For more than two decades Aesop Rock has made a career out of turning anxiety into architecture, building entire universes out of nonlinear memories, street-corner observations, and the kind of poetic clutter most rappers wouldn’t dare touch. But with I Heard It’s A Mess There Too, the underground titan takes a phrase that started as an offhand lyric and flips it into a full-blown thesis on connection, dislocation, and the strange comfort of knowing the chaos isn’t just happening to you. The album’s title came from Aesop checking in with friends scattered across the map, trading updates on the state of their city or state of their mind. The refrain, “I heard it’s a mess there too,” became a kind of emotional shorthand, a way of acknowledging shared turbulence without naming it outright. As he sat with the line, it grew into a lens for the way we navigate distance, a way to document the world as it shifts beneath our feet while still reaching back toward the people who tether us.

If Aesop has always been a master of dense, labyrinthine production, I Heard It’s A Mess There Too marks a deliberate reset. “I made a conscious shift in my process,” he explains. “Cleaner, more minimal.” And it shows. The beats feel differently here, with stripped-down drums, unhurried basslines, and space for his voice to cut through it all. It is not sparse so much as surgically precise, a series of sonic rooms where each object has purpose.

The twelve tracks wander like dispatches from different coordinates, each one a postcard from a slightly off-kilter world. There is a sense of movement baked into the album, the kind that comes from tinkering, recalibrating, chasing new tools and new textures. You can hear him pushing against old habits, resisting the impulse to pile layers until they collapse under their own density. Instead, he lets mood drive the machine.

That restraint becomes its own kind of revelation. With the beats no longer competing for oxygen, Aesop’s voice feels sharper than ever, wry, weary, cutting, and deeply human. The stories spill out like overheard conversations on a cross-country trip, funny, bleak, and strangely comforting in their specificity. I Heard It’s A Mess There Too is not a travelogue and it is not a crisis album, though it draws from both. It is a document of a restless mind trying to pin down the world while acknowledging it refuses to stay still. Aesop Rock does not just capture the mess. He makes it meaningful.