This M.I.A. album is...not good.

Hi everyone, Anthony Fantano here, internet's busiest music nerd, here to talk about the new M.I.A. album, M.I.7, or her 7th album.

M.I.A. is somebody who, for a long time — and still even now to a degree — is an artist who I just will not stand for slander on, or an underestimation of her talents, abilities, and influence on modern music. In my opinion, her first two albums [Arular, Kala] were truly game-changing; her third [ΛΛ Λ Y Λ, or "Maya"], while not bringing as much cultural impact, was certainly ahead of the curve for a lot of the super noisy, experimental, industrially-coded, sensory overload pop and electronic music and hip-hop that would later become normalized deeper into the 2010s. And look, even though M.I.A. through that decade was not making records that were quite as solid or as groundbreaking and exciting as her earlier works, that's fine. Lots of artists only have about a good 10-year stretch, and Matangi had a lot of solid tracks on it. But as time has continued, the new releases have been getting more and more forgettable, just unremarkable in every way whatsoever. And look, even that I can live with to an extent when it comes to M.I.A.'s legacy, and how I view her as an artist in a broad sense.

But in recent years, this fall-off artistically has also coincided with what I view to be a fall-off mentally and ideologically. If you're an M.I.A. fan, if you're somebody who's followed her career across the entirety of its span, you know that she is somebody who has always been on the fringes of politics, spirituality, and philosophy. But lately, a lot of the opinions, comments, concerns, activist positions she's been taking have been aligning more with...your average, internet conspiracy-brained uncle: going on and on and on about the dangers of vaccines, literally selling people tinfoil clothing to help protect them from 5G, reposting RFK clips on Twitter, of course. (Why not!) Oh, and "theorizing" about two "diverging" Jewish bloodlines, one of which is the "good one" connected to Jesus, and then there's, like...the "evil one." It's really the sort of stuff Ye was getting pulled apart for not too long ago, and this is not to say he should be allowed to slide just because M.I.A. isn't catching quite as much flack for it. But...these kinds of posts are not good.

It's clearly the sign of somebody who is not in their right mind, which reflects kinda poorly and weirdly on this new record being a Christian album. Yes, M.I.A. is taking a newfound religious stance on this record, praising the power of God and Jesus — for an hour-long record, 30 minutes of which is actually silence. (I shit you not!)

Weird, bigoted, nutty conspiratorial posts and opinions aside, a Christian-themed album from M.I.A. is not inherently a bad thing if this newfound religious direction for her inspires good music. The issue, though, with M.I.7 is that it, in fact, does not because M.I.7 is handily one of the blandest and most forgettable projects she's ever released. In fact, I would not be able to recall anything from it if not for the fact that it was just trying to angle some Christian vibes and themes in the lyrics, which all add up into some of the most weird, awkward, and cringe tracks to end up on any M.I.A. album ever.

Case in point: "PRAYER 777" just sounds like bad Christian trip-hop. In its attempts to sound heavenly, cloudy, and spacious, just any grit or bite or anything sonically that would make something in this genre groovy, or interesting, or engaging is sucked out in favor of something with no flavor. The track "JESUS" featuring the Sunday Service Choir — yes, that Sunday Service Choir — just sounds like a bad CHVRCHES or Purity Ring song from the mid-2010s.

In fact, there's not really a normal or somewhat enjoyable M.I.A.-sounding song on this project until we hit the song "MONEY," which, while it does have a lot of overlap creatively with her older work, structurally goes nowhere; features some very unnecessary, weird, and annoying vocal pitching; and lastly is not really the smart statement on money and materialism that M.I.A. presumes it is. It's pretty vapid all around.

But before I get any deeper into the core tracks of this album, I want to address its many interludes and what they're saying in total. Nearly every full song on this record is matched with (or interrupted by) these short spoken-word passages, or this series of shorter "trumpet" songs: "TRUMPET 1," "TRUMPET 2," "TRUMPET 3," and so on. Not only are these tracks annoying and completely interrupt the overall flow of the record, but they showcase just how up her own ass M.I.A. is about this new, high-and-mighty religious stance she's taking here, which I think says a lot about what draws certain personalities to Western iterations of Christianity. Because rather than being humble and seeing yourself as a single disciple in a greater flock of followers of Jesus Christ, M.I.A. portrays herself almost as being the next prophet of some sort, not only in the way that she frames her own career and its continuation from this point as being "ordained" by God. (Because...Satan/The Devil was trying to stop M.I.A.'s career dead in its tracks, but then God put a comma on that shit.) But also, these trumpet tracks have musical call-backs to past releases — be it either from Matangi or a trumpet lick from "Bucky Done Gun," — to try to tie these horn parts into theological mentions of horn-playing in the Christian faith. It's through that tie-in that it feels almost like M.I.A. is saying that there's this godly code in the music of her career that was always there, even before she was Christian. I'm sorry, that is just an insanely egotistical way to read into your spiritual awakening here.

These trumpet tracks altogether tell a story of sorts, even on "TRUMPET 6," where M.I.A. mentions all these stubborn atheists not repenting and accepting God, even though the evidence is like...right in front of them. And then in the final trumpet portion, the trumpets are allowed to to rest because they've been "lit" this whole time, and God just decides everybody's worth saving...That's cool...! I don't know if that includes the atheists that were mentioned earlier, but you know, whatever.

This then leads us into the very celebratory "EVERYTHING" track, which has one of the most awkward flows I've heard on any M.I.A. song ever. She's not known for having the most complex or solid rap deliveries of all time, but there truly are some Will Smith-ass bars on this track:

"This is hella real but the devil real fake / The world will tremble if you fall for the snake / God does have a cape, that's not a cap / He gave me an armour, truth and fact."

I'm sorry, I've seen too many Christian youth group rap PSAs on tape to take any of this seriously. Almost everything oozing out of this album is like, "Hey guys, I'm gonna teach you Christ can be cool!"

It's after this track we have "30 MINUTES OF SILENCE," which closes out the entire record. I will say it's not completely just a 30-minute silent track: there is a vocal chant passage right at the end of the 30 minutes that kind of leads in with a small drone. So, you know, it's not purely 30 minutes of silence, but it's not a musical passage that you would really need to stick around for, honestly.

Other moments on the record I could go into: I don't know...maybe "CIRCLE," which sounds like you took this very spacey, faux-world-beat pop mesh on the production side and had some kind of crunchy, yogi, born-again Christian woman who likes to sing over techno beats on Instagram Reels. Yeah, her writing the lyrics, essentially.

"Every year has a month / Every month has a week / Every week has a day / Every day has an hour / Every hour has a minute / Every minute has a second / Time starts now."

Okay, larger increments of time can be broken down into smaller increments of time! Whoa, crazy!

So much of this album just screams weak-minded cult member, that you could read or hear any of this and think, "Wow, I never— I never thought of it that way." I don't want to be a dick here, but tie this in with the Jewish bloodline stuff, and what the hell are we doing?

Yeah, this record is nutty and boring, and it's so beneath the talent and mind that was once M.I.A. It's just very disappointing stuff, and I'm not sure what else to say, so I'll just leave it here. This M.I.A. album? It's NOT GOOD.