go back and listen again knowing what you have then you might just listen for what is there rather than what you might have hoped would be there.
What this has also been great for is being able to discover the hidden gems on an album as there’s nowhere to hide them on such a short release. If an album is 18 tracks deep then you might get exhausted around track 11 and just listen to the first few seconds of a song before hitting next and in doing so you might miss the overall message of the album through some necessary transitions just like if you skipped some scenes in a movie because the film was over 2 hours long. But with these more concise releases you’re now seeing every track get equal acknowledgment and while that makes bad tracks really stand out it also ensures that you won’t miss a highlight simply because it wasn’t promoted as a single and it falls 45 minutes into the album that still has 25 minutes to go.
Hopefully this trend continues as quality has always withstood the test of time moreso than quantity. People still claim Illmatic as the best rap album of all time and it’s only 39 minutes. None of this is to say that you can’t make a classic that tops the hour mark as there are plenty of classic records that are closer to 70 minutes in length (one of the best albums so far this year, Victory Lap, clocks in at 65 minutes), but if these shorter releases are what it takes to get people to care about albums again and if it forces artists to focus on making the best music they can rather than just filling up time to get their streaming numbers (the Migos reportedly only spent a few minutes on many tracks on their last album, and it shows) then we’ll continue to enjoy the amazing output that we’ve gotten thus far.
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