6lack - 'East Atlanta Love Letter' Review

If this album were to be judged alone, I would probably score it pretty highly. The production is tight, the sentiment behind the message can be heard throughout and 6lack’s thematic tone is clear throughout the album. Yet an opinion of an album can never really just be based on the sound itself and this is where East Atlanta Love Letter is let down. A second album usually requires some form of reinvention and individuality to make it truly outstanding, otherwise it just seems like the artist is phoning it in or hasn’t come up with anything new and is sticking to the same creative process. This isn’t to say an artist has to change a winning formula and doing so can be detrimental; Disclosure’s mainstream jump to Caracal in an attempt to win over new fans ended up with them losing their old ones. Artists such as Kendrick Lamar, Anderson Paak and Goldlink - to name a few - are so successful because each album they put out is different enough from the last whilst still keeping to the artist’s core, pleasing both the fans whilst allowing the musician to be creative sonically. 6lack fails to do that on his latest release by failing to keep his sound unique or improving, perhaps even worsening, the formula he already had.

The main theme of East Atlanta Love Letter is 6lack’s adaptability to his elevated status in the R&B world. He talks about his efforts to keep himself level-headed by writing lyrics in budget hotels or the ongoing guilt he feels about his past mistakes and this provides a depth and intimacy that is a struggle to find in mainstream music. Yet for all the albums good work, it continuously fails to build on its successes by taking the easy R&B route of obsessing about women and boasting about riches. Tracks like ‘PRBLMS’ from his debut album FREE 6LACK truly express the ongoing battles that young, successful artists face when society expects them to behave in a certain way, yet the meaningful messages are so few and far between in his latest release that it comes across as somewhat lazy. ‘Nonchalant’, the second single from the album, does feature some clever wordplay that exhibit 6lack’s history of battle rapping, but the time it appears on the project it feels too little too late.

The tracks that do seem to pull the most weight are ‘Loaded Gun’, ‘Let Her Go’ and ‘Switch’, but in reality these sound like they belong on FREE 6LACK and still probably would not compete with the top five tracks. 6lack manages to make features from J. Cole, Future and Offset seem boring and uninspired, whilst some of the dreary singing seems like it could have been done by anyone and has no individuality whatsoever; it is believable that any other mainstream R&B artist could have made the exact same album coincidentally. This is what lets East Atlanta Love Letter down; it’s not that the album is particularly bad, it just feels like it has been done before not only by other R&B artists but by 6lack himself.

Favourite track: 'Let Her Go'

6/10