'Twelve Carat Toothache' is perhaps the most self-loathing album by any conflicted pop idol since Kurt Cobain.
Oh, he sympathized, of course — nodded his prodigiously tattooed head in sorry recognition as you complained about creepy fans showing up outside your house and about fake friends and about how empty you feel after blowing somebody else’s annual salary on a watch.
But having witnessed A-list peers like Billie Eilish, Drake and Lorde lament the unexpected hardship of celebrity, Malone seems to have concluded that none were being honest about the role they played in their own misery. Behold “Twelve Carat Toothache,” perhaps the most self-loathing album by any conflicted pop idol since Kurt Cobain, whose biggest hit Malone nods to right at the beginning: “You’re the superstar / Entertain us,” he sings in opener “Reputation,” a bleary piano ballad that goes on to enumerate the many ways he’s failed to live up to his venerated position.
“I was born to f— up,” he declares at the track’s climax, his voice a kind of trembling sheep’s bleat, “I was born / What a shame.”Malone’s fourth studio LP — and his follow-up to the most-consumed album of 2019, “Hollywood’s Bleeding” — “Twelve Carat Toothache” presents a discomfiting portrait of the 26-year-old singer and rapper whose smoothie-like blend of hip-hop, rock, country and synth-pop have made him a titan of the streaming era.
His confessions aren’t especially novel: He drinks too much; he lets his big mouth get him into fights; he cheats on his lovers and induces his friends’ lovers to cheat on them with him. But the desperation with which he details his inability to healthily navigate being a famous person — the amazing lack of vanity in his language — sets him apart from pop’s other rich-and-sad types.