It’s hard to think of an album with a more confusing backstory than Childish Gambino-aka-Donald Glover’s “Atavista,” which was first released stealthily — with little notice, promotion, cover artwork or even song titles — into a dark world four years ago, in the early days of the pandemic, and originally named after its grim release date, “3.15.20.”
The album basically kept its light under a bushel for the past four years, until last month when Glover announced on his Gilga internet radio show that he’d be re-releasing it in the near future. And at midnight this past Sunday, it suddenly appeared on streaming services, with three songs removed and two new ones added, bearing the title Glover said he’d originally intended. It was accompanied by a characteristically subtext-laden video for the song “Big Foot Little Foot,” and the announcement of a massive world tour launching in August.
No matter the name, it was an album fans had been waiting literally years for: In 2018, Glover dropped three singles, performed the greatest “Saturday Night Live” hosting/musical guest double-duty in memory, released the deeply political “This Is America” video and launched an electrifying world tour that sprawled into the following year and included a headlining appearance at Coachella. But by the end of 2019, there was still no album.
Yet on March 15, 2020, just days after pandemic lockdown descended, he quietly and suddenly released it, with only a social media post leading to website where the album played on an endless loop with no distinguishable beginning or end … and he took it down around 12 hours later. The album was officially released onto streaming services a week later, retaining its plain white cover. And there it stayed. “3.15.20” quickly faded from memories — understandably, given the time — and many fellow music writers admitted, when compiling year-end lists for that terrible year, that they’d completely forgotten about it. It seemed like Glover had wanted to bury it.
But in any form, the album is a masterpiece, not only Glover’s best work but one of the great R&B-leaning sets of the past decade and a kaleidoscopic showcase for his seemingly endless talents: He sings, raps, multitracks dense layers of his and others’ voices, puts on different characters for different songs; he mixes live instruments with vintage analog and digital electronic keyboards. His collaborators included Ariana Grande, 21 Savage, Khadja Bonet (who, in the absence of actual credits, many people initially thought was SZA) and coproducers DJ Dahi (Kendrick Lamar, Drake) and Oscar-winning composer Ludwig Goransson. It’s as if Prince, Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder and Outkast had a brilliant, unruly baby.
Over time, the album’s fans got louder. Even Tyler, the Creator wrote of it on social media, “He tried to be all secret and cryptic like a dickfuck and people missed out on some really cool shit, to me at least.” Asked about it directly in an interview with Complex last fall, Glover said, “I took that approach because I guess that’s what I was going through. I had just lost my father, I had just had a kid, and I was going through a lot… and that’s what I expressed. I think people are right — it would have garnered a different [response]” if it had been released more conventionally, and then said he liked the fact that it flew under the radar.
However, his comments last month suggested he’d had a change of heart, and implied that he released the album at that time, even though it was unfinished, because he simply wanted it to exist for fans in case the world ended (a dramatic but not-unreasonable sentiment in March of 2020). “People didn’t even know I put it out,” he said. “I didn’t master or mix it, I just kind of put it out. I was going through a lot, n—-s thought everybody was going to die because it was the pandemic.” He then said he’d finished it and would release it soon, followed by “the final Childish Gambino album” this summer. Per Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, atavism is a “recurrence in an organism of a trait or character typical of an ancestral form,” or a “recurrence of or reversion to a past style, manner, outlook, approach, or activity” — both of which suit this recurrence/ reversion of the album.
Based on a comparison with a vintage rip of the album’s original stream that’s been in my iTunes for four years (thanks, Steven), “3.15.20” and “Atavist” are different, but not that different. The order has been upended, with much of the previous second half now the first half; some of the interludes between songs have been dropped or trimmed; two songs have acquired guest verses (“Little Foot Big Foot” has one from Lil Nudy; “Sweet Thang” from Summer Walker). Most significantly, the sound is much clearer, and three tracks — the 2018 single “Feels Like Summer,” one apparently called “Intro (Warlords)” and a harmony-stacked interlude called “We Are” — have been dropped entirely. In their places are the title track and one called “Human Sacrifice,” both of which were premiered on his 2018 tour. (The cover is still plain and white, but at least there’s a title on it.)
Forensic analysis aside, the album is still great, ranging from sweetness and playfulness to dark menace, from vintage soul to dark experimentalism. The title track has fuzzed-out ‘70s synths, a tight rhythm and a clean vocal from Glover; “To Be Hunted” is a thumping groove whose title is countered with the line “To be beautiful is to be hunted”; “The Violence” is a midtempo shuffle with lyrics about gun violence that counterintuitively concludes with an adorable conversation between Glover and one of his toddler-aged sons listing the people he loves, including himself. “Do you love yourself, Daddy?”
The ballads are fire too: Grande turns in a soaring performance on the gospel-inflected “Time,” and “Sweet Thang” is a harmony-loaded slow jam with a heaping medley of voices and a woozy guitar solo that could have been an outtake from Prince’s classic “Sign O’ the Times.”
And many defy categorization: “Little Foot Big Foot” is a playful bounce with sweet, Beach Boys-esque harmonies that could be from a children’s album; “Algorhythm” is a hulking rap with Glover’s voice distorted to an intimidating menace; the intense closer, “Final Church,” recalls Kanye West’s more threatening songs but has a chorus that says, “There is love in every moment under the sun.” It — and the album — close with Glover shrieking and an analog synth playing in a tone that recalls Stevie Wonder’s “Livin’ for the City.”
This bout of atavism is a prelude for what’s coming next: “Bando Storm and the New World,” the “final” Childish Gambino album, due this summer and apparently the soundtrack to a forthcoming film (or something like that) that few people know anything about. He previewed two songs apparently from it on his radio show: a fiery collaboration with Kanye West apparently called “Say Less,” and a tag-team with Kid Cudi titled “Warlords” that is totally different from the song of the same name that appeared on the initial “3.15.20” album.
Whatever form it takes — and whether or not it’s actually the final album (he’s hinted at such things before) — Childish Gambino is going out with a bang.
