Grade: 3.5/5.0

In a move that some critics considered ill-advised, Danny Brown turned 40 years old. Apparently unsatisfied, he then doubled down — currently he’s 42, for some reason. What’s next, 43? What happened to the rapper who promised he was going to “Die Like a Rockstar?”

The Danny Brown fans know and love is on the way out, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. At a certain age, it must be hard to rap about a life lived fast and constantly on the verge of ending. But what are you supposed to write about instead? The 48-year old Andre 3000 recently expressed his struggles to write bars when he lives a life of colonoscopies and worsening vision. Can Brown show a generation of old rappers how to play a young man’s game?

On his new album Quaranta, Brown takes things slow. This is not the crazy Danny Brown fans might be used to — hopefully they got their fill from Scaring the Hoes earlier this year. The beats on Quaranta are quieter, reverbier and heavier on the low and mid-range frequencies, so even when they verge into banger territory, they still sound like they’re emanating from a wet cave. Their quality ranges from smooth-yet-basic lofi-beats-to-study-to core (“Shakedown”) to the kind of music that probably plays on loop in heaven’s convenience stores (“Celibate”).

To complement this, half the album is rapped in Brown’s “normal” register, which is ironically abnormal for him. Typically, Brown utilizes a characteristic oddball delivery for his verses, rapping like he’s giving his best Joker impression. When he busts out his regular voice, you know you’re about to get one of the two or so “serious” songs on an album. Quaranta bucks this tradition by having five of these songs back-to-back.

While things do get serious, Quaranta’s dark subject matter is far less uncomfortable than his 2016 album Atrocity Exhibition. Here, he’s less focused on drugs and more focused on a variety of other intimate topics. Although his previous work described his addiction in painful detail, tracks such as “Down Wit It,” which details a lost love, somehow feel even more personal. 

It’s not that drug addiction is “impersonal,” rather that hedonism had become Brown’s brand. Deviating from his established norm makes newer tracks stand out among the crowd. “Jenn’s Terrific Vacation” is an “issues” song that tackles gentrification, and “Bass Jam” waxes nostalgic for the music of Brown’s childhood.

While these songs arguably could dig a bit deeper (the former track, for instance, pretty much just describes gentrification instead of providing interesting commentary), their mere existence sets them apart in Brown’s discography.

Luckily, Brown’s trademark humor is no less apparent across Quaranta, supplying some levity alongside his mellow soul-searching. Typical Danny-isms, such as “Got a Mexican homie named Chinese Mike” on “Tantor,” call back to his older, goofier raps.

The place Quaranta has in Brown’s life story is clear. The title translates to “forty” in Italian, as the first track clearly explains. Danny Brown is older now, and sober, too. As for Quaranta’s place in his discography, from an audience’s perspective, things are less clear. 

There’s not much that’s bad about the album, it’s just less good than his previous work. As Brown is in a state of personal transition, Quaranta sometimes feels like it’s missing that indescribable thing that makes it matter to listeners. 

It’s as if the album wasn’t recorded in the throes of a midlife crisis, but instead in the peripheral moments right before and after, when the emotion is detached enough to lack a central drama. His personal stories don’t seem like they’re on the tip of his tongue, desperate to be heard. He seems to be reaching deep for painful anecdotes because that’s what his fans expect from him, and he wants to apologize for a relative lack of wackiness.

Quaranta is far from phoned-in. Brown is, at his core, a great rapper. He’s a great musician, period. It’s hard to imagine a project from him that doesn’t deliver on some level. Still, Quaranta sits as a minor work within his weighty discography.