Blackbear - 'Cybersex' - Album Review

Matthew Tyler Musto, or, as many people know him as ‘blackbear’ (uncapitalized due to his preference) has been a successful yet very controversial artist to say the least. He was first noticed on the radar after co-writing Justin Bieber’s ‘boyfriend’ and found his initial claim to fame after the release of his song ‘IDFC’ off of his first full length album ‘Deadroses’ released in 2015. The artist is known for his fire beats and depressing stories told through his music and ‘Cybersex’ exemplifies this. However, I feel that the album was overall very mediocre.

As a massive blackbear fan I was expecting the album to show the artists growth since his previous album ‘digital druglord’ however, the topics of ‘sex, love, heartbreak and drugs’ stayed the same and the beats all sound very familiar. For many of us music lovers we like to see Artists who are versatile, such as Logic, Tyler the Creator or Childish Gambino who always keep us guessing as to what way they can make us fall in love with their music no matter how much it differs from their previous releases. But, this album has got me questioning whether or not blackbear will now end up as another Hoodie Allen, talented but predictable.

However, the album wasn’t a complete vanilla mixture. The features on the album spice it up and give it a bit of life especially with Tinashe, Lil Aaron and Machine Gun Kelly. The one song that for me, could show promise for any future work produced by blackbear is ‘Anxiety’ which features ‘FRND’. This was the first song I listened to on the album which got me excited to listen before I fell into the abyss of blandness. The song does show some original blackbear roots but it has an upbeat tempo and some decently positive vibes despite the name of the song which is very rare from blackbear.

The ‘hottest’ tracks on the album that I could see trending and potentially playing in clubs are ‘Up in This’ and ‘Playboy s**t’. These songs exemplify the blackbear wed expect, but would’ve been enough to keep the old fans happy if he had’ve tried to experiment more with new styles. One thing that was surprising for me to see and hear, was a collaboration with Ne-Yo. The R&B artist would not have been an artist I would have imagined would have ever been associated with this album, however even he could not spice it up.

I personally preferred digital druglord compared to this project and hope that in the future we can see some more expansion from the artist. Overall as I stated before, the album was not completely terrible, but it wasn’t very special either.

If I had to score it, it would get a: 6/10