Mac Miller’s career was still going strong when he died in 2018, just weeks after the release of his fifth studio album, Swimming. Although the album’s sales numbers fell short of the top-charting status that marked his debut, 2011's Blue Slide Park, Swimming also showed that Miller was still in the process of fully coming into his own as an artist, deploying all of his various public personas in service of his music.
Two years later, that album is now set to get a companion piece, with Miller’s Instagram account announcing the release of an upcoming posthumous album, titled Circles. (Per the statement, the two albums were designed to work alongside each other; hence Swimming in Circles.) The album was finished by Miller’s Swimming collaborator, Jon Brion, who worked for the last year and a half to finish the songs on the second album, working from conversations he’d had with the artist about the direction the album should go.
It’s not clear yet what Circles will sound like—the post only goes so far as to say it’s of a different, complementing style to Swimming. The album will be out next week, on January 17.
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I guess there’s no hope of seeing him live.
Yes. He is dead.
“It’s not clear yet what Circles will sound like—the post only goes so far as to say it’s of a different, complementing style to Swimming.”some people close to Mac suggested that he was working on a more acoustic, almost folky album before he died, which seems to be borne out by the songs from these sessions that have leaked already. that in combination with Brion doing his Brion thing… sounds like we’re in for some beautiful music.