Donald Glover finished his set at the Governor’s Ball in New York over the weekend by announcing his next Childish Gambino album will be his last.
“You’re in my heart,” he said to the crowd. “I’ll see you later for the last Gambino album.”
Fans of the polymath won’t be too surprised that Glover has outgrown the moniker he plucked from an online Wu-Tang name generator. Glover has a habit of leaving creative projects early: he was a writer on 30 Rock for the first two seasons, before leaving to join the cast of Community, a job he left after five seasons in order to focus on his rap career and to create the critically-acclaimed series Atlanta. “I like endings”, he warned us in 2015, and we are seeing this over and over.
The slinky soul music he now releases under the Gambino name bears little resemblance to the joke-filled Lil Wayne pastiche of his earlier mixtape, nor the dark, conceptual hip hop of his Because The Internet album.
Of course, this doesn’t mean Glover is giving up on releasing music – it just means this particular project is coming to a close. As with everything Glover does, we’ll be sure to be surprised by what comes next.
