Kid Cudi doesn’t plan to rap forever. In recent interviews, the 38-year-old has doubted the likelihood of performing beyond his forties (“Like, my name is Kid Cudi,” he told Esquire). Although he wouldn’t be the first rapper to tease retirement without following through, Cudi has spent the last few years like an artist plotting an exit strategy, diversifying his portfolio with a spate of acting, writing, and directing projects. He’s finding some success. Earlier this year he gave a charismatic supporting turn in Ti West’s horror hit X, which along with its prequel Pearl was produced by Cudi’s production company Mad Solar.
Cudi’s latest record, Entergalactic, is a product of those same ambitions to conquer film and television, a visual album released in conjunction with an animated Netflix film of the same name. A low-key romantic comedy, the movie casts Cudi as an aspiring cartoonist opposite best friend Timothée Chalamet and love interest Jessica Williams, and the album shares the feature’s low stakes and blissful, lovelorn vibe. It’s ironic that a project born of Cudi’s desire to leave recording behind contains some of his most purely enjoyable music in a decade.
Entergalactic comes on the heels of his most backward-looking album yet, 2020’s Man on the Moon III: The Chosen, the latest sequel to the 2009 debut he’s cast his entire career as a celebration of. Like so many Cudi records before it, Man on the Moon III was listless to the point of misery, beholden to muses he’d already exhausted the first time around. With its depthless depressive musings and cosmic ponderings, it was another empty statement from a rapper who wears the mantle of a great artist without making great art.
One of the most pleasant surprises about Entergalactic, then, beyond its unshowy but absolutely sumptuous production, is that Cudi is finally writing outside himself. By singing from the perspective of his rom-com alter ego, he frees himself to let a little light into his dreary world. On “New Mode,” he telegraphs the new direction: “Finally got my head right, it's a new me.” On “Angel” and “Ignite the Love” he sounds convincingly smitten. One of two R&B-slickened Ty Dolla $ign collaborations, “Can’t Shake Her” has the soft touch of 6LACK’s most unforced work.
Cudi remains a clumsy lyricist, and only his most devoted rap forum evangelists could mistake his raw prose for profundity. “This life goes on and on, yeah/Living my truth is all I know,” he raps on “Livin’ My Truth,” a song that affirms his gift for saying nothing. But if nothing else, he’s becoming a more economical writer, and when he gets out of the way of his own music, the results can be gorgeous. Beautifully scored with the understated strings of a Luther Vandross ballad, “Maybe So” might be the most elegant composition he’s ever recorded.
If you take all the indulgence and excess out of a Kid Cudi record, is it even a Kid Cudi record? Entergalactic is an unusual addition to Cudi’s discography, a small statement from a rapper who prides himself on big, aimless ones. It doesn’t wallow. It doesn’t rage. It just sort of lingers pleasantly. It’s the easy hang that Cudi usually works so hard to deny himself.
