Despite being immortalized in baby-making playlists and on urban radio by his 2015 hit “Don’t,” Bryson Tiller is something of a cult underdog, rarely mentioned alongside the biggest R&B and pop-rap names of the last decade. The closest he’s come to recapturing that early success was his catty, insouciant 2024 banger “Whatever She Wants,” a surprise hit that was originally a SoundCloud-only freebie.
Tiller confronts his underdog status directly with a striking mix of insecurity and bombast on “Finished,” the final track on the rapper-singer’s fifth studio album, Solace & the Vices. He assesses his career up to now and states what he has in store moving forward: “I’m goin’ on a whole new run,” he enthuses, before admitting, “I ain’t lookin’ for the number one/Just money and the shit keep comin’,” while assuring us he “ain’t fallin’ off, bitch, you funny.” He also derides his hometown of Louisville’s Hometown Heroes murals, which have been made for other ascendant alums like Jennifer Lawrence and Jack Harlow but apparently not for him.
That’s a rather curious note on which to end part two of the album, The Vices, which has been billed as something of a chest-thumping victory lap following the first half’s trip through moody, more emotional R&B terrain. The question the album implicitly poses is whether these two sides—genres and emotional states—can really be separated.
At his most effective, Tiller is able to lock into a slipstream where rapping and singing, verse and hook, merge in a melodic, forceful flow. This often comes when he’s really going in on a phrase or word, using an exaggerated vocal run or trill to invest a seemingly innocuous or even petty idea with the utmost urgency. On “No Contest,” exhalations of “hey”—framed as the inciting spark of a relationship—comprise the entirety of the chorus. And on “Cut Ties,” he duets with himself, his lowkey belts weaving in and out of the rapping, each one amplifying the other.
Words and ideas tumble together with elegant chaos on “Autumn Drive” and “Crocodile Tears,” guided by Tiller’s sometimes boyish voice, which has a nasally sweetness to it. His upper register gets a nice workout on “Workaholic,” though some of the other songs in the album’s front half are melodically less memorable. Many barely reach two minutes and feel underbaked.
R&B and rap, and overt success and potential irrelevance, aren’t the only polarities Tiller plays with on Solace & the Vices. His work is both exceedingly modern and a little dated. The ’80s-influenced production on “I Need Her” feels discordant with the painfully 21st-century declaration “[I] need her like the songs on my playlist” (and the album’s cover art is very VSCO-coded or like something from someone’s Flickr page circa 2011). But when Tiller puts every last ounce of energy into a performance, recruits exciting up-and-coming rappers like Luh Tyler or BabyDrill for a feature, or shrewdly selects a beat with a current edge to it like “Cut Ties” or “No Contest,” it’s a reminder that he’s still very much keeping up with his more celebrated peers.
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