Eminem review, Music to be Murdered By: Rapper's bitter diatribes show he is incapable of moving on

It stands to reason that Eminem would align himself with Alfred Hitchcock, the director who supposedly inspired this album – they share an active distrust of women

Eminem doesn’t care what the critics think. He cares so little, in fact, that he spends the first track on his surprise album telling us how little he cares. He really doesn’t care. Honest.

Music to be Murdered By is the rapper’s 11th studio album, following 2018’s Kamikaze, which in turn arrived a year after the critically mauled Revival. The record’s intro, “Premonition”, is essentially a diatribe about how the man born Marshall Mathers can never win (“They said I’m lyrically amazing but I have nothing to say/ But then when I put out Revival and I had something to say they said that they hate it”), where he spins all that criticism into rapid-fire bars.

It stands to reason that Eminem would align himself with Alfred Hitchcock, the director who supposedly inspired this album. Like Eminem, whose distrust of women is so entrenched that it’s more pitiable than anything, Hitchcock mistreated women, both on-screen and off. On Music to be Murdered By, the women are still strippers, bimbos and hoes; I'm reminded of a comment about Hitchcock by Bidisha in 2010: “There’s the vamp, the tramp, the snitch, the witch, the slink, the double-crossed and, best of all, the demon mommy. Don’t worry, they all get punished in the end.”

There’s a confusing roster of rap's elder statesmen and younger pop stars scattered across the (unnecessary) 20 tracks. Ed Sheeran’s idea of a wild night out is still “smoke and the bottle” and not leaving the club until it closes – on his own album it would sound cheesy; on an Eminem album, it’s laughable. Skylar Grey’s contribution on “Leaving Heaven” only serves to dial up the melodrama, while Anderson .Paak struggles to add lustre to the epically tedious “Lock it Up”.

Eminem belittles the trauma of a then 26-year-old Ariana Grande for kicks on “Unaccommodating” by comparing himself to the Manchester Arena bomber. The sour taste of this track lingers well beyond the album’s centrepiece, “Darkness”, which is intended as a searing critique of America’s toxic gun culture. Instead, his use of gunfire and explosion samples feels grossly exploitative; its message is meaningless when you consider Eminem's extensive catalogue of hyper-violent material from the past two decades.

“Yah Yah” is a rare case of quality production and well-chosen guest artists. Its scuzzy bass sounds heavily influenced by Cypress Hill’s psychedelic Elephants on Acid, and the track includes a blistering guest verse from The Roots’ Black Thought. For Eminem, though, speed is still everything – he turns on the turbo engines and blasts through bars with a velocity that makes you think of Will Ferrell in Talladega Nights: “I wanna go fast!” It’s astonishing that for all that horsepower, Eminem is incapable of moving on.