Dark Times: Vince Staples Drops the Distance on His Def Jam Farewell

Vince Staples closes his run at Def Jam with Dark Times, a 13-track album that trades bravado for something quieter. The record isn’t interested in flexing. It wants to sit with grief, money trouble and old wounds, and it does that over warm, blues-inflected production that never fights the lyrics for space.

Numbers Behind the Record

• Artist: Vince Staples
• Album: Dark Times (2024)
• Tracks: 13
• Length: 35 minutes
• Metacritic score: 82/100

Close Your Eyes and Swing to Justin

The album opens with Close Your Eyes and Swing, a brief mood-setter that functions as a doorway rather than a song. Black&Blue follows and gives the record its first real statement, moody and unresolved.

Government Cheese lands early and lands hard. It’s one of the tracks singled out for praise, and the reason is obvious: Staples turns childhood scarcity into something specific and unsentimental, not a slogan.

Children’s Song, another standout, does something similar from a different angle — plainspoken, a little eerie, willing to let a simple melody carry a heavy idea. Shame on the Devil, the fifth track, is the album’s emotional center. It’s the one song here that keeps getting singled out, and it earns that attention with writing that feels unguarded in a way Staples rarely allows himself.

Étouffée is the longest track on the album and the most sonically rich. It simmers rather than rushes, and it rewards the extra length. Liars is brief, a quick gut-punch, and Justin closes this stretch on a smaller, more private note.

“Radio” Through Little Homies

The middle-to-late run doesn’t chase a single obvious highlight, but it doesn’t sag either. “Radio,” Nothing Matters and Little Homies each add texture rather than filler — a slow-motion groove here, a resigned hook there. None of the three needs to be a centerpiece to justify its spot; together they keep the album’s tone consistent without repeating itself.

Freeman and the Closing Track

Freeman tightens things back up before the closer. Why Won’t the Sun Come Out?, the final track, gives the album its title in spirit if not in name — a question left open rather than answered, which is the right way to end a record built on unresolved feeling.

Here’s the short version of how the album’s best moments rank against each other:

1. Shame on the Devil
2. Étouffée
3. Government Cheese
4. Children’s Song

That order isn’t arbitrary. It moves from the album’s most emotionally direct song to its most sonically ambitious, then to its sharpest piece of writing, then to its plainest and maybe its bravest.

Rolling Stone put it best: “It feels brave for Staples to reach towards new depths of understanding about his life and the people he encounters.”

That bravery is the whole point of Dark Times. Staples has spent his career keeping listeners at arm’s length with irony and deadpan. Here he drops the distance. The production, warm and low-lit throughout, never oversells the emotion; it just makes room for it.

The album is short by design.

Thirty-five minutes is enough to make the point and get out, and nothing on the tracklist feels like padding. Even the two sub-minute tracks, Close Your Eyes and Swing and Liars, function as connective tissue rather than dead air. That discipline is part of why the record holds together as well as it does.

Dark Times isn’t a flashy send-off from a major label, and it isn’t trying to be. It’s a record about weight — financial, emotional, historical — delivered by an artist willing to let that weight show. The hooks are smaller than on some of his earlier work, and the album doesn’t chase a single. What it chases instead is honesty, and it catches it more often than not.

This is Vince Staples at his most exposed, and it’s some of his best writing to date. The production supports rather than decorates, the sequencing never wastes a minute, and the four tracks that rise above the rest — Shame on the Devil, Étouffée, Government Cheese and Children’s Song — would anchor any album in his catalog.

Dark Times earns its title and earns its praise. It’s a melancholic, warm record that stays with you, and one of the more honest albums Staples has made.

Score: 82/100

album review · Dark Times · Def Jam · hip-hop · Vince Staples