Vince Staples

It opens with the ephemeral sounds of nature. Birds, bugs, and airy notes chiming in the air. Then, the undercurrent of something darker, disrupting the fantasy: a distorted voice. “To live is to be,” the voice says, “Like the nigga in the tree.” This is how Dark Times, Vince Staples’ eighth studio album, begins. It’s a new era in the prolific artist’s canon, a muscular and revelatory work refining elements that have been present in his catalog for the last decade: dense lyricism over lush, layered beats; wry, melancholic observations about life; finding pockets of light in an endless dark. For Staples, the album is “a snapshot” of this period of his life. “It’s been 10 years since I started putting things out properly,” he says, referencing his first EP, with Def Jam in 2014, Shyne Coldchain Vol 2, “I don’t really keep track of any of that stuff, but it’s important to take a second to appreciate the journey.” The title came intuitively to Staples after he listened to the record in full, noticing heavy motifs that kept reappearing. The album cover, featuring a faintly seen noose, was similarly intuitive. Staples began recording the album over a seven-month stretch, during weekly sessions in North Hollywood. At the time, he was in post-production on his critically acclaimed Netflix series The Vince Staples Show, which he wrote, produced and starred in. Working on the show was “very, very instrumental in how I view creativity,” Staples says.