Kanye West ‘Donda 2’ Review: Retooled, Remixed, and Redundant

Nearly three years after its exclusive release on Stem Player, accompanied by a listening event at LoanDepot Park in Miami, Kanye West’s Donda 2 has been unceremoniously dumped on streaming services, its reappearance marked by a livestream featuring known misogynist Sneako and white supremacist Nick Fuentes. The contrast between these two moments underscores not only Kanye’s stark cultural decline in recent years but also how deeply unserious—and increasingly chaotic—anything music-related from his camp has become. [Editor’s Note: As of this writing, the album has been mysteriously removed from Spotify.]

When it was initially released in 2022, Donda 2 was branded with a “V2.22.22 Miami” tag to suggest that what listeners were hearing was a work in progress. But the new release is more or less the same product, with only minor tweaks to its sequencing (it still opens with an overly emo XXXTentacion appearance and closes with barely considered Soulja Boy bars) and a few subtle mix adjustments. There are a handful of new songs, such as “Mr. Miyagi” (which features Playboi Carti—one of several major figures who Kanye has publicly bad-mouthed in recent weeks), but their inclusion hardly shifts the album’s overall trajectory.

Many of Donda 2’s tracks still feature a heavy dose of “mumble”—the catch-all term that fans and critics use to describe Kanye’s placeholder vocals—and carry the unmistakable feeling of being incomplete first drafts. Still, given that the album’s central theme is loss—of the rapper’s marriage, his children, and, at the time, his best friend Virgil Abloh—one could generously interpret this inability to articulate coherent thoughts as an expression of grief itself. This idea proves more compelling in theory than in execution, especially on “Louie Bags,” where Jack Harlow effortlessly raps circles around Kanye, who delivers a babbled, repetitive non-verse.

Indeed, Donda 2 mostly finds Kanye completely miserable, pouting about everything from sharing custody of his kids (on “True Love” and the overly aggressive, if exhilarating, “Security”) to not being praised for his prowess in the bedroom (“Keep the Flowers”) to, most persistently, lamenting that his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, won’t take him back. This fixation reaches its most melodramatic peak on the dystopian “SciFi,” where Kanye delivers an absurd ultimatum: “Make a choice, oxygen or WiFi?” (which is still more tolerable than “When you laid down and I gave you the semen/I swear I heard God, the voice of Morgan Freeman” mere moments later).

Kanye’s musical genius still occasionally shines through, but there’s only one truly great song here: “Happy,” which plays like a bad-decision anthem for the ages. After a blast of malignant machismo from Future, Ye launches into a delirious, ticking-time-bomb of a verse about impulsively buying Uber, berating fans for asking him “nothin’ you can Google,” and spiraling through unchecked bravado. His raw honesty eventually cuts through the bluster: the confrontational query that punctuates his manic rant—“Do I look happy to you?”—lands as a genuine cry for help from a man who was already teetering on the edge of losing everything. “Pick me up before I drown,” he begs on “Pablo,” but Donda 2 presents Kanye as a man barely able to keep his own head above water.