Travis Scott released his third studio album Astroworld on August 3, 2018 through Cactus Jack Records and Grand Hustle Records, distributed by Epic Records. This is a catalogue album, framed as catalogue: nothing here is new, and the Travis Scott Astroworld record still matters because it is the album that turned a psychedelic rap experiment into the biggest commercial run of his career, on both sides of the border.
The title is a memorial. AstroWorld was the Six Flags amusement park in Scott’s hometown of Houston, Texas, closed in 2005 to make way for development, and Scott named the album for it years before release. He explained the idea to GQ in 2017:
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“They tore down AstroWorld to build more apartment space. That’s what it’s going to sound like, like taking an amusement park away from kids. We want it back. We want the building back. That’s why I’m doing it. It took the fun out of the city.”
The album cover, photographed by David LaChapelle, literalised the concept: a giant golden inflatable of Scott’s head as the entrance gate to the park, issued in day and night versions. The official video for “Yosemite,” embedded below and directed by Nabil, sends a young Scott searching through the jungle for the lost park itself.
Travis Scott Astroworld Tracklist And Its Canadian Production Core
The album runs 17 tracks in 58 minutes, and its guest and production list maps the whole genre in 2018. Frank Ocean opens the ride on “Carousel.” “Stop Trying to Be God” layers Kid Cudi, Philip Bailey and James Blake, with Stevie Wonder playing harmonica. The Weeknd appears twice, on “Skeletons” and “Wake Up.” Juice Wrld and Sheck Wes ride “No Bystanders,” 21 Savage takes “NC-17,” Gunna and Toronto’s own NAV feature on “Yosemite,” and Don Toliver makes an early arrival on “Can’t Say.” “Butterfly Effect,” produced by Canada’s Murda Beatz and released as a single back on May 15, 2017, closes the sequence as the record that previewed the whole world a year early.
Read the credits closely and Astroworld is partly a Canadian production story, the detail most coverage of this album skips. Toronto’s WondaGurl co-produced “No Bystanders.” Boi-1da, from Ajax, produced “NC-17” with Cubeatz. Frank Dukes, from Toronto, worked on “Wake Up” and “Astrothunder.” Nineteen85, one half of dvsn, co-produced the closing “Coffee Bean.” Add Murda Beatz on “Butterfly Effect” and NAV’s verse on “Yosemite,” and six of the album’s seventeen tracks carry a Canadian hand. The biggest American rap album of 2018 was built, in real part, by producers from the Toronto area.
The Charts: Number One In Two Countries
Astroworld debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 537,000 album-equivalent units in its first week, 270,000 of them pure sales and more than 349 million streams, the second-largest opening week of 2018 behind Drake’s Scorpion. It held number one for a second week and returned to the top that December, three weeks in total, and it was nominated for Best Rap Album at the 61st Grammy Awards.
In Canada it did the same job: the album opened at number one on the Canadian Albums Chart with 27,000 units, Scott’s first number one album in this country, and stayed on top for a second week. All seventeen tracks entered the Billboard Hot 100 at once, with “Sicko Mode” debuting at number four and “Stargazing” at number eight, making Scott only the fourth act ever to debut multiple songs inside the Hot 100 top ten in the same week. The story of the biggest of those songs is told in full in our reading of the “Sicko Mode” lyrics.
The Certifications Kept Climbing
Catalogue is measured in years, and Astroworld’s certifications kept arriving long after its release summer. The RIAA certified the album six times Platinum in the United States on August 29, 2024, and Music Canada has certified it five times Platinum, 400,000 units in Canada alone. Its singles ran even further: “Butterfly Effect” stands at nine times Platinum in the US and eight times Platinum in Canada, and “Yosemite” has reached four times Platinum in both countries.
Heard now, Astroworld holds up as the hinge record of Scott’s career: the Rodeo psychedelia scaled to stadium size without losing its strangeness, a Houston childhood landmark rebuilt as a tracklist, and a production bench deep enough to include half of Toronto’s hitmaking class. Released on August 3, 2018, it remains the fullest document of the world he has been touring ever since.
