Payback (album)

Background

Danny!'s previous record, Where Is Danny?, was noted for being highly experimental and eccentric in nature, merging genres by way of Turkish psychedelic rock, Big Band arrangements, bossa nova and library music. While a courageous and critically acclaimed effort, the album was nonetheless largely ignored by mainstream media, due mostly to Danny!'s perpetual lack of a proper record deal and publicity team at the time, but also likely to the abrupt shift in musical direction for Danny!.

Shortly after Where Is Danny?'s re-release in 2011, Danny! began to compose what began as a vindictive satirical project to expose how listeners were much more interested in high-profile collaborations than music of substance. Danny! would spend the remainder of 2011 assembling a catalog of tracks originally intended for the Interscope digital download version of what would become Payback.

Danny! would depart from Interscope's digital label in late 2011 and was later picked up by Questlove's recently relaunched Okayplayer Records.

Release

Payback, narrated by Joi Gilliam, was later revamped for an official fall 2012 release, scrapping the original track listing and encompassing elements and nuances throughout the record as homage to Timbaland and Missy Elliott collaborations from the late 1990s. For example, the drum pattern from "Go That-A-Way" emulates that which can be heard on Elliott's 1997 single "Beep Me 911", while the chirping cricket, drum programming and even ad-libs from Elliott herself from Aaliyah's "One In A Million" appear on "Far Away". All tracks were produced by Danny! himself and is considered the musical bridge between Where Is Danny? and Payback's successor, the experimental The Book Of Daniel.

The week prior to the album's release, Danny! performed "Evil" on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon with The Roots as his backing band.

Reception

Payback initially received mostly favorable reviews after being delivered to the press at the top of 2012, ultimately earning a 76% rating from review aggregator Metacritic leading up to its eventual fall release. Noting the album's scarcity and constant delays at the time, Popmatters praised Danny!'s candor as well as the cultural references scattered throughout the album, wondering "how much of the album’s more subversive elements could slip between the cracks at a time when the market behaves as though there’s simply no time or need for inspective ears".

The production on the album was unanimously acclaimed by critics; Slant Magazine deemed the beats "undeniably savvy". Sites such as AllMusic and DJ Booth lauded Danny!'s emotional purging throughout the record, with both likening Payback to an on-wax "catharsis", while others such as Rolling Stone and No Ripcord chided him for the very same thing, calling Danny! "angry" on an album "[full] of gripes". Danny! would later debunk the latter sentiments on his Tumblr blog track by track, dismissing the presentation of such notions as "lazy". Swain recanted this stance on his subsequent album, The Book Of Daniel, acknowledging that Payback was "cartoonishly entitled" and conceived during a "very, very dark time in [his] life".