Travis Scott, fresh off his critically acclaimed 2018 album“Astroworld,” returns with a new single titled “Highest In The Room.”

The song begins with a spooky whistle tone canvas that Scott’s voice promptly paints over, giving the listener a true Travis Scott experience. “HITR” seems to follow the same formula that “Astroworld” used, using particularly synthetic beats with his signature low toned under the breath voice.

“HITR” holds very true to the narrative that Scott has been following across all of his discography. Scott focuses on rapping about his wife Kylie Jenner and being far-gone off drugs in the room he is residing in, thus, “Highest In The Room.”

The backtrack sticks with its whistle tones but throughout the song, an acoustic guitar makes appearances as well as the hip-hop famous 808 drums. It holds up to be simplistic at best and encompasses Scott’s style in that manner.

The polarizing issue that stands out with this song is its similarity to Scott’s recent discography. This song feels like a track that didn’t make it onto “Astroworld,” and was left in reserves to hold his relevance in the hip-hop scene until his next album.

If you’ve listened to a Travis Scott song before, you have unconsciously listened to this track. It simply does not stand out from the crowded world that Scott has created for himself.

The one thing that does stand out from this song is the beautiful piano outro accompanied by a quick synth melody. This thirty-second outro feels like something off of Kanye West’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” which could be considered the gold-standard of modern-day hip-hop.

Fans on Twitter quickly caught onto this, describing it as a transcending experience. If Scott stuck with this disposition across the whole track, this song wouldn’t feel extremely basic.

“Astroworld” conceivably was Scott’s magnum opus. It’s plainly unfortunate to see Scott develop a copy-paste mentality when it comes to making music.

Travis Scott needs to stray away from his formulaic music-making and experiment more. Scott has proven in a thirty-second snippet he has the potential to create aesthetically magnificent music, but is lacking in his performance of providing that in his single discography.