It's track reviews. It's happening. It's happening. It's actually happening. New A$AP Rocky album, Don't Be Dumb.

The release date is currently set for January 16th, which, yes, we're all excited for, but maybe we should take a moment to remember just that this was pretty much the longest album rollout of all time or of maybe the past 10 years. I mean, for sure, there are artists that one could say are as big, if not bigger than Rocky and have kept their fans waiting for new material longer. Maybe Frank Ocean, for example.

But what makes Don't Be Dumb different is that this is an album that allegedly has been done for years. There's literally numerous examples of this man saying this album is complete; complete or nearing completion once again, and yet it never quite reaches that point.

And over the course of this time, it's not like Rocky has ever truly fully disappeared from the limelight either, and has been delivering almost everything other than music. I mean, in a way, you could forgive it and say he does keep himself busy with a lot of extracurriculars. And he's also gone through some pretty massive life changes as of late, like becoming a father, hurdles he's had to overcome, like that shooting trial in which he was acquitted recently. Dialing the clock even further back, there was the time he was arrested in Sweden.

So I don't know, a lot of odd things going on in the life of A$AP Rocky since the release of his last album, Testing, a record that I was not crazy about when it came out. I don't think it's aged well. However, I don't think it's an album Rocky meant to leave out there hanging for as long as he has. I think this LP was originally intended, given the name, Testing, to be a place for him to experiment, try some new things ideas, throw some stuff at the wall, see what sticks, and then move forward from there depending on crowd reception.

I'm getting the sense that Don't Be Dumb is, at least in part, a result of that building process because this album is at least in part being sold as Rocky expanding his abilities artistically and musically, trying different genres, trying different sounds, broadening his style further than it's ever been broadened before, which is saying something considering the super wide range of collaborators this guy has made music with over the years. I mean, one of his most recent singles, "Highjack" from 2024, features none other than indie folk songstress, Jessica Pratt.

And this new track here that has been posted with the Don't Be Dumb album preview, "Punk Rocky", is seemingly teasing another genre switch. So shout out to Hasan on Twitter, who reminded me of some of this background information in the lead up to this album release. But let's listen to "Punk Rocky" and see how "Punk Rocky" this track is.

Oh, no. Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no. Oh, no. Yeah, I wasn't crazy about that. Off the bat, it wasn't very punk rock. Not very punk rock at all. However, I don't think it really would have mattered what you called this thing. You could call it "Bloobody Bloopado, Rocky", and I still wouldn't be impressed with it. Again, I do admire and appreciate the man's devotion to pushing himself outside of his comfort zone and not allowing the industry to pigeonhole him into the same sound that maybe he built his name off of back in 2011, 2012. The fact that Rocky is still willing to try new things at this point in his career, especially on an album that is so highly anticipated, which could make or break his career, considering how long fans have been waiting. Again, it's an admirable thing, but I think the prime issue with this track is that there's just so much out there like this already.

Maybe within the scheme of Rocky's core audience, that may not matter all that much because maybe a lot of Rocky's fans aren't exactly plugged into the super twangy, thin, indie rock, that super reverb heavy, that was coming out of Brooklyn and other places in New York during the early 2010s, really when Rocky was popping off in his rap career. Bands that sounded just like this were running parallel to him, many of whom have washed out in terms of relevancy and didn't really have a whole lot of staying power because their sound was boring and the songwriting was mediocre.

And the songwriting here is super mediocre, too. The vocals, for the most part, are boring and forgettable. And that is when you can actually hear them because they're so buried in reverb behind the guitars that you can't really make them out half the time. In a way, I would say this track actually sounds just as boring, derivative, and uninspired as a Royel Otis track. And who the hell knows? That could have been Rocky's point of inspiration here. I mean, there was a midpoint where the beat slowed down a bit and Rocky's vocal delivery got a bit more pointed and shouty, that stuck out to me. And some of the rhythmic switch-ups toward the back and of the track caught my ear, too.

But for the most part, the guitars and drums across this track were just too bland for words, and it all tended to blend into itself over the course of its four-minute run time, which for a song this skeletal and repetitive, it did not need to be this long. Really, everything this track did could have been accomplished in two minutes. So, yeah, the bad news is that I didn't really like this A$AP Rocky song.

But the good news is that there is no way on God's green Earth the rest of the album is going to sound like this, given Rocky's reputation and, again, the fact that I think this album is building off of Testing a bit. This record is most likely going to be trying to do a little bit of everything. Whether or not it's going to do all of everything well is the question. You could knock "Punk Rock" off the tracklist, I guess. But I'm still holding out hope for grindcore Rocky and power electronics Rocky.

At the end of the day, even if this song is underwhelming, it is something, because the album's release date is just around the corner. It's going to happen. If the record doesn't do well, hopefully Rocky is at a point in his career where you can just pick up the pieces and move on and drop a follow-up sooner rather than later. But if songs like "Taylor Swif" as well as "Highjack" end up in the tracklist, the record is going to have some great highlights on it for sure. So yeah, not my favorite A$AP Rocky track for sure.

Anthony Fantano, Punk Rocky, Forever.