Childish Gambino review, Bando Stone & the New World: Donald Glover’s alter-ego delivers an overgrown opus

Actor and musician says goodbye to his musical persona with a 17-track album that’s as great as it is unwieldy

“Are we gonna die?” asks a child’s voice. “Not tonight,” comes the answer. The child is seven-year-old Legend Glover, son of showbiz multi-hyphenate Donald Glover. The response is his father’s.

This exchange is the very first sound we hear on Bando Stone & the New World, the fifth full-length album from Glover’s shape-shifting music project under the moniker Childish Gambino. And yet, the album is a death, of sorts: Glover has framed Bando Stone as a farewell, the final record released as what he describes as the Gambino “character”. At 40, the Atlanta star is through being Childish.

Bando Stone isn’t so much grown-up as overgrown, like a verdant but unruly garden. This is an album of enormous scope, an hour-long, 17-track odyssey that also, we are told, serves as the soundtrack to a forthcoming musical of the same name. The range of styles and musical influences here is daunting. There are shades of Yeezus in the harsh electronica of the album opener “H3@RT$ W3RE M3NT TO F7¥”; his flow on the verses of “Survive” – a pop-rap winner that’s all smooth harmonies and snaky basslines – also sounds distinctly Kanye-esque. Then, suddenly, it sounds like you’re listening to a completely different artist: on the breezy, utterly infectious pop jam “Real Love”, or the afrobeat-infused “In the Night”, one of the album’s two singles, which features Amaarae and Jorja Smith.

Glover holds a quite specific reputation in the world of music. Though he is undoubtedly one of the most successful screen actors to have made the leap across, Glover’s early output has a somewhat mixed legacy. Camp, his 2011 debut, is notorious for its sweaty, obnoxious one-liners – and its many dicey quips about Asian women. But his sound has changed a lot over the years and, at times, he’s proved capable of something original and lasting: the elastic, unique “Redbone”, from the the funkadelic venture “Awaken, My Love”, or the combative, politically charged “This is America”, which birthed one of the most discussed music videos in recent memory.

There is nothing on Bando Stone that is arresting enough to supplant either of these tracks at the top of Glover’s musical canon. But there are plenty of strong ones: the mellow, jazzy “No Excuses”, for instance, or “Running Around (feat. Fousheé)”, a triumphantly catchy track that flaunts a surprising aptitude for Sam Fenderish indie-pop choruses. Camp defenders will also appreciate the vestiges of Glover’s penchant for goofier wordplay: “I’m a make a billi’ like I’m Eilish,” Glover raps on “Talk My S***”; on “Survive”, he quips that he’s “with my son, watching Bluey like we both Crip”.

‘Bando Stone & the New World’ is the fifth and final studio album by Childish Gambino (RCA Records)

Glover has said that he geared the sound of Bando Stone towards his forthcoming stadium tour. “For this album, I really wanted to be able to play big rooms and have big, anthemic songs that fill those rooms,” he said. This is particularly evident on songs such as “A Place Where Love Goes” and “Lithonia”, a truly anthemic pop-rock ballad. Production on the album is sublime throughout, drawing from a roster of big-name technicians – including Ludwig Goransson, Max Martin, Steve Lacy, and Glover himself. There are also a welcome smattering of featured artists, among them Yeat, Flo Milli, and, in a track conceptually reminiscent of Eminem’s “My Dad’s Gone Crazy”, his son Legend, contributing some proper bars on “Can You Feel Me”.

Bando Stone, sprawling and maximalist, will do little to dispel the notion that Glover is a self-serious artiste. There is no forgetting, for instance, the naval-gazing 2021 interview he conducted with himself as his own interviewer. “Know I got an ego ’bout as big as Lake Tahoe,” he admits on “Dadvocate”. But the thing about Glover is that, while he may have grand notions of his own artistry, it often – in Atlanta, or in his very best music recordings – lives up to it. Bando Stone may be the work of a man high on his own metaphorical supply. But more likely than not, you’ll end up high on it too.