Over the course of the past month, pop star Kanye West premiered and released his tenth solo album, Donda. Through three live-streamed listening parties — two at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, one at Chicago’s Soldier Field — and multiple versions of the album streamed live via Apple Music, West worked through the album in public, being said to file and retract the album with streaming services multiple times. He ostensibly arrived at a final version that was released the morning of Sunday, August 29; after it was out, he posted on Instagram, “UNIVERSAL PUT MY ALBUM OUT WITHOUT MY APPROVAL AND THEY BLOCKED JAIL 2 FROM BEING ON THE ALBUM.” Not only was the album not taken down, but now you can buy it on his website alongside Donda merchandise. It broke a bevy of streaming records, including pulling over 60 million streams on Apple Music, making it the biggest opening of 2021 and the third biggest of all time (following J. Cole’s 2018 album KOD and Drake’s 2016 album Views). It also beat Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour to become Spotify’s most-streamed album in 24 hours this year.

The first reviews of West’s new record came out only hours after it was released, and it is unlikely that any critics had advance copies, which is what usually allows them to get reviews out on release day or shortly after. That reviewers listened to, thought about, and formed a critique of his 108-minute album in that amount of time serves to remind us that, like West’s album itself, cultural criticism is a product to be consumed. Nearly every major music publication reviewed Donda within 48 hours of its release. And their similarities are uncanny. 

West’s critics universally lament the album’s length and condemn the use of collaborators like Marilyn Manson, DaBaby, and Chris Brown, who have respectively been accused of sexual assault, homophobia, and domestic assault. Many essays pointed out the general absence of drums on Donda. Most of the reviews find paucity in West’s rapping on the album and in the lack of female contributors, and find the lyrics to be trite and self-deprecating. The phrase “self-imposed deadlines” has been employed countless times in a negative way; and many of the reviews say the album felt unfinished or was not edited properly, suggesting that we shouldn’t take Donda seriously because the artist didn’t. (West taught us to expect his records to be tampered with indefinitely in the same way that M. Night Shyamalan eventually ruined his own films by forcing us to expect and look out for twists.) I cannot recall another album whose reviews have been so similar. Is Donda simply so weak that its flaws are plainly visible to all critics? Or has the record not been properly unpacked?

Though the 27-song record includes four bonus tracks, Donda spiritually ends with “Come to Life” and “No Child Left Behind,” a melancholy power duo that echoes the explosive exuberance of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s “Lost in the World” and “Who Will Survive in America.” The My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy songs exalt the romance of Kanye’s “classic nights” in the city and question whether they’re enough to fill the void, while the tracks from Donda draw on dark nights of the private soul. In a way, Donda inverts the force of Kanye’s greatest record and its follow-up, Yeezus, and offers a response. If My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was about Kanye’s experience of promise of the American Dream during the Obama years and Yeezus was about the personal chaos and anxiety that ensued from its predecessor’s success, then Donda caps a years-long reflection on that time in which the artist has tried to reconcile his public life with his private one. The bombastic The Life of Pablo began dealing with those dissonances, while Ye and Jesus is King were experiments (with varying success) in exploring them further. 

Donda feels like an attempt at a confession and emotional documentation. The themes on the record seem to be sadness, acceptance, loss, and forgiveness, with West longing for a fresh start and dreaming of being reunited with his mother, who passed away in 2007. “Life change when you famous,” West raps at the beginning of “Pure Souls”; by the middle of the song, he says, “It ain’t how it used to be / This the new me, so get used to me / Lookin’ in the mirror, it’s the truth of me / Lookin at my kids, it’s the proof of me.” Driven by hope, West believes he’s on a path of change. In the sublime “Come to Life,” one of his most gorgeous songs, he sings: 

Ever wish you had another life? 
Don’t you wish the night would go numb? 
I’ve been feelin’ low for so long 
I ain’t had a high in so long 
I been in the dark for so long 
Night is always darkest ‘fore the dawn 
Gotta make my mark ‘fore I’m gone 
I don’t wanna die alone. 

Sung over gospel organ as fluttering piano and shimmering bass loom on the horizon, these affecting missives from West make for some of his most honest music yet.

There’s something here for everyone as West runs the stylistic gamut from his earlier, more soulful tunes through the wild yawps of Yeezus, the dissonant twinges of The Life of Pablo, and Jesus is King’s sparse but often stirring gospel and hip-hop. As an album, Donda feels like a coherent summation of the past decade of West’s work, and offers some of his most challenging music to date. There are ballads, bangers, pensive moments, magnetic opening and closing moods, all of which resist passive listening. Donda doesn’t rely on big hooks or choruses that you’ll be humming once the album ends; in fact, it’s actually been the slower, quieter moments that have stuck in my mind. Like most of West’s albums from the 2010s, especially My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Yeezus, and Jesus is King, Donda tasks us with reflecting on what rap music is and can be. This is not a pop album to play in the background or the club, but a musical diary to be listened to and thought about. In many ways, Donda is the rap brethren to something like Sun Kil Moon’s Benji or Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked at Me, hushed albums mired in loss, reflection, and attempts at overcoming. 

Opening song “Jail” comes out of the gate with gravitas and grace under crisis, setting the album’s tone as serious and reflective; its verse from Jay-Z, while tepid, is an uplifting reconciliation — they haven’t done a song together in years. “Off The Grid” goes hard, featuring an ominous beat and a brilliantly woozy bass line that support a killer contribution from Fivio Foreign; Kanye hasn’t felt this darkly groovy in a long time. The ethereal “Jonah” makes space for Vory to spit some truth, giving Drake’s best slow jams from the glory days of Take Care a run for their money (though “Marvin’s Room” is eternal). In the same song, Lil Durk vulnerably and boldly raps about his brother who was recently killed, while on “Jesus Lord,” West misses his mother and tells a sad story of revenge before Jay Electronica lets loose with some of the album’s best rhymes. Throughout, West exhibits engaging, smart production (“Believe What I Say,” “New Again”) and alternates between beguiling moods (“Moon”) and gripping, discordant outbursts (“God Breathed”). 

When we listen to Donda, it isn’t just the music we’re experiencing, but the guests themselves, who are part of the work, part of the whole; their presence is meant to affect us. In the world of Donda, West wants to treat pop culture as a religion, a place where sinners (abusers, lawbreakers, and killers) have the opportunity for redemption if they want it. In the Soldier Field listening event, West stood in front of a model of his childhood home next to Marilyn Manson and DaBaby. Religion would require these figures to confess in order to have God’s forgiveness; perhaps by including them in the event and on Donda, West asks what they’d have to do for ours. Are they worthy of our forgiveness? Are they capable of self-understanding? Of change? At the end of the day, that’s up to Marilyn Manson and DaBaby. For West, Donda is a living catalogue of questions like those, as well as a cry for reunion with his mother, the person who’s supposed to offer unconditional acceptance, guidance, and empathy. The disintegration of West’s marriage to Kim Kardashian, which is barely mentioned on Donda despite his having written most of it while going through a divorce, must also be behind some of his despair. With them gone, he must feel very alone. Any of us would.

The question I’ve thought about the most with Donda is why West chose Jay-Z’s “Jail” as the first song when the alternate version, “Jail pt 2,” which features DaBaby and resides at the end of the record as a bonus track, is clearly better. Jay-Z sounds tired, struggling to issue rhymes and smug proclamations, while DaBaby arrives energetic, confident, hungry, even arrogant. West’s prioritization of Jay-Z’s “Jail” ultimately shows his desire for reconciliation with his friend and former collaborator after years of beef, which, to him, is more important than DaBaby’s superior and more relevant verse; still, the inclusion of DaBaby’s version cements the outcast rapper as part of the event and invites us to consider, every time we listen, whether he can apologize to the people he alienated, and whether we can hear that apology if and when it comes. To dismiss DaBaby outright for his sins and to chide Kanye for allowing him to exist in this space is to deny their humanity and to reject the possibility of DaBaby becoming a more accepting person. Maybe Donda’s ultimate message to us — and especially to the album’s critics — is actually a question: If you don’t take yourself to live in a world where people can change, how could you ever truly hear someone who might want to?