XXXTENTACION - Bad Vibes Forever (2LP) - Bone Vinyl

Bad Vibes Forever closes a complicated circle. Issued on December 6, 2019 through the Bad Vibes Forever imprint with EMPIRE handling distribution, it was framed as XXXTENTACION’s final studio statement, stitched together from material he left behind and finished by his tight-knit collaborators. You can hear both the care and the strain of that task. The record tries to hold all the versions of Jahseh Onfroy at once, the whispery acoustic diarist, the bruised singer, the aggressive rapper, the genre scavenger who could jump from punk to dancehall without blinking.

The title track captures what drew so many listeners in. It leans on a gentle guitar figure, a heartbeat kick, and a sticky hook from PnB Rock, with Trippie Redd floating right in X’s emotional register. It is intimate but not small; you feel the bedroom-scale production, yet the melody carries like a radio single. “HEARTEATER,” released with a stark video starring Geneva Ayala, strips things back even more. It is one of the most haunting moments here, a reminder of how he could make confessionals feel like field recordings, messy and human.

But the album wears its big-guest ambition on its sleeve too. “School Shooters” brings in Lil Wayne, and the contrast works because Wayne finds a sober tone that matches the song’s uneasy guitars and clipped drums. Blink-182 show up on “It’s All Fading to Black,” a pop-punk crossover that feels almost on-the-nose until the chorus lands and you realize how much X’s hook writing already flirted with that era’s style. “Ecstasy” with Noah Cyrus is featherlight and melancholy, a late-night drive as a duet. “NorthStar (Remix)” ropes in Joyner Lucas for a flinty back-and-forth that nods to traditional rap sparring, while “Royalty” invites Ky-Mani Marley, Vybz Kartel, and Stefflon Don into a dancehall pocket that suits his cadence surprisingly well. None of that feels like fluke casting. He talked often about absorbing everything, and this is the eclectic map that spilled out.

John Cunningham, who stood behind so much of X’s work, helps keep a thread running through the patchwork. You hear his fingerprints in the sparse arrangements, in the way vocals get plenty of space while bass and kick do the heavy lifting. Still, the posthumous reality shows. A few sketches feel skeletal, ideas that might have grown with more studio time. Sequencing leans long and drifty, like a playlist that refuses to pick a lane. If you came up on 17 and still return to “Jocelyn Flores,” you might wish for more of that sharpened focus. If you fell for the hurricane energy of “Look at Me!,” some mid-album lulls will test your patience.

Even so, there are stretches that hit hard. “The Only Time I Feel Alive” rides a cavernous low end and distorted edges that recall his most abrasive moments, but the hook slips into wounded pop. “What’s Good” knocks with classic mixtape urgency. Then a quiet cut sneaks up on you and you are back in confession mode, as if the studio door was left cracked overnight and you wandered into someone’s notebook. That push and pull, chaos and intimacy, is the core of Bad Vibes Forever. It is uneven because his catalog was uneven, and it is moving for the same reason.

For anyone debating the format, Bad Vibes Forever vinyl gives the record a little more breath. The low-end weight sits warmer, the acoustic guitars sound less brittle, and the genre pivots feel like scene changes instead of hard edits. If you like collecting XXXTENTACION vinyl, this one rounds out the shelf with the late-era experiments alongside the cult favorites. I found my copy while crate digging at a Melbourne record store; hearing “HEARTEATER” spill out of the listening station speakers made me remember why physical listening slows you down in the right ways. If you prefer to buy XXXTENTACION records online, most shops that specialize in hip-hop and crossover pop have kept this one in rotation, and you will often see other XXXTENTACION albums on vinyl bundled in. Fans in the crate game across the world, from local spots to big-box sellers of vinyl records Australia wide, know this album finds curious listeners.

Bad Vibes Forever is not the tidy career capstone people write in fantasies, but it is a document of reach and restlessness that defined his rise. The features underline the bridges he could build, the bare songs remind you he did not need them, and the production team’s stitching, while visible, holds. If you come to it as a fan, you find the fragments you loved. If you are new, you hear the contradictions that made him a flashpoint. Either way, as a listening experience and as a piece of XXXTENTACION vinyl history, it earns a place in the stack.