With the exception of Summertime ‘06, which was two discs and 20 songs, Vince Staples has never made long projects. His discography is mostly made up of tapes and albums that hover around the ten-song mark and his recent project, FM!, fits into the same mold. The project — which consists of eight straight-up songs, two interludes from Earl Sweatshirt and Tyga each, and one skit — is tied together by a mock-radio show format courtesy of longtime L.A. radio personalities Big Boy, Ayyde Vargas, and others. With a 22-minute runtime, it’s both concise and cutting, a car ride through beautiful and treacherous Long Beach avenues that harshly spits back at the uncomfortable gaze the 25-year-old the rapper has often been subjected to.

Staples has come to hold a strange position in rap: he’s been both criticized and celebrated, sometimes more so than his actual music, for speaking out about social issues on Twitter, and his gang affiliation has become a negligent fallback lens through which journalists view his music (in a 2017 interview with NPR, he bemoaned this: "You can't find a Vince Staples article where it doesn't say, "Ex-gang member,'") . But through all of this, he’s proven to be a better critic than many of the people writing reviews of his albums. After experimenting with a more electronic sound on Big Fish Theory, the new project sounds like a return to form, one where the freedom and uncertainty of a hot summer are mirrored in Kenny Beats and Hager’s careening production.

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The opener, “Feels Like Summer,” finds Staples balancing the unbridled joy and ever-lurking dangers that characterize much of the project: “We gon’ party til the sun or the guns come out.” “FUN!” deals with the contradictions between Staples’s past and his more extravagant present, all while masquerading as a party anthem. On the closing track, “Tweakin’,” Staples grapples with the death that’s surrounded him, even as he’s become rich and famous: “Tryna get rich, get everybody fed/ But everybody dead.” Before you know it, just like summer, the project is already over.

