Donald Glover says he is retiring his long-running musical project Childish Gambino because it's no longer fulfilling for him.
In an interview with the New York Times, Glover gave a blunt answer about his moniker's future, saying, “It really was just like, ‘Oh, it’s done.' It’s not fulfilling. And I just felt like I didn’t need to build in this way anymore.”
Tomorrow (July 19), Glover will release what will be the final Childish Gambino album, Bando Stone & the New World, which will also serve as the soundtrack to a film he directed and stars in by the same name.
In the feature, Glover explains that "the continued decline of album consumption, disruptions in the touring business and the difficulty of capturing a mass audience in a heavily fractured media environment" also contributed to the decision.
It was important to him to go out on a high, which he feels is the case with Bando Stone & the New World. The goal was to make something that could bring together a big audience and encourage "a sense of togetherness."
“Success to me is, honestly, being able to put out a wide-scale album that I would listen to,” he said. “For this album, I really wanted to be able to play big rooms and have big, anthemic songs that fill those rooms, so that people feel a sense of togetherness.”
Glovers says chart performance and sales for Bando don't really matter to him. He'd rather have an album that stays with people, like SZA's SOS, which he gives as an example.
“If people listen to this album and it becomes a part of their identity, if they look back a year later and are reminded of how much they listened to it and what that felt like in the summer of ’24 — that kind of real estate is way more valuable to me,” he said.