STAR LINE

Album ∙ Hip-Hop/Rap ∙ 2025

Chance the Rapper

Since his debut mixtape, 2012’s 10 Day, launched 18-year-old Chancelor Bennett to indie stardom, fans have watched the Chicago native grow up in real time—from stoner on high school suspension to precocious hometown hero to God-fearing family man. “I lived an adulthood at a really young age,” Chance, now 32, tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I was touring and traveling and supporting multiple family members, businesses, friends, everything. I’m damn near a child star, you know what I’m saying?” Marking the journey were three studio mixtapes now deemed classics and an official debut album, 2019’s The Big Day, on which Lil Chano from 79th stepped with purpose into the roles of husband, father, and adult.

The Chance who opens his sophomore album by declaring, “Surprise! It’s the boy who lived,” is not the same man from six years prior; since then, there was the acrimonious split from his longtime manager in 2020, then the 2024 announcement that he and his wife were separating after five years of marriage. On STAR LINE (named after Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line, an oceanic shipping line in the Back-to-Africa movement), he faces reality head-on, addressing not just his own struggles but those of the world with his trademark wit, poignance, and double-take-worthy wordplay. “Politically, internationally, the world is going through it,” he tells Lowe. “And we’re really getting to see the elasticity and the bandwidth of moral fiber. Everything is getting stretched to its limits.”

Though Chance draws inspiration from recent travels to Ghana and Jamaica, STAR LINE is grounded in his hometown of Chicago, from whose culture he draws lines to Black culture across the diaspora. Here, the juke drums on “Speed of Light” co-mingle with the Rastafarian roots of “Tree,” the futurist dancehall of “Burn Ya Block,” and the Afrobeats rhythms of “Space & Time.” He shares the spotlight with Chicagoans past and present—from ’90s heroes Do or Die to up-and-comers like BabyChiefDoIt—and slips in slick interpolations of local anthems both beloved and esoteric. (Real heads will catch the reference to BBU’s “Chi Don’t Dance” on the Jamila Woods duet “No More Old Men.”) And on the soulful “Back to the Go,” Chance shakes off a series of stumbles, packs his bags, and heads back home: “Been around the board/Now I’m back to the Go.”