Aminé Releases Surprise New Project ‘ONEPOINTFIVE’

Aminé, the Portland rapper best known for his 2016 sleeper hit “Caroline,” has a bone to pick with how rappers classify their albums. In the past few years, rappers releasing new music have often drawn distinctions between what is an album versus what is a mixtape (or, in Drake’s case, what is a playlist). Aminé, who dropped a surprise project called ONEPOINTFIVE on Tuesday night, opted to call it an “EP/LP/Mixtape/Album.”

“Mixtapes are albums, and albums are mixtapes,” Aminé says (to himself) in a promotional video dropped just hours before the release of ONEPOINTFIVE. “They call their albums mixtapes because, if it flops, it’s an EP.”

“They,” presumably, are other rappers he’d rather not name. As for Aminé himself, he’s given ONEPOINTFIVE a title that hints at its place in his catalog. This is the first project he’s released since the surprising, ebullient Good For You, which saw the rapper expanding his horizons as an artist after catapulting to fame with one of the most unique hits in rap in the past few years. Presumably, this isn’t his next big statement album, but a stop on the way to album number two. That said, even at first glance it’s clear these aren’t throwaway tracks: “Birthdays these days be the worst days/Cause I know I’m getting older and unhappier/Me and my father love each other but we barely show it/He hates that I left home and the lawn is his to mow it” is a personal admission from the first track, and he brought the attention-grabbing Rico Nasty, Gunna and G Herbo along for features.

After a brief mislabeling of the project on Apple Music in which ONEPOINTFIVE was listed under another artist’s name, the project is now available to stream on all platforms.