Kanye West & Ty Dolla Sign’s (¥$) ‘Vultures 2’ Is Out and It’s an Unforgiving Disaster

A new Kanye and Ty Dolla album is out but still unfinished and still updating as we speak. The album, part two of a trilogy, was released after months of delays. Let’s talk about it.

Courtesy of YZY.

Yes, well? Here we are. It’s an album by Kanye West, so completely bad that it can’t be defended anymore. One can’t say he hasn’t methodically worked towards this! Since The Life of Pablo, it’s been going downhill mentally for the man, and that has manifested in various ways in his music. But whether it’s ye, Donda, or even Jesus Is King, somehow, well-meaning listeners can always still recognize the ‘genius’ in the madness. A genius that probably primarily consisted of his ability to identify strong ideas for songs and sounds and get the best out of his collaborators. So even in the era where Kanye is actually just a vegetable, the first Vultures still resulted in at least a passable album.

Vultures 2 is now what you’ve been hearing since Jesus Is King. It’s a look into Kanye’s psyche: And Kanye’s psyche is currently a burning circus tent. This album sounds unfinished because it’s impossible to finish. Kanye is obviously no longer mentally capable of finishing songs, but because collaborator Ty Dolla $ign announced multiple albums, and this one has already been delayed numerous times, whatever is lying around has to come out.

Vultures 2 is a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It hardly resembles a real album, but rather the shame that XXXTentacion’s heirs have made with his unreleased material. If there had been an audio clip called “Ye On Drums,” we would have heard it on this album. There are 16 tracks, one of them a completely nonsensical interlude, the rest absurd shit. Demo verses from Kanye, generic singing from Ty. It sounds a bit like Jesus Is King, but even on that otherwise probably clearly worst Kanye album, there were fantastic lucid moments and a clear idea of what kind of album it should be. This? This is a pirated trash can.

Kanye albums normally have fantastic intros. “Slide” is the sketch of the skeleton of the blueprint of a maybe pretty cool beat; it’s a lonely, drifting, pushing up-and-down ghost howl. And the Kanye verse is so strange and clumsily rapped that you think he’s doing a really funny demo right there, or he’s unlearned every rap skill. This unsteady tapping would have taken you to the Train in the RBA—without big ambitions to make it to the Entry. But somehow almost equally bad: Ty Dolla $ign, who stands next to this burning car wreck of a song and sings down a generic sixteen, playing Smooth Lady’s Man, as if nothing happened. He feels a bit like somewhere between a sleazy used goods dealer and a scam artist who wants to sell the barge. He basically says, “Okay, okay, maybe the son of a bitch is on fire, but look: The cup holder still works perfectly, and you look wonderful at the wheel. Because I like you, maybe we could even do something about the price.” Winking smiley, winking smiley, flame emoji.

There are isolated moments where, with imagination, one could guess that something with potential might have once been in these song child coffins: “Time Moving Slow” would have a quite solid instrumental if you did something with it. “Field Trip” obviously rips off “Carnival,” hoping to land another hit with a similar formula. Somewhere in the second part, Kodak Black raps over a neither cleared nor meaningfully processed sample of Portishead’s “Machine Gun.” The idea could have yielded something, but it sounds soulless and random, like everything on this album. Otherwise there are formerly endearing leaks like “530” or “Sky City”—one of them has more or less already been proven that we’re dealing with a version that was ripped from YouTube by the makers of this album. It’s the goddamn YouTube rip that we have here on the album. That’s how bad the conditions are.

And Kanye? When he does rise from the state of nonverbal mumbling, it’s only to remind that one should, for God’s sake, have no sympathy for him right now. “Husband” sounds like anti-feminist propaganda from a Pentecostal church (no honey, please don’t go to college, you only need your husband, haha, I said, NO, YOU ONLY NEED YOUR HUSBAND). The hook is then bizarrely pasted again at the end of the following track. Maybe that’s supposed to create the illusion of coherence—it was probably just a careless mistake because they only had thirty minutes in which Kanye was sitting on the toilet with an unlocked laptop to put all this nonsense together and upload it.

On the outro “My Soul,” he then even has the sheer audacity to say, “Cancel culture before I get censored.” My brother in Christ, you’re at the end of a run as if you tried to make stupid, problematic shit-talking a competitive sport. You were the whole damn Call of Duty lobby. And you had a shitty number-one hit?! Where is this cancel culture that scares you so much? Where??? Kanye lives in his imaginary woke world like an imaginary cockroach in an imaginary nuclear fallout. It’s so absurd in its detachment from reality that one could almost overlook how trivial and stupid his whining is.

One is almost glad that he has the presence of a sleepwalker on the rest of the album. The faceless Ty Dolla $ign parts and a few uninspired features have glued this pile of trash can leftovers into an album, but it feels like Ty Dolla $ign put make-up on a corpse to move it with wires like a puppeteer. “Hello, of course, we made a second album; please give us money for it, hoo hoo! Oh no, the stage is on fire. Does anyone actually want to buy this car now?”

It’s a tragedy. Really. This album is so unbelievably bad that it’s hard to believe it actually exists. If Kanye has even one more clear moment in his life, it shouldn’t come as a surprise if it completely disappears from all streaming platforms. It’s not the first time that I haven’t even remotely recognized the old Kanye in Kanye’s music anymore. This album (and the previous ones) is finally the appropriate soundtrack for the Kanye who has revealed himself to us in recent years: It’s burdening, incoherent shit. It’s great that there’s no way in hell to defend it anymore.