For anyone still clinging to the image of Danny Brown as rap’s gnarled jester of addiction and chaos, the guest list on Stardust must look like an existential prank. femtanyl, Frost Children, underscores — a lineup more at home on a hyperpop livestream than a bruised Detroit basement. Yet for all the stylistic detours, Brown has never been about genre so much as pure, destabilizing feeling. Across his career, his voice has always been the real instrument: the banshee yelp of XXX, the funhouse panic of “Ain’t It Funny,” the cracked grin masking despair. Even when he was bouncing over Rustie’s EDM sugar rushes or flirting with Charli XCX, Brown wasn’t chasing trends; he was chasing sensation.
Stardust is Brown’s first album made completely sober, and it radiates the kind of clarity that comes after a long fever breaks. His latest trip isn’t into another drug but into the manic euphoria of the hyperpop underground — a corner of the internet where every emotion is cranked past the redline. The conversion started mid-pandemic, when Dorian Electra pulled him into the virtual Subculture raves. Later, hearing underscores’ Wallsocket reminded him how music could still feel dangerous, still make him giddy. Out of that spark came a new circle of collaborators: digital maximalists, genre-agnostic wanderers, kids who grew up on SoundCloud chaos and refused to stand still. With their help, Brown has reimagined himself not as the twisted prophet of ruin but as a post-rehab rave romantic.
The result is a gleeful, chaotic rebirth — part self-help testimonial, part internet-era victory lap. Brown calls the record Stardust; it could just as easily be titled Danny Brown Finally Smiles. He plays a character named Dusty Star (the wink’s not subtle), framed by surreal narration from Frost Children’s Angel Prost. The music itself darts between grime, trance, and digital noise like a pinball, but at its heart, it’s a love letter to being alive long enough to reinvent yourself. “Fuck punching in, I’ma write till my wrist breaks,” he snarls on “Book of Daniel,” a Quadeca collaboration that doubles as his personal resurrection story. “Don’t have a care in this world about what anybody thinks / When the fat lady sings, just know you lived your dreams.” It’s corny, sure, but coming from Brown — the man who once sounded like he was laughing through hellfire — it lands like gospel.
The album’s orbiting cast gives Stardust its communal warmth. 8485 drapes “Flowers” in angelic glow, JOHNNASCUS unleashes chaos on “1999,” and underscores helps twist “Baby” into a dizzy grime-pop fever dream that could’ve dropped in a London club circa 2003. Brown’s sincerity peeks through the static: on “What You See,” he revisits his reckless past with unnerving calm, half-confession, half-apology (“I was at your daughters’, doing anything I can just to try to get they bra off / I’m sorry Ms. Jackson”). Elsewhere, “Whatever the Case” plays like TikTok-core with a migraine, a beat so cartoonish it almost dares him to keep up.
Not everything sticks. A few tracks — “Lift You Up,” “RIGHT FROM WRONG” — settle into predictable positivity anthems, and some of the hyperpop gloss feels too polished for an artist whose greatest gift is chaos. But when Brown leans into the weird, Stardust comes alive. The title track is pure acid-bubble delirium, like XXX beamed through a cracked iPhone screen. It’s the kind of song you imagine making half the internet ecstatic and the other half physically ill — which is to say, it’s exactly the right place for him to be.
If earlier Danny Brown records were about self-destruction, Stardust is about the miracle of still being here — alive, lucid, grateful, and maybe just a little disoriented by joy. “Man, this rap shit saved my life,” he murmurs on closer “All4U,” as Jane Remover’s sample floats in the ether behind him. The moment feels almost holy: the old jester turned sage, dancing in the afterglow of his own survival.
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