Album Review: CAOS by Miguel
On CAOS, Miguel honors his eclectic past while carving a new space where vulnerability and swagger coexist. Its willingness to sit with pain and joy makes it the most complete portrait of him to date.
Back in 2010, Miguel described his sound as “fly, funkadelic, intergalactic hip‑hop meets sexy, orgasmic, crazy dope shit.” Early singles such as “Sure Thing,” which had a resurgence years ago, wove quirky, Prince‑like devotionals (“If I’m the blunt, you could be the lighter”), and his debut album, All I Want Is You, blended slick R&B with rock guitars. Kaleidoscope Dream introduced psychedelic textures and Euro‑soul, and by Wildheart, he was chasing post‑rock guitars and trap drums, balancing sexual anthems with meditations on identity and California dreaming. War & Leisure put his politics out front; over funk and Latin rhythms, he sang about police violence and immigrant rights, asking on “Now” if this is the look of freedom.
Awaiting the follow-up, he spoke to the Broken Record Podcast about his unreleased 2023 project Viscera as a kind of emotional exorcism that later evolved into CAOS. He said Viscera began under the title Bad Habits, Sad Anthems—meant to be the opposite of what people expected from him, trading in the sensual, dreamlike tone of his earlier work for something heavier and more introspective. The idea was to write from the parts of himself that weren’t polished: to confront his vices and the sorrow that often hides behind pleasure. But as he kept recording, he admitted the songs started to feel “too heavy, even for me,” and some of them had to stay in the vault. About a quarter of that material eventually became the spine of CAOS, reshaped into something more balanced and alive.
That turn toward CAOS wasn’t just musical—it was philosophical. He described the album as his acknowledgment of the disorder he’s created in his own life, and his decision to make peace with it. “If it’s not growing, it’s dead,” he said, quoting Ms. Lauryn Hill, before explaining that he’d come to believe a certain amount of chaos is necessary for growth. For him, it’s not “toxic chaos,” but intentional disruption—forcing himself and his collaborators out of comfort zones so something new can emerge. He compared it to the band Portishead switching instruments mid-album: nobody gets to coast when they’re holding an unfamiliar tool. That kind of creative friction, he said, keeps him awake.
Even his earlier suspension stunt—hanging by piercings in his back—tied into this theme. What others found extreme, he framed as meditation. It was his way of asking, What’s my relationship to pain? and Why do I carry it with pride? That physical surrender was part of the same reckoning that informed CAOS: using pain as a teacher instead of a mask. The title track opens with a voice note in Spanish: “La vida es fría, el frío es dolor, el dolor, crecimiento… Vendrá la lluvia, y el sol atraviesa las nubes”—life is cold, cold is pain, pain is growth, rain comes, and the sun pierces the clouds. It is not a rallying cry so much as a subdued acknowledgement that discomfort precedes bloom. From this frame, the record moves like a conversation with a friend; you hear an artist who has watched his marriage dissolve and an entire album (Viscera) evaporate into myth, yet he speaks without bitterness.
That restless arc is the lineage CAOS honors. The album doesn’t pretend those peaks didn’t happen—it samples them, quotes them, folds them into new structures—but it also refuses to repeat them. Miguel still writes about desire, but the winking seducer of his twenties is mostly gone. In “The Killing,” he flips Tupac’s famous line (“I ain’t a killer, but don’t push me”) into a dark fantasy: “Sex crime, yellow tape, white chalk fiend, full blown… wrist bound, face down, yeah, I’m a slash all morning.” The violence is metaphorical; the song is about consensual power exchange, a mutual obsession that blurs pleasure and danger. His falsetto bends into a snarl as he sings “My heart could be possessed by you… I’m slightly obsessed with the killing.” It’s unsettling because it shows how easily intimacy slides into compulsion. The production matches the lyrics: guitars scrape, trap drums/hi-hats stutter, and a woozy guitar line recalls Wildheart’s rock flirtations without copying them.
In “RIP,” the mood turns inward. Over glistening synths and percussion that feels like an anxious heartbeat, he admits, “Can I surrender to you? All my defenses are down… It hurts to be human.” He repeats, almost pleading, “I rip when the weight bears down… before I get edgy on my empty oscillations.” The hook could have lapsed into the generic territory, but Miguel never lets it. In the verse, he sings about dancing with tears in your eyes and killing chaos to free his heart. The language is direct, almost prosaic. The payoff is when his voice cracks on the word “human.” For an artist whose earlier work traded on controlled seduction, hearing him allow a note to break is startling.
CAOS mixes Spanish and English not as decorative florishes but as emotional code‑switching. In the title track’s intro, the Spanish monologue grounds the album in shared heritage. It reappears subtly in “New Martyrs (Ride 4 U)” when he sings, “I wear my heart on my sleeve/I’ve got my seed on my mind,” and later, as sirens blare, he tells his partner, “Let me kiss you goodbye, you know I’m ready to blast”. The chorus is a question—“Are you with it, babe?”—repeated like a litany. But the song’s spine is the bridge where he declares, “The love can’t be silent when the system isn’t equal.” He references carrying a gun and wearing a mask, images of protest and survival (which is fitting on what the country is going through right now and across the world), while his lover vows to “ride for you.” The bilingual lines aren’t there for exoticism. They mirror a switching between tenderness and vigilance that many immigrants or children of immigrants know. When singing, “Quiero nadar a través por tu cuerpo” (“I want to swim through your body”) in a later song, it feels like a private aside.
Miguel has always linked sex to liberation; here, he ties it to rebellion. “New Martyrs” is essentially a Bonnie and Clyde anthem: he’s got a “Blick on my waist” and she promises, “I’ll ride for you.” At one point, he fires two shots in the air and instructs his partner to watch the clock while they rob a system that “isn’t equal”. The adrenaline rush is tempered by a bridge questioning how much suffering God expects and how much loss one can bear. It’s devotion as defiance: love gives them reason to fight and, if necessary, die. When the couple finally embraces, the guitars distort into a blissful haze. On “The Killing” and “New Martyrs,” Miguel approaches violence like a poet: the imagery is vivid but not gratuitous. Occasionally, though, his taste for extremes trips him up. The extended metaphors of car crashes, clichés (“Fuck one, fuck two/We fuck three times early morning”), and bloodshed border on juvenile shock value. They contrast awkwardly with the vulnerability he is aiming for. It’s in these moments that CAOS feels like it’s trying to prove its chaos rather than simply inhabit it.
The album’s most moving song isn’t about sex or rebellion. It’s about grief. “Angel’s Song” arrives three-quarters through and feels like a conversation across generations. Over gentle guitars and a sample of his infant daughter’s cooing (Miguel became a father after the album’s lost years), he sings, “Truth or dare, do or die/Kill streaks full of Black lives/Got a call from mom today/I miss you, mom, it’s been a while.” He juxtaposes video‑game violence with real‑world deaths, then uses the mundane—playing Call of Duty, watching the news—to underline how normalized slaughter has become. Later, he references the Gaza Strip and algorithms, laments that “nothing has been the same since Chelsea passed” (a nod to the death of his wife’s friend or perhaps a stillborn child), and imagines taking his family to space because Earth is burning. Amid these apocalyptic musings, he looks at his daughter and confesses, “Your tiny hand in mine… You deserve a world that’s perfect… Sorry that I ain’t perfect… I needed an angel, I’m glad I found you.” The song doesn’t resolve grief; instead, it holds it. The arrangement is intentionally ragged—guitar arpeggios that drift out of key, synths that swell like sirens—mirroring the way memory loops and stutters when you lose someone.
For all its chaos, the album is meticulously sequenced. “Always Time” offers breath: he admits “Broken glass, piercing words/It changed so fast, yeah, it hurts” and concludes that maybe love sometimes means letting go. These moments keep the record from collapsing under its own weight. When the George Clinton‑assisted “COMMA/KARMA” arrives, Miguel has already taken us through violence, devotion, grief, and acceptance. Clinton enters like a cosmic uncle, reminding him of funk’s continuum. The track begins with him saying, “Cloaked in a cloud, disguised in the sky/Written in stone, that’s why we rock so good all night,” an overt nod to Parliament‑Funkadelic’s Afrofuturism. Then Clinton punctures the solemnity with humor, encouraging Miguel to throw a party for the homies, smoke, and pour something when he’s gone, and remember that good thoughts and evil thoughts coexist. The message is simple: life is a comma, not a period. The production is slinky and psychedelic—wah‑guitars, deep bass, a pun on karma, and the pause between lives. It’s corny on paper, but in the record’s context, it feels like a release, a way to treat death as another rest stop rather than an ending.
Miguel’s previous albums traced an arc from bedroom bravado to political activism. CAOS is the record where those threads converge without an agenda. He fuses R&B, rock, electronic, and industrial sounds with Latin rhythms into a single statement, but the production never feels like a genre sampler. In lieu of this, it uses hybridization to illustrate the blurred lines between pleasure and pain, intimacy and conflict. His bilingual writing functions as emotional code‑switching, reflecting the realities of a Black‑Mexican American navigating love and loss in two cultures. Vocally, he sounds as good as ever, although his fickle fans may say otherwise, that they want him to make “good R&B” while stop trying to be “alternative.” News flash: let artists grow whether you like it or not. The songwriting is sometimes heavy‑handed (sexual metaphors occasionally lapse into shock value, and certain wordplay overstays its welcome), but when he steadies his pen, the songs hit with specificity. The path from All I Want Is You to CAOS is a trek from infatuation to self‑interrogation. Miguel has reinvented himself and has shed layers like never before. It may not be the album you wanted as a fan, but it’s needed for times like this.
Standout (★★★★½)
Favorite Track(s): “The Killing,” “New Martyrs (Ride 4 U),” “Angel’s Song,” “Always Time”