Released in June 2017, as part of Brockhamptons next project the Saturation trilogy, Saturation 1 marked the bands first studio album following their mixtape, All American Trash.
With their first studio outing, it already feels as though Brockhampton’s found their identity as a group compared to their previous efforts and leaves a strong first impression bringing the alternative hip hop sound to the forefront
The albums overall structure is loose, with not much in the way of a concept outside of a few skits placed throughout the album all spoken in Spanish. While there’s no real concept or story going on within the album, it lets Brockhampton experiment with what numerous sounds and beats. You start off with a song like HEAT which is this violent, grimy and overall nasty sounding track to something like MILK which is a song about self-reflection. Even within the songs themselves the band constantly changes up it’s sound with the track BUMP being in a similar vain to HEAT then the chorus switches it up to this simple acoustic guitar over Kevin Abstract’s singing before diving right back into that vulgar beat. For the most part the album is solid but there are certain songs where the band is still trying to find their sound and not all the tracks hit exactly.
BOYS doesn’t do too much for me, the instrumental kind of sounds a bit drowsy and Kevins ongoing pitched vocals throughout are a bit much though verses from Ameer and Dom do bring it back, the end of song lingers far longer then it should have. I have a similar issue with the song FAKE which suffers from the same issue I had with Kevins vocals on BOYS but along with some pitched chipmunk vocals from the other members it’s easily the weakest song off the album.
However, the more boyband sounding tracks like MILK and SWIM really bring the album around from feeling like just a standard hip hop album, especially with the final song WASTE which is an acoustic guitar ballet. The song is such a far cry from the rest of the album which is can often be aggressive, confident, Brash. WASTE is very melancholy in the story it tells, what seems to be telling us about an individual losing someone significant to them to another person.
Overall, Saturation is an excellent start to a trilogy. There’s room for the boys to improve but they show what they can do on a full album. If All American Trash was the band crawling, Saturation is Brockhampton Walking.
Saturation is available to stream on Spotify and Apple Music.
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