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Critic Reviews
91
You’ve got a few pieces of trash, a couple of sketches whose mileage varies on how well you dig their hooks, and plenty of fantastic stuff that ranks with M.I.A.’s best work.
9y
83
AIM may not be the Next Great M.I.A. album, but it delivers a solid collection of distinctive, crowd-friendly bangers that sound like no one else.
9y
80
M.I.A., AKA Mathangi Arulpragasam, has said that although she’ll probably continue to “put music out”, she thinks ‘AIM’ could be her last album. So it’s slightly surprising to find that it contains some of her most relaxed and reflective work.
9y
75
A decisively joyful soufflé ballooning with hopeful optimism.
7y
75
If this it to be M.I.A.’s final release, it’s a fittingly confrontational, vibrant and invigorating piece of work.
9y
70
Even if AIM is more scattered than her finest work, at its best it plays like a scrapbook that pieces together over a decade's worth of sounds and issues.
9y
70
A.I.M. may not be concise, but it's focused and purposeful, a loose collection characterized by sticky-hot swagger, political awareness and, most importantly, urgency.
9y
70
For all its merits AIM is a muddled record, and her divisiveness is sometimes counterproductive.
9y
67
The softer, less abrasive style in which she’s chosen to address these topics makes AIM an enjoyable listen from start to finish, but the album lacks the bold blows that have become M.I.A.’s trademark.
9y
60
If this is her last album (as she has intimated), a true original bows out on a more equable note.
8y
60
The experimental sting of earlier releases has worn perilously thin.
9y
60
Sadly, the LP suffers at times from the same issue that marred her previous works 'Matangi' and 'MAYA' – the content too often fails to mirror the breadth of her vision and the scope of the grandiose subjects she tackles.
9y
60
After rebelling against pop structure on 2010's MAYA and to a lesser extent 2013's Matangi, M.I.A. has released her most classically pop album since her commercial crossover, Kala, nearly a decade ago.
9y
60
These are global-facing pop songs that somehow have no place: too slow for a club, too confrontational for the bedroom, too skatty for the radio.
9y
60
From an artist whose past work has stoked controversy and even caused her to receive death threats, AIM finds M.I.A. content to simply make an album, not craft a definitive statement to punctuate her career.
9y
60
M.I.A.'s skill as a buoyant beat-rider remains intact, and there are moments on AIM where the political and personal blur evocatively.
9y
60
A contrary, hard to grapple with statement on superficial, RT-if-you-support-this-cause politics, M.I.A’s album is one that stands composed with a fixed grin, while internally raging.
9y
60
The idea of taking any one of M.I.A.'s albums and trimming its excess to 12 of the most colorfully resonant offerings is tantalizing to imagine. The same goes for this one.
9y
60
Despite the wealth of glowing beats and rhymes, AIM would have benefitted from some unpredictability.
9y
59
At this point her music is more potent in theory than execution.
9y
55
AIM, her fifth album, has all the sights, sounds and sentiments of her previous work, but it’s weighed down by an overwhelming sense of tedium. M.I.A. used to sound busy because she was brimming with ideas, but here she’s busy trying to find an idea to cling to.
9y
50
MIA’s powers of provocation may have waned with her most recent releases, but it feels unjust that an artist once so potent might go out with a whimper like this, rather than a bang.
9y
43
AIM sounds like a field recording made in the middle of a bustling Sri Lankan market: colorful, flavorful, and most of all, noisy.
9y
40
The result, predictably, is a meager collection of would-be low-charting singles that never approaches anything like a unified farewell. What this suggests is that M.I.A. is just tired, or that music simply isn’t as fulfilling for her as it once was.
9y
40
As was the case with both Maya and Matangi, there are only fleeting glimpses of brilliance on a long-player littered with ideas that never seemed to get past the kernel stage.
9y
The further she goes, the more she escapes with her sound than ever. I've listened to three of her projects, from best to probably worst, and with each album, I feel like her production is starting to decline to the point of becoming repetitive. I might be saying this wrong, but that's how I truly feel. I don't wish for her to have weak songs, but for her to truly wake up and do what she used to do: bangers that are melodic and truly test her skills.
never ever ever understood the hate on this?? i’m not sure why but this album sounds great to me and i am in the vast minority on that but idc it’s my personal fav.
ALSO don’t listen to M.I.A.!
Covid is real, wear your mask.
AIM is the combination of all the qualities and potentials of the artist M.I.A. and basically thrown into the trash. It's so sad to think that this is probably the last album of the singer since it destroys an almost perfect discography, moreover I do not believe that the same person who created Arular and Kala was able to create this work, I wonder if there are other reasons behind an album with such decadence of quality. We have some decent songs like "Borders" and ... read more
This is where the decline in her music began; unfortunately, this album is a bit weak. I'd only single out about 5 or 6 songs—the rest is either very boring or just bad.
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Track List
| 1 | Borders 4:11 | 79 |
| 2 | Go Off 3:04 | 73 |
| 3 | Bird Song 3:01 | 60 |
| 4 | Jump In 2:23 | 46 |
| 5 | Freedun 4:41 feat. ZAYN | 71 |
| 6 | Foreign Friend 4:23 feat. Dexta Daps | 56 |
| 7 | Finally 3:00 | 63 |
| 8 | A.M.P (All My People) 3:21 | 74 |
| 9 | Ali R U OK? 3:30 | 67 |
| 10 | Visa 2:51 | 71 |
| 11 | Fly Pirate 2:25 | 60 |
| 12 | Survivor 2:59 | 56 |
Total Length: 39 minutes
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1mo
Hope this album gets a critical reappraisal like MAYA and Matangi have soon, it's genuinely quite consistently enjoyable especially if u like 2010s electronic music
4mo
Like the problem with it is that it's not boring at all, it's very interesting and groovy, but it's not making it possible to develop much love for the songs, they come and go despite everything
