Mac Miller’s successful musical debuts kicked off his career in 2011. In 2010 and 2011, Mac had a lot to be excited about, and it showed in his music.

While K.I.Ds and Blue Slide Park introduced the signature melancholy discussed above, they were also riddled with playful, happy tracks that exuded youth, excitement for the future, and a frustratingly-naïve optimism.

However, as happens to the lives of most artists who blow up as barely-and-debatably-not-even adult 18-year-olds, things changed once Mac got famous. Leaving home, touring the country, and becoming a household name all at once may seem like good challenges, but they’re challenges nonetheless.

At about this time, we know from interviews that Mac Miller had started smoking weed to cope with the stress of being on the road. We also know that this is about when depression and anxiety began playing a larger role in his life.

In early 2012 we received his next musical installation; Macadellic. All of the enthusiasm and exuberance coming from K.I.D.S. was replaced by more depressing themes; drug use, the unintended dark sides of fame, and disillusionment with his previously-optimistic outlook.

Over the course of 2012 and early 2013, Mac had begun a spiral into using heavier drugs to cope. As he told Complex Magazine in 2013,

I was not happy and I was on lean very heavy [during the Macadelic tour.] I was so fucked up all the time it was bad. My friends couldn’t even look at me the same. I was lost.

This notably darker period in Mac Miller’s life gave way to an even darker period in his music. On Halloween of 2013, Mac Miller released an almost comically dark Horror Core album under the pseudonym Delusional Thomas.

Delusional Thomas was a pitched-up alter ego (a la Quasimoto). Imagine a Cartesian Demon bent on skewing Mac Miller towards self-destruction, hopelessness, and despair. The album’s content was centered around drug use, violence, suicide, insanity and hyperbolic evil. The production consisted of babies crying, sirens, gun fire, and other over-the-top unsettling soundscapes.

In the most profound track off the mixtape, “Grandpa Used to Carry A Flask”, the narrative voice alternates fluently between Mac Miller and Delusional Thomas, sometimes within the span of a single line.

It starts as nihilistic manifesto and slowly devolves into a single-person argument fueled by drugs and impending psychosis:

What’s the purpose of everything, who the fuck cares?

We run scared, cause nothing fair and we don’t become aware

Pretend it don’t exist, ignorance, the only bliss … To leave you holy, prepare for the apocalypse

Sixty thousand on a rollie, cookies with the chocolate chips

Rapping hippopotamus, mothafuck a zookeeper

I don’t do features, I snort glue and chew ether

… Mr. Jesus can you save my life?

The mixtape is brilliant, and also shockingly dark; listen at your own caution:

This dark period continued through his next studio album Faces — this time as a proper Mac Miller release, which immediately received widespread critical acclaim. Compared to Delusional Thomas, the album was a more honest acknowledgement of the artist’s struggles with drug addiction, mental health, and celebrity status.