Post Malone - F-1 Trillion

For once, it isn’t hyperbole to say that we’ve reached the release of one of the most anticipated albums of the year. Post Malone’s country debut, an initial set of 18 songs dubbed F-1 Trillion, followed the now standard pop juggernaut path of quickly morphing into a surprise deluxe version, F-1 Trillion: Long Bed, with an additional nine songs on a second disc.

The inevitable question of whether this is a “real” country album from an established artist outside of the genre turns out to be the most easily answered one. It’s undoubtedly country as we understand it to be today; sometimes bare-faced and unabashedly recognisable, sometimes flattened into a grab-all of genres with a brush of country for varnish.

The more pertinent question turns out to be why Post Malone has made this album. We already know who Post Malone is, but it’s hard to get a sense from this album – particularly on Disc 1, which is packed with songs, endless collaborators, countless co-writers and a checklist of subjects to cover – of exactly who he is as a country artist and what that might help him to say more effectively than in his previous cuts outside the genre. It’s a familiar rap sheet of country music themes – knowingly clever and wordy songs about love, losing it, alcohol as a balm, falling in with the wrong crowd, struggle, a murder song or two for good measure and even a father-daughter song.

The similarly familiar collaborator list is both cynical and impressive. Barely a country sub-genre is left unturned as he draws on veteran crowd pleasers like Dolly Parton & Tim McGraw, critical kooks Sierra Ferrell & Billy Strings and country darlings Lainey Wilson & Luke Combs, amongst many others to join him on song after song. Whether this is all an attempt to gain the trust of the country audience by proximity to its adorned ambassadors, or an expression of deference and love to the genre, the reality seems to be both, yet the album isn’t always better for it. A single with Morgan Wallen is undoubtedly going to draw an internet crowd and a swoop of country fans with it, and ‘I Had Some Help’ might have been a smash, but its inoffensive fodder of pop sounds musically and lyrically weak amongst the much finer efforts on the full album cut.

The marketing campaign surrounding this album has focused on Malone’s long time love of the genre, and the fun and joy he brings to this record is undoubtedly what elevates it beyond accusations of lip service, particularly on songs like Hank Williams Jr collab ‘Finer Things’, which captures that effortless warble in his voice in snatches, or neo-traditional country songs like ‘Go To Hell’. ‘Goes Without Saying’ is a classic Nashville writers’ room effort of rearranging punctuation and breath marks to blend two phrases into each other. “It goes without sayin’, she put me in the past,” and “she goes without sayin’ goodbye” he sings on one of the many Ernest co-writes. In fact, if much of the album sounds familiar, it’s not just because of the recognisable voices you hear on the tracks, but in the words as well. Ernest is a co-writer on well over half of the songs on the first disc, the repetitive rise and fall of his millennial intonation present on one of the few tracks in the first half that Malone takes on alone, ‘What Don’t Belong To Me’. It turns out to be one of the album’s best efforts, leaving the question of why he didn’t put himself front and centre of the album from the start. 

Perhaps this is the only country album Post Malone intends to make and that’s the point behind packing it so tightly. If it were to be edited down into something more digestible, some of the duets on Disc 1 would undoubtedly take the hit. There’s the predictable ‘Losers’, featuring Jelly Roll, and the dull ‘Hide My Gun’, featuring Hardy. Yet, for every miss of a duet, there’s something that breathes life back into the project. ‘Never Love You Again’ may criminally under use Sierra Ferrell, but its confident use of steel guitar, which drops briefly and pleasantly into a Lynyrd Skynyrd-tinged punch of electric towards the end, is excellent, whilst the southern rock romp of ‘California Sober’ and the speedy bluegrass of ‘M-E-X-I-C-O’, featuring Chris Stapleton and Billy Strings, respectively, show that Malone really knows his collaborators musically, bringing out the best in each of them.

The end of Disc 1 and the subsequent Disc 2 is perhaps the better representation of Post Malone as a country artist, not just in how it sounds, but in its confidence as a run of solo cuts. ‘Yours’ might be painfully saccharine and thematically questionable – “she might be wearin’ white but her first dress it was pink”, he sings – but in his un-self-conscious delivery of bald emotion, at least you get the sense that he’s singing a Post Malone song that happens to be country, rather than a country song that happens to be sung by Post Malone. Similarly, ‘Two Hearts’, in particular, is an introspective look at a break up and its collateral damage in the shape of children caught in a custody battle. It’s heartbreaking and telling.

As to the “why” behind this album, in its broad approach of saying things we already know about Post Malone, it remains frustratingly unanswered. Yet, in raising the question, he’s given us an extremely listenable country fusion album that will undoubtedly provide a gateway for new fans of the genre. Deeper questions remain unanswered, but as Post Malone himself would say, he ain’t got a guy for that.

8/10

Post Malone’s 2024 project, F-1 Trillion, is available everywhere now via Mercury Records.

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