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Mac Miller‘s estate has announced that a second posthumous project from the beloved rapper called Balloonerism is on the way.
The news was revealed during Tyler, The Creator‘s Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival in Los Angeles this past weekend, where a trailer for the upcoming release was played between sets from Sampha and The Alchemist.
The two-and-a-half-minute video features movie-quality CGI animation as well as two unreleased tracks: “The Song That Changed Everything,” which reportedly features SZA, and “5 Dollar Pony Rides.”
The cinematic trailer ends with the word, “Soon” before revealing what appears to be the album cover.
The abstract, balloon-themed artwork is a painting of Mac Miller by artist Alim Smith, who posted a similar image on Instagram in 2018, just weeks before the rapper’s passing. Mac commented on the post: “Need this.”
The Pittsburgh native is said to have recorded Balloonerism over the course of a week in 2014, prior to the making of his fan-favorite mixtape Faces.
In the 2022 book The Book of Mac: Remembering Mac Miller, the rapper’s longtime manager Quentin Cuff described the project as “very zany.”
“Mac and [engineer] Josh [Berg] were cooped up in the bottom studio [at Mac’s house in L.A.] They were cooking up very zany, otherworldly, weird creations. At the time, they really stood out, and people loved it,” he said in an excerpt published on Passion of the Weiss.
“There’s that album, Balloonerism, that was probably made before Faces. A lot of it was supposed to be Faces, and then Balloonerism’s its own thing. There’s so many albums during that time that were in the thought process.”
While further details including a release date have yet to be announced, Balloonerism will serve as Mac Miller’s second posthumous album following Circles.
Released in January 2020, Circles was being worked on by Mac before his death and was completed by producer Jon Brion. It was intended as a companion album to his fifth LP Swimming, which arrived shortly before he passed away due to an accidental drug overdose in September 2018.
