In 2018, the twenty-six-year-old Pittsburgh rapper Mac Miller was on the verge of a creative breakthrough. He’d spent the better part of a decade transforming himself from a well-meaning frat rapper into a craft-driven technician and producer. That August, he released “Swimming,” the most complete album of his career, with tracks that suggested an even more ambitious turn in his music-making. A month later, Miller died, of an accidental drug overdose. His journey had been tragically cut short. But he left behind an incomplete project.
The unfinished project has become a common issue in rap, a genre that is seeing many of its young and talented artists die, leaving caches of uncurated, crude, and deferred music in their wake. The process of producing these albums comes down to the decision-making—who gets to make those decisions and why? What is the aim? And is the record label or the producer in charge asking the most important question: Should this album even be released?
An early iteration of the phenomenon traces back to the jazz titan Miles Davis. In 1991, the hip-hop producer Easy Mo Bee was tasked with completing Davis’s “rap” album, “Doo-Bop,” after his death. The result was largely still considered “unfinished”—and, ultimately, a failure—by critics (though it did go on to win a Grammy, in 1993, for Best R. &. B. Instrumental Performance). In 1992, Time cited “a slapped-together, disconnected feeling.” It established many of the caveats that come with these projects: the albums are seen as hollow and made of scraps, and therefore considered inconsequential. Conversely, the posthumous rap album as a practice first took hold in the late nineties out of necessity, in response to the shooting deaths of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. The albums in question—“The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory,” with Tupac credited as Makaveli, and “Life After Death”—were already finished, and they helped to immortalize the artists. The posthumous album became a way to leverage the remaining music into a climactic statement about the artist’s place in history. Every posthumous rap album since those two has been trying precariously to reach that standard.
Recent years have been particularly deadly for hip-hop, and the last eighteen months have seen an uptick in posthumous releases from rappers, many of whom were rising or in their prime—a list that includes the Brooklyn drill star Pop Smoke, the chameleonic crooner Juice WRLD, the emo alchemist Lil Peep, the controversial bruiser XXXTentacion, the trap prodigy Bankroll Fresh, and more. The twenty-six-year-old Chicago rapper King Von was shot and killed last November, only days after his album was released; a posthumous one seems inevitable. It is easier now than at any point before to record music, and rappers, on average, record at an astounding pace. Many labels see no reason for those hard drives to collect dust. The Pop Smoke and Juice WRLD albums were among the most successful of 2020. Yet the core creative problem remains: How do you complete an album without input and final oversight from the creative force behind it? Juice WRLD allegedly has thousands of unreleased songs, and this raises issues with quality control. Many Pop Smoke songs were rough cuts with gaps that were filled later by questionably selected guest rappers. Any posthumous album runs the risk of collecting leftovers, but some, such as XXXTentacion’s “Skins,” prove that they can also just contain concluded bad ideas that should have been shelved.
One honorable route for the posthumous album is as a legacy capstone, a project that closes the book on a storied career. In 2019, DJ Premier cobbled together the remaining verses of his longtime partner, the rapper Guru, to build out their final album as the rap duo Gang Starr. More commonly, posthumous albums are treated as commercial assets. 50 Cent, who executive-produced Pop Smoke’s “Shoot For the Stars Aim For the Moon,” often seemed to treat the album as a means to satisfy the material pursuits of the late rapper. “As soon as I know that the record positioned itself for No. 1, I feel like I did enough,” he told Billboard. The ideal scenario is when a posthumous album becomes a creative salve, closing the wounds created by the artist’s loss. “My son is still alive, I see him every day, I hear his voice. He talks to me through his music,” Bankroll Fresh’s mother said, when explaining her choice to release an album years after his death. “As long as his spiritual body operates in harmony he is still alive, still making his mark on the world and still carving out a legacy that makes me proud to call him my son.”
No album better closes the wound left by an artist’s death than Mac Miller’s “Circles,” which is the product of Miller’s friends, family, collaborators, and label putting his art first. When the producer Jon Brion started working with Miller, the rapper nervously alluded to the existence of what Brion describes as more “song-based material,” and Brion encouraged him to share it. “By the second night, we were in it,” he said. Once Miller had his album “Swimming” more or less squared away, “Circles” began to come together in his mind. It was taking shape, but the conversations were still full of ideas and loose ends.
Brion, who has worked with Fiona Apple, Kanye West, Frank Ocean, and Beyoncé, to name a few, speaks of Miller in glowing terms—as a man and an artist. “His acumen as a record-maker was already really high,” he said. Vic Wainstein, Miller’s engineer, told me that Miller had “stopped with the ‘pressure makes diamonds’ approach; he got into being happier and more assertive with his decisions.” Like many musicians, Miller was working on a number of things at any given time. “In contemporary record-making, coupled with Mac’s prolific nature, there were, like, ten projects going on,” Jeff Sosnow, an executive vice-president of artist and repertoire at Warner Bros. Records, who worked with Miller, told me. The creative process could be so fluid that there were ongoing talks about how to present the music. Brion explained: “He was just doing an immense amount of work. He was in a creative spurt. And he was nervous about—he didn’t call them the weird songs, but he treated them that way.” A two-album thing became a three-album cycle, and Brion remembered a night when Miller considered extending it beyond even that. “He kept amassing stuff.”
Miller died before he could work through what to do with those songs and how best to finish and share them. “That intersection of art, commerce, and tragedy is not fun,” Christian Clancy, Miller’s manager, told me. “The estate, the family—I think everyone—kind of knew that once you can get past the grief, as best you can, this had to come out because it was so good. Then it just became about ‘O.K., how do we do this in the most soulful way possible?’ ” The album’s material seemed to demand a public release. “How do you leave the record where he took the jump off the table? He’s been working his whole life to that jump,” Clancy said. “As painful as it was for everyone, we all realized that.”
“The label never once approached Clancy or the family or the estate or anything about putting out music,” Sosnow said. “[‘Circles’] came from an incoming phone call to us: ‘The family would like Jon to finish the album.’ ” Brion went to United Recordings, where Ray Charles had recorded much of his classic “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music,” and completed the album in the way that he had discussed with Miller.
Wainstein described working on “Circles” as “a call to duty.” It wasn’t just about securing Miller’s legacy; it was about revealing where he was along his personal-growth curve—the plans he had for his music in the immediate future. Brion, similarly, took it upon himself to see the vision through. “I really liked where we were headed, so I did want to see it finished, and I didn’t want to see somebody just do the standard things to it and normalize it,” Brion said. “There was a part of me that wanted to protect that. I wanted to make sure he looked as good to the world as possible.” Wainstein estimates that roughly eighty per cent of the album was mapped out before Miller’s death and that there were thirty to fifty songs that could be used to make up the difference. Brion said, “I’d just find myself in tears working and going, ‘O.K., just gonna power through.’ I’d know tonally something was right if I felt like he was standing in the room.”
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