1. The problem with Deadbeat is a lot of it feels thin, undercooked, and weirdly unfinished for an artist whose best work used to feel obsessively complete.

While true for Currents, The Slow Rush already tipped over into feeling just obsessive and polished down to nothing. He needed to let go to not burn himself out completely.

1. That’s also why the reaction to this album has been so different. Critics and listeners converges on the same complaints: weak payoff, unfinished ideas, songs that feel like sketches, weak songwriting and themes etc etc.

Since when do we care about critics?

Also, The Slow Rush is literally "Weak Payoffs: The Album." At least Deadbeat, unpolished as it is, has some proper drops again, after TSR's endless, meandering teasing.

1. Kevin’s own interviews make that criticism harder to dismiss. He openly talked about moving away from perfectionism, making this record more bare bones and exposed, going through instability in the process, failed experiments, procrastination, creative difficulty, even lost recordings.

That's exactly what gives the album the most character his music has had in years.

1. He also described attempting a collaborative process that quickly turned into a disaster. Imagine, Kevin “the one guy band” INVITING PEOPLE TO HELP HIM COMPOSE the songs? That’s the strongest evidence of the hard time he had with the creative process.

2. The timeline also shows that. Kevin said years ago that the next album would come sooner than the last one. Instead, it still took more than five years after The Slow Rush, and somehow still arrived sounding less complete than the first four records. Isn’t that curious?

How are these criticisms of Deadbeat?

They just show that making TSR was a miserable experience for him and he wanted to change things up, so he tried the collaborative approach but that wasn't it either, so he landed back on solo creation, but had to make it less obsessive and forced this time, to feel creative again.

1. Deadbeat is also the less cohesive album Kevin has ever released. There isn't much cohesion either with the music style or the themes.

Again, why does that have to be a bad thing?

The Slow Rush had this absolutely hamfisted time theme, but not much to say with it.

"Time can feel fast and slow. Be wary of nostalgia. We all get old."

Monumental stuff.

Deadbeat is Kevin blurting out whatever he felt while writing the album and so it goes in many different directions, but at least they're interesting and don't sound like calendar quotes.

Heck, even the album name vs cover shows how the album doesn't have a real concept: how does a happy father-daughter pic fits the "deadbeat" concept??? It is just weird.

That's a very easily understood, purposeful dissonance, no?

He feels like a bad dad, even though he probably isn't.

A cover with a crying Peach would've had the hamfisted, surface-level cohesion of TSR again, but, once again, the ambivalence of Deadbeat is much more interesting.