Post Malone Doesn’t Care About Number One Songs Anymore

Post Malone spoke about battling burnout, refusing to compromise, and ditching chart games on his new album, Twelve Carat Toothache, in a new profile in Billboard. 

In the nearly three years since the release of Hollywood’s Bleeding, Post Malone has stayed relatively quiet, moving from Los Angeles to a much more remote estate in Utah. While the move provided some peace and quiet after his prolific, star-making run from 2016’s Stoney to Hollywood’s Bleeding, Post admitted in the years since he wasn’t that interested in playing guitar, making beats, or doing music of any kind.

“You think about everything at the same time, and it’s fucking overload,” he said. “There’s a lot riding on the music. There’s a lot riding on just being able to keep making songs. And that’s hard to do because you’re like, ‘Fuck — I already talked about everything.’ And you kind of run out of ideas, and that’s scary shit.”

It was only after some sessions with his regular collaborator, Louis Bell, that the creative spark returned. Of the songs on Twelve Carat Toothache, Post Malone said he wanted to “speak more to how I’m feeling at the moment: the ups and downs and the disarray and the bipolar aspect of being an artist in the mainstream.” 

Post also tried to make a more concise record, and he alluded to some potential tension with his label, Republic, over the album’s length, which is expected to be a relatively tight 45 minutes. (Super-long LPs — such as Post Malone’s own 64-minute Beer Bongs and Bentleys — have proven particularly lucrative in the streaming era.)

“Trying to shove 20 to 25 songs, it doesn’t work,” Post Malone said. “Talking to the label [it’s like], ‘Oh, if you have less songs, you’re not going to stream as much,’ but the whole thing is that you don’t want to compromise your art and your gut vibe on anything. I’ve made a lot of compromises, especially musically, but now I don’t feel like I want to anymore. I don’t need a Number One; that doesn’t matter to me no more, and at a point, it did.”

Post Malone has yet to announce any official details about Twelve Carat Toothache, such as a release date or tracklist. A tour in support of the album could come in 2023, according to his manager Dre London.

From Rolling Stone US.