Mac Miller HHV Records 27 Items

The new hope in indie hip-hop

At 15, Mac Miller decided to devote all his free time to hip hop, recorded his first mixtapes and already won local awards in Pittsburgh for his music – his easygoing style landed him a record deal with indie label Rostrum Records, and at just 18, his mixtape K.I.D.S. went through the roof in 2010. Miller made a name for himself with catchy beats and lighthearted lyrics that revolve around high school life, including partying, smoking weed and girls – after all, the rapper himself still went to high school while recording the tape. The positive vibe and youthful, carefree lyrics offered an alternative to the gangsta image dominant in U.S. hip hop at the time, and Miller didn‘t keep his newly acquired fanbase waiting long for new tracks: his next mixtape Best Day Ever was released in 2011 and included his first chart success Donald Trump, and the following album Blue Slide Park even entered the Billboard 200 at number one. At this time, the young rapper had long been known as the new hope in indie hip hop: there hadn’t been a chart-topping indie release in over ten years.

With the courage to experiment

On the personally-tinged mixtape Macadelic, he shared the mic with notable friends like Lil Wayne, Kendrick Lamar and Juicy J, and also gave his fans a glimpse of what he would later expand upon: an openness to new sounds, sometimes psychedelically-situated ideas, and a never-ending search for previously untrodden sonic territory. His 2013 record Watching Movies with the Sound Off was more testament to his artistic drive for freedom than ever before; Miller now wanted to dive into all aspects of his music: “I’m starting to work on music from different angles, whether it be a writer or a producer. I’m doing them strictly because it’s what I love to do.” He was hardly just the upbeat party entertainer of his first mixtapes, but had evolved into a more introspective artist with experimentally adept production – many music media considered it one of the best albums of the year. The immense success hardly took him away from his indie mentality, however, and his mixtape Faces, like all mixtapes before it, was released for free on the Internet – on jazz beats that also delved into psychedelic realms, he reflected here on his personal struggle with drug addiction. Also released on vinyl, the record took Miller to a new lyrical level and is now considered a masterpiece by many fans.

On the battle against inner demons

Once again at the top of the charts, he continued to evolve with GO:OD AM in a direction that made him an honest storyteller with a lyrical focus on his inner conflicts. On the record The Divine Feminine, his focus changed, and the album now showed Miller as more of a comprehensive musician, not just a rapper: he was inspired by the R&B genre and sang more in the tracks than ever before in his career. His last album Swimming, completed in his lifetime, also added another milestone to his discography as he documented the healing process from his inner demons on dreamy beats – the quiet record brings him out more grown up, more mature than ever. He never made a secret of his drug affinity, and yet it caused him to fail in the end: in September 2018, he died tragically, the cause of death determined to be an overdose. Four days later, thousands of fans remembered him at a memorial service at Blue Slide Park in Pittsburgh – the place Miller named his first album after. His record Circles was released posthumously in 2020, and it continued what the rapper had started on Swimming before: a journey inside, searching for a peaceful place. Circles is more pop than his previous works, and in a bitter way the album shows the remarkable range of artistic possibilities that Mac Miller would have experimented with in his further career – it is a worthy conclusion to his work and at the same time a sad document of the times.