Mac Miller’s estate has revealed exciting news: a second posthumous album titled Balloonerism is on its way.
The announcement came during Tyler, The Creator’s Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival in Los Angeles, where a visually stunning trailer for the project played between sets from Sampha and The Alchemist.
The two-and-a-half-minute clip, which boasts high-quality CGI animation, gives fans a taste of what’s to come with two unreleased tracks: “The Song That Changed Everything” (rumored to feature SZA) and “5 Dollar Pony Rides.”
The trailer ends with the word “Soon” before revealing the album cover: an abstract, balloon-inspired artwork painted by artist Alim Smith. This image has a sentimental backstory, as Smith first shared a similar piece on Instagram in 2018, just weeks before Mac’s passing. Mac himself commented on the post, saying, “Need this.”
Balloonerism 🎈 pic.twitter.com/AOmEXOPUlR
— The Mac Miller Memoir (@MacMillerMemoir) November 17, 2024
Mac Miller’s ‘Balloonerism’ album is set to be officially released—the announcement was just made at Camp Flog Gnaw 🎈 pic.twitter.com/C545YKAtOC
— Rap Favorites (@RapFavorites) November 17, 2024
Balloonerism is said to have been recorded by Mac Miller over the course of a week in 2014, right before the creation of his beloved mixtape Faces. In the 2022 book The Book of Mac: Remembering Mac Miller, Mac’s longtime manager, Quentin Cuff, described the project as “very zany,” revealing that the rapper and engineer Josh Berg spent countless hours in the bottom studio of Mac’s Los Angeles home, producing “otherworldly” and “weird” sounds that stood out from everything else at the time.
Cuff also noted that many tracks from Balloonerism were originally meant for Faces, but the album quickly became its own distinct project. “There’s so many albums during that time that were in the thought process,” he said in a 2022 excerpt from Passion of the Weiss.
Though the exact release date is still under wraps, Balloonerism will be Mac Miller’s second posthumous release, following his 2020 album Circles. Circles was in the works before Mac’s untimely death and was completed by producer Jon Brion. The album was meant to complement his fifth studio album Swimming, which was released just before Mac tragically passed away from an accidental drug overdose in September 2018.