Album Review: 7 by Lil Nas X

As part of my research into the 2019 Grammy's Album of the Year category, I listened to each nominated album 5 times in order to evaluate my own ranking.

Here are some quick stats about 7 by Lil Nas X:

• Debut EP

• Released June 21, 2019

• Album length: 18:44, 8 tracks

• Peaked at #2 on US Billboard 200 (30 weeks on chart)

• Genre: Hip hop, pop

• Metacritic score: 57/100

I actually kind of liked this. It's not my usual type of music that I'm interested in, but it was catchy and upbeat and I liked it. It was fun and it was pretty easy to get into it.

I thought it was pretty interesting how different a lot of the songs were. Some songs were normal hip hop, while some had country, pop or rock influences. I thought it was an interesting experiment to make an album that doesn't adhere to one specific genre. From some of the reviews I've seen, that seems to be why people don't like it. But I think it's innovative and worth trying at least once. It's also a very short album so I never felt like I was wasting my time listening.

Because the songs had such different influences, I assumed there was no way that Lil Nas X could have had any input in writing. But I was very surprised to see that he's credited on all of the songs. Not only is he credited as a writer for all the songs, he also is the only writer for four of the songs. That was definitely something that I wanted to see, since his voice is very autotuned on some of these songs. If they're autotuned, I at least want to see that they wrote this stuff (otherwise they could just used someone who could actually sing). He also produced at least one song. It doesn't look like he played any instruments for any of the recordings.

My favorite song was "F9mily (You and Me)" even though it was so autotuned. There weren't any songs that I particularly disliked.

Overall, I think it was a fun album. I liked it, and I don't think it hurts to exist out in the world. I may continue to listen to this in the future. I'll probably continue to listen to at least a few of my favorites from the album.