7 Takeaways From Childish Gambino’s ‘Bando Stone & the New World’

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - JUNE 30: Donald Glover AKA Childish Gambino performs onstage during the 2024 BET Awards at Peacock Theater on June 30, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images for BET)

Donald Glover’s Childish Gambino project has always emphasized the grandiose. His albums are bolstered by weighty themes, knotty narratives, and heady concepts. It’s fitting, then, that his last album under the moniker, Bando Stone & the New World, is also its most spectacular in scope. In a recent New York Times profile, he explained why the name was being retired, saying: “It really was just like, ’Oh, it’s done. It’s not fulfilling. And I just felt like I didn’t need to build in this way anymore.” If this is really the farewell he says it is, then he’s going out with an absolute bang.

The Childish Gambino project is often a good way to track where Glover’s other creative entities are at, too. His playful, often-panned early raps coincided with his career in comedy, particularly on the show Community. His acclaimed breakthrough, 2016’s Awaken, My Love!, came as he was creating his most celebrated body of work today, the television show Atlanta. Now, on the heels of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, it’s unclear what exactly Glover will be doing next, but the cinematic maximalism of Bando Stone and its to-be-released accompanying film suggests something that spans multiple mediums.

Though the album is marketed as a supplement to the film, Donald Glover album releases are still massive events in their own rights. The album takes on the air of a rock opera, telling the tale of Bando Stone—a name that may or may not be the alter-ego of “Cody LaRae,” who is sung about on “Lithonia”—who is on the wrong side of celebrity and success as a musical artist. Glover blends narratives and perspectives, mixing reality and fiction to create a surreal story that unfurls like many of his psychedelic opuses. The album is out and we dug in. Here are seven early takeaways from listening to Childish Gambino’s Bando Stone & the New World.

Is this coming from Bando or Glover’s perspective?

Much has been made about the origin story that informs Gambino’s new album, and how it serves as a soundtrack for a film of the same name. Glover stars in the movie as a character named Bando Stone, a superstar musician whose best music is in the past. This meta-narrative makes its way into the music, but it’s not always easy to tell when Glover is telling Stone’s story and when he’s reflecting on personal experiences. “Lithonia,” the album’s first single, is named after a town about 30 minutes from where Glover grew up in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Stone makes its way into the protagonist’s name, and on the song he refers to a character named “Cody LaRae,” which might be the Stone character’s given name. Confused? On “Survive,” he raps: “It's a new verse with my old flow/ There's a new world and an old one/ He was 17 back in '01.” Glover, born in 1983, was 17 years old back in 2001. —Will Schube

A large gumbo of genres

While this may be Donald Glover’s last album under the Childish Gambino moniker, he’s going out on a high note, playing into some of the themes of early records while simultaneously expanding his sound into new directions. Glover has always been a voracious consumer of a variety of styles, and early albums had him flipping unexpected tracks into hip-hop samples. On Awaken, My Love!, he used the funk stylings of bands like Parliament Funkadelic as a launching point, and on Bando Stone, he remains as thrillingly restless as ever. Hints of radio-ready pop, electro, calypso, punk, and more make their way onto the album, creating the chameleonic and unpredictable listening experience Gambino is known for. —Will Schube

Yeat’s role in Bando Stone’s new world

One of those “collaborations you wouldn’t expect” happened when Gambino and Yeat shared space on the iridescent “Cruisin’”. The dystopian, extraterrestrial world Yeat built with his latest album, 2093, sees Bando Stone follow a similar mold. After all, the plot of the film depicts Bando navigating a postmodern world rid of people; their link-up makes perfect sense for the album’s concept. However, Yeat’s feature feels more like a glitch in the software than a main storyline, mumbling through a 30-second bridge only to fade away within Bino’s emotive croons. It’s almost as if Yeat was abducted from the song mid-sentence, but perhaps this was calculated? Or maybe it’s just a short-lived cameo. —Jon Barlas

Legend Glover has real talent

It seems like every rapper in 2024 is including their children on their albums—we’re looking at you, ‘Ye and Drake—and Glover has hopped on the trend, recruiting his son Legend for an adorable cut called “Can You Feel Me.” The song spins the alphabet song into a funky, tropical track with Gambino employing an impressive falsetto while Legend carries the second verse, offering up some impressive bars. He raps: “I'm so fly like Batman/ I can fly up to the moon/ Stars in the sky like a stadium/ They lightin' up the whole room now.” Later on, Legend drops one of the most heartwarming lines on the project, spitting: “I wanna go wherever you are/ You're in my heart, you're in my soul/ We're never apart/ Riding around like kids in the dark.”—Will Schube

There’s only one really great rap performance from Gambino

While “Talk My Shit” with Amaarae and Flo Milli does feature rapping from Gambino, it’s not as bombastic and stank face-inducing as “Yoshinoya.” Flowing over droning keys and vocal textures, a drum breakdown at its midway point sees Gambino flip a switch—relentlessly tearing off a series of rhymes that fans haven’t heard in years. Bino goes at everybody from oldheads rocking hypebeast gear, think piece journalists, the state of the rap game, and maybe Drake, with rhymes that are more tongue-in-cheek than anything. “I'm allergic to this rap shit/Made a song, but spent more time writin' the caption/I'm an actor, you can put that on set/I'm about that action/My tweets all lower case, I saw these niggas cappin'/My homegirl said you a stalker, so we ain't dappin',” he raps.

“Yoshinoya” sees Glover unleash his inner rap devil for one last go—and man was it worth the wait. —Jon Barlas

The album makes us want to see the film more

Ambition is a double edged sword for Glover, who not only lends his hand to the production of nearly every song, but directs and is set to star in the forthcoming film. Bando Stone and The New World is not a quintessential Gambino album, and if you went into it thinking Bino would return to his roots for his last hurrah, you were sorely mistaken. However, Glover strikes immediate intrigue and sparks of brilliance throughout the 17-track opus. It admittedly feels like it’s made for the movies and “big rooms” as opposed to being a commercial marvel. This, though, was to be expected, as Glover enlists the help of Ludwig Göransson—the Swedish composer who scored films such as Oppenheimer, Black Panther, Tenet and worked with Bino on Awaken My Love!—to aid in the record’s anthemic essence. It feels like you’re listening to a film with the record’s sonic swirls, twists and turns without the visuals (yet). Bando is sure to shine brighter on the big screen, which will make the soundtrack album hit different than on first listen. —Jon Barlas

The end of Childish Gambino is here

With Bando Stone being Childish Gambino’s final album, it was interesting to see how he’d wrap things up, if the final song would serve as a reflection of his career, a capstone for the album, or a signifier of something related to the accompanying film. “A Place Where Love Goes” seems to hit each of these metrics. Even the opening sample, which seems to be a looped vocal chop of a girl saying, “We don't care about the party/ We just wanna dance,” alludes to his career. Glover has always done things on his own terms; he won’t show up to the party unless the dancefloor has ample space.

During the chorus, he sings, “All my life/ I had to try to survive/ But/ it is all right now/ We found a place/ A place where love goes.” The line may be about the protagonist of his film, but it’s also a poignant reflection on his career. He’s spent years proving doubters wrong, and he’s landed himself as one of the most important figures in modern culture. Despite his missteps, quirks, and willingness to move at his own unpredictable whimsy, our artistic era has become heavily influenced by the work of Childish Gambino and Donald Glover. —Will Schube