Mac Miller – Balloonerism review: a richly important missing piece of the rapper's creative journey
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In many ways, this Mac Miller album is nothing new at all. Balloonerism, the posthumous LP released with permission from the late rapper’s estate, was a project Miller worked on in 2014, around the same time as his Faces mixtape, between studio albums Watching Movies With The Sound Off and GO:OD AM. Plus, many Mac fans have already heard it, or bits of it, with unofficial versions of the album floating around the internet for years.
And yet, there is something so richly important about its 2025 release. Like a missing piece of a puzzle, Balloonerism is a key part of the rapper’s creative development, a creative development that became increasingly agnostic of any musical genre.
To many, Mac Miller is still the frat rapping, Pittsburgh schoolboy that broke onto the scene via his online popularity back in 2010. And, for a while, this was true. He was scrappy, and cocky, and he made hip hop songs about wanting to be famous and have sex with lots of models.
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It worked: Miller’s debut album Blue Slide Park became the first independently distributed debut album to top the US Billboard 200 since 1995, and Miller ended up dating world famous pop star Ariana Grande. But Miller shed the frat rap skin relatively quickly into his career, even if many people didn’t register it until his 2018 album Swimming, the rapper’s last release before he died from an accidental drug overdose a month later, aged 26.
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Two years on from Miller’s death and the release of Swimming, the Miller estate released Circles, a sister project that was finished off by producer Jon Brion in Miller’s memory. Now, five years on from Circles’ release, the Miller estate brings us Balloonerism, a winding experimental blend of hip hop, funk and jazz that bridges the gap between Miller’s fledgling rapper beginnings and his final form as a well-respected, revered musician.
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