Mike Posner - A Real Good Kid

It might appear that Mike Posner’s undergone a total reinvention from the blithe, folksy pop-rap of his 2010 debut or maybe the guy’s just grown up. His third album, A Real Good Kid, is a document of tough times: During its creation, Posner endured the death of his father and of his good friend Avicii, in addition to a bad breakup. Opener “January 11th, 2017” spares no feelings, describing the day his dad died in tender and occasionally brutal detail, with striking little asides like the perfectly mundane “January in Detroit is cold as f*ck.” But it’s also a document of personal transition: Posner’s re-evaluating his relationships with women, his own mortality, and just about everything else, and he's doing it with a bluesier bent than we’ve heard on his previous records. Through it all, his songwriting’s matured: He slips into anguished spoken-word poetry on gospel elegy “Drip,” and opens the cathartic move-on with the excellent one-liner “I wish Tracy Chapman was my friend.”