Bully, Ye’s 12th solo album, finds him excavating the past instead of reckoning with it.
We knew this moment was coming. Ever since Kanye West, now Ye, told his friend and podcast host Justin La Boy that he was naming his next album Bully over a year ago, we knew he would again attempt to get back in the good graces of fans, haters, and onlookers alike with his most valuable currency: new music. Unless you truly are divorced from popular culture or so value your mental health that you ignore most of the daily ineptitudes on social media, you likely came across one of Ye’s very public and prolonged meltdowns. These have been happening since he’s had Twitter (now X), but the most recent string seemed to have started with, or been caused by, his messy decoupling from adidas in 2022. The German footwear giant announced that it was ending its successful partnership with Ye due to internal workplace complaints and antisemitic comments he made across various platforms and interviews.
From there, Ye vaulted from indignity to indignity—rocking a White Lives Matter T-shirt with Candace Owens during Paris Fashion Week, publicly disrespecting Black executives at adidas, and denying the Holocaust in interviews with people like Alex Jones, just to rattle off a few—seemingly looking for new ways to engender shock and awe. It all culminated in a spectacular flame out in 2025 which saw the beleaguered superstar, among many other things, conducting interviews while wearing a modified KKK outfit, and recording a vile and astounding song with alternative rapper Dave Blunts praising Adolf Hitler.
By that point, many of his longtime friends and associates began to distance themselves and make clear they do not agree with nor share the views and beliefs spouted by Ye. UMG and Sony Music both denounced his actions. Apple Music removed a number of the playlists it had created with his music. Retailers and fashion brands shunned him. The man who spent the past two decades dazzling the music and fashion industries had found himself largely ostracized from both.
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Down and out, Ye retreated. He signed a deal with gamma., the multidisciplinary creative agency that’s recently released albums from Usher, Mariah Carey, and Rick Ross, and dropped a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal that acted as a public apology for his recent actions. In it, he explained, the car accident that nearly took his life and, in turn, helped power the single that made him a household name, left him misdiagnosed. “The deeper injury, the one inside my skull, went unnoticed,” he wrote before explaining that he now knows he has bipolar type 1.
He also announced that he was going to release an LP version of the Bully EP he released in 2025. As you could imagine, fans were skeptical. Was he apologizing because he wanted to clear the way for his new album? There’s a running joke among Ye fans that he goes through a cycle every few years. Step 1: He acts or does something deeply antisocial that causes fans to bristle and decamp. Step 2: He apologizes. Step 3: He does something else to drive people away. Step 4: He releases new music that largely makes people forget why they were upset with him in the first place.
The most recent example came in the form of his collaborative album with Ty Dolla $ign, Vultures 1, which featured the single “Carnival” that went No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Ozzy Osbourne complained that even though he refused to clear the sample of Black Sabbath’s song “Iron Man” due to Ye’s antisemitic remarks, Ye used it anyway. Ye had to remove the sample and replace it with one of his own songs that sampled “Iron Man.”
Despite the success of “Carnival” and Vultures 1, which itself went No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, critics felt that, while the album had surprising moments, it was far from Ye or Ty’s best work. “Ultimately, Vultures 1 is a simulacrum of a strong Ye album — sometimes thinly constructed, but thickened with harsh sound and polished to a high shine,” wrote Jon Caramanica for the New York Times. In other words, it wasn’t good enough to distract from the chaos Ye wrought.
That framework may now be untenable with all the bedlam Ye has caused over the past few years. There’s likely nothing Ye can do to make people digest his art without the foul taste of his bigotry. His new album, Bully, is the first test of that notion.
Much like Vultures 1, Bully finds Ye looking more to the past than the future. Up until The Life of Pablo, it felt as if Ye was working in real time to not only figure out who he is at that particular moment but what we all are in relation to each other. His albums played with form, texture, sound, and language in a way pop artists of his stature would never attempt. He wasn’t afraid to leave past successful conventions in the past in favor of something new. Bully sees none of that. We’re treated to a sort of excavation of his career thus far. For example, we get the abrasive industrial chops of the Yeezus era via the Travis Scott-featuring “Father.” And we even dip all the way back to his mixtape days with the comparably simple, dirty soul sampling of “Whatever Works.”
It all feels comfortable if not needed. There’s little here that feels essential. He doesn’t dive deep into his personal affairs or answer many questions people have, instead opting to toss out lines here and there that touch on his return (“I’m back like an Epi-Pen,” as he says on “Father”) or the work he’s doing on his mental health (“Kicked all the ego right out of the door” and “I’ve been fighting for my life,” he says on “This One Here”). There’s also the issue of his vocal performance.
In the run-up to this album, Ye announced that he was not using AI on the project after the small backlash he faced last year when he said he enjoyed using the tools to help with stem splitting. Many wondered, after listening, if the Ye we hear on the album who often seems flat and unenthused about the content is actually the real Ye or an AI creation. Without analyzing from afar, the simplest explanation may be that this new vocally restrained Ye is the result of whatever treatment he mentioned in the WSJ advertisement.
Another difference: Unlike Ye of old, the songs don’t sprint and build towards a maximalist end. Many are less than two minutes long and don’t carry much of a structure, if any. It makes sense for the era we’re in, with attention spans desiccated and artists like Yeat and Playboi Carti considered the vanguard—but that’s not what we’ve come to expect from Ye. He usually rises above the moment and the times. That said, for fans of Ye it may be a hopeful listen; an album as a reset. A way to spin the dial back to zero to start working on the next combination.
But, for everyone else, it may just be another album.
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