End Of An Era For Childish Gambino: Donald Glover Reveals Why He's Retiring The Name

“He was 17 back in '01/ Now we forty-teen, havin' no fun”.

Those are lyrics from Childish Gambino’s soulful sax-infused number Survive, the third single on his newest - and final - album under the Childish Gambino moniker.

For Gambino, Bando Stone And The New World is a concept album originally meant for the big screen, shadowing the story of a big-time singer trying to record his magnum opus on an island while the world around comes to an end. The character Bando Stone and the alter-ego Childish Gambino have a lot of parallels, both the fictional and the real looking into the mirror of what it means to come to an end. 

Childish Gambino is one of the oldest and most prominent parts of Donald Glover’s career, sticking with the Renaissance Man as he extended his resume from rapper to comedian, actor, director, producer, and father. 

Famously taking his stage name from a Wu-Tang Clan name generator, the rapper released his first mixtape, Sick Boi, in 2008, followed by Poindexter in 2009 and I Am Just A Rapper and its follow-up, I Am Just A Rapper 2, in 2010.

Trying to fit into a whitewashed zeitgeist, the young rapper sampled everything from Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, and St Vincent as a backdrop for his nasally Lil Wayne-inspired inflection. The rapper truly came into his own when leaving Indie-sleaze behind and taking his writing chops from Comedy Central to spin crude lyrical banter over blunt and aggressive cadence. He debuted this style on his 2011 album, Camp, and carried millennials and Gen Z through the 2010s with the follow-up album, Because The Internet, in 2013. 

A chameleon, Gambino then changed again to a new, unexpected style, incorporating R&B and soul elements from the black excellence of the 70s and earlier. Influences such as Sly Stone, Funkadelic, and Shuggie Otis can be heard through wobbly slap-basslines, gospel choruses, and dark soundscapes. A challenging album to swallow for older fans, Awaken My Love eventually reigned as a Gambino classic, going on to win the rapper his first Grammy for the hit, Redbone.

While these eras marked the peak of Gambino, the end of an era for Donald Glover comes as no surprise: rumours of his previously unnamed work Atavista being the last Childish Gambino album made the rounds for a while, as the singer released the project with a blank white cover, and numbers for song names.

Despite a positive reception, it looked like an unfinished project from the start. The album got a proper name and release at the beginning of 2024, with Gambino saying to the press, “We’re releasing Atavista, but after that, there’s the final Childish Gambino album.”

Glover recently spoke intimately with The New York Times about the reasoning behind the retirement of Childish Gambino. 

“It really was just like, ‘Oh, it’s done,’” he told the publication about when he realised the project was finished. “It’s not fulfilling. And I just felt like I didn’t need to build in this way anymore.”

“I’m not 25 anymore, standing in front of a boulder like, ‘This has to move,’” he said of his life trajectory changing, experiencing the passing of Donald Glover Snr and being a father to 3 sons. “You give what you can, but there’s beauty everywhere in every moment. You don’t have to build it. You don’t have to search for it.”

Like most of his past discography, Glover worked hard with co-manager Fam Uderorji to try and create another cult classic to make up for there being no more to follow after Bando Stone:

“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 than chart metrics,” he said.

The new album arrives after Childish Gambino recently announced his tour of Australia and New Zealand, marking his first stops down under since 2019. Glover will be accompanied by special guest Amaarae on all dates, with demand leading to additional dates being announced in Sydney and Melbourne.