Balloonerism

Balloonerism is my favourite Mac Miller album. His storytelling showcases how much haunting lives inside the mundanity of life. It’s devastating but deeply relatable, even if the specific situations he recalls are not. It feels like being dropped into a badlands version of the world: a place that should invert reality, but instead mirrors it back at you. And in this case, back at Mac.

There are orphans in a sandbox. A banker who drives off a bridge. A girl waiting on her psych evaluation. A girl ordering her drugs. Mac laughing as he tells Rick a knock-knock joke.

The second track (DJ’s Chord Organ Ft. SZA)–the first two minutes and forty seconds more interlude than song–does something to my nervous system. “B-flat, F, B-flat, F, D” Mac names a note, then plays its accompanying key, then the next, and the next on Daniel Johnston’s chord organ. The hum of keys like an exhale. We get SZA’s ethereal voice drifting and weaving in between the soft drums, smooth bass. As it slowly builds, we’re all rolling together as it gains momentum.

You let it take you wherever it decides to go.

And that sets the tone for the entire record. You’re in it now. From that moment on, everything matches the same emotional frequency as we move from song to song. Nothing feels out of place, but at the same time this isn’t one complete picture with pieces neatly nestled.

Still, you let it take you anyway.

Balloonerism defo isn’t trying to save you

On Funny Papers, Mac says almost innocently that he “didn’t think anyone died on a Friday”, then immediately tells a story of death (the world proving him wrong). The angry banker who got drunk and “drove off the bridge to his wedding song”. He moves onto a mother holding her newborn, wondering why she would bring “these bright eyes into this dark place”. He talks about ageing — or more accurately, his fear of it — “the mind go with age / don’t surrender / my mistake I misplaced all of my remembers”.

Lightness and despair walk the same line, but it is clear that whatever light you see will eventually fade as the horrors of the world push through the happiness haze. Your death soundtracked by your wedding song, projecting fears onto a newborn, fearing that aging will take you away from who you are. It sounds like catastrophising. Or a horrific comedown.

But could it be the album capturing the vulnerability of the human condition so precisely – how we are always at the mercy of our own perspective. Aging really just means you haven’t died, a newborn is the literal representation of new life. Driving off a bridge to your wedding song is bleak, so take the negative with the positive – but it feels like that’s not entirely possible here.

Have a think

Humans are storytellers, we’ve told stories for millennia with varying intentions; to guide, to mislead, to destroy. But Mac’s storytelling on Balloonerism feels more like observations. No intention to lead anyone anywhere, other than through his own thoughts which are muddled but not convoluted enough to dissuade you from listening.

There’s something disarmingly earnest about that.

And because of that, I could listen to Mac tell stories forever. He has a quality that says ‘I’ve almost figured it all out’ but also ‘I have no fucking clue’. It’s wonder and desperation, bewilderment and disappointment at the world. Like he’s answering his own questions but still seeks resolutions. The search for meaning continues in perpetuity.

Don’t reduce it to ‘sad addict stories’

Mac references drug use throughout Balloonerism, so it would be easy to reduce it to a story about addiction or someone on a trip. And tbf, it wouldn’t be a world away from what could be the truth. But once you label something ‘drug-fuelled’ you run the risk of ignoring the life that exists behind the connotations.

There is sadness here, undeniably, but that doesn’t make Balloonerism a ‘sad addict’s album’. It feels more accurate to say it’s about life itself, with drugs functioning both as a literal presence and a metaphor. Life has highs and comedowns. Moments of euphoria followed by collapse. Long stretches of nothingness punctuated by intensity. Random, disorienting moments that don’t make sense until suddenly they do.

Drugs are a language for how living actually feels. Maybe its easier to talk about life when you’re high because the haze acts a protective filter so you can chat shit without the anxiety, until the comedown hits. Maybe that’s what Balloonerism partly is.

“She’s fallin’ for her hallucinations / But what’s love without imagination? Yeah / Baby, don’t let them tell you what’s real and what’s not / There’s a paradise waiting on the other side of the dock, woah”

And let’s not forget where this record sits in his discography.

Balloonerism feels like a time capsule, transporting us to where Mac was at creatively and emotionally in 2014. The brightness of K.I.D.S (2010) and Blue Slide Park (2011) has faded, replaced by something heavier. It feels like a prerequisite moment before life around him hardened like cement into concrete.

You hear that same weight in Watching Movies with the Sound Off (2013) and GO:OD AM (2015). Made between 2013 and 2014 and shelved in favour of the latter, Balloonerism exists right at the centre of Mac’s turn inward.

What’s strange is that Balloonerism was released in 2025, after Swimming (2018) and Circles (2020), but it doesn’t feel out of place at all. If anything, it feels like it could sit as a B-side to either of them.

My rec is to listen in this order:

1. Watching Movies with the Sound Off

2. Balloonerism

3. GO:OD AM

We like messy

Producer Eric Dan said the album was left largely untouched.

“The rough edges were part of its charm and highlighted where Mac was creatively at that time.”

That roughness is part of what pulls me in. The mess is compelling, I’m drawn to it more than polish. Clean narratives are comforting, but how often do they resonate with depth that scratches parts of your brain that are often left alone, unscathed?

The light is opaque

There’s minimal light on this album. The slithers that do appear feel less like hope and more like ‘what could have been’ or like a backhanded compliment.

“On Fourth Street, the orphan children play on the jungle gym/Life is fantasy and somersaults then/Before the world tear apart imagination”. Innocence exists, but its framed as something already under threat. 5 Dollar Pony Rides screams the desperation of a relationship where two people are orbiting each other without ever really meeting each other halfway.

Friendly Hallucinations captures a different kind of crisis. The girl at its centre is clearly unravelling, yet Mac offers reassurance that feels both tender and dangerous: “Baby, don’t let them tell you what’s real and what’s not.” It’s comfort, but it’s also permission to drift further from reality.

Then there’s Shangri-La, named after Rick Rubin’s studio, where Mac spent time in 2014 getting sober. “Okay, I was drivin’ up to Shangri-La to get my meditation on/The weather’s nice today, what a perfect day to die (Day to die)/She’d kill herself, but she’d rather get married.” Is there really anything else to say other than it’s sad?

It’s like light exists but never without tithing the devil.

Mac’s infatuation with death

One thing I can’t ignore is Mac’s fixation on death. At times it feels prophetic. At others, he seems to circle death with curiosity and questions his own mortality. The idea of death hangs fucking heavy on this record, explicitly and implicitly.

“I gave my life to this shit, already killed myself” (Do You Have A Destination?)
“Need to let the drugs go, tryna find Heaven — I get high but never come close” (Do You Have a Destination?)
“Found my body somewhere in the sewer” (Mrs. Deborah Downer)
“I swear to God I never wanna sin again, but I fear that trouble’s on its way” (Funny Papers)
“No, you shouldn’t — you said it’d never get this far.” (Shangri‑La)
“Cause I see the light at the end of the tunnel… it feels like I’m dyin” (Manakins)
“What does death feel like? Why does death steal life?” (Rick’s Piano)

After the success of K.I.D.S I wonder if Mac found nihilism. A solid, ‘wtf is the point of it all? I did the thing and it worked but it didn’t exactly work for me’. Stuck in perpetual survival mode, searching for meaning while half‑convinced he won’t be around long enough to find it.

This album doesn’t offer answers. It doesn’t resolve. It simply tells a side of a story — one we were lucky enough to be invited to listen in on.

Writer notes:
I’m obsessed with this album in a way that is probably really unhealthy but you connect with what you connect with. It has left such an impression on me that I already preempted the emptiness I’d feel when I finished writing about it. I feel this ache below my chest, wrapping itself around my sternum. And my eyes keep welling up.

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