How many albums did Mac Miller release while he was alive?
Mac Miller‘s life was cut short on September 7th, 2018, after suffering an accidental overdose from a combination of fentanyl, alcohol and cocaine. The Pittsburgh rapper, who was 26 when he died, constantly challenged himself with each album and showed a different side to his talents whenever possible.
Born Malcolm James McCormick on January 19th, 1992, Mac grew up in the Point Breeze area of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to photographer and architect parents and also had an older brother. He initially attended Winchester Thurston School but graduated from Taylor Allderdice High School, where Wiz Khalifa also went to school.
Mac started rapping at 14 after teaching himself to play the piano, guitar, drums and bass by six years old. “Once I hit 15, I got real serious about it and it changed my life completely,” he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “I used to be into sports, play all the sports, go to all the high school parties. But once I found out hip-hop is almost like a job, that’s all I did.”
He added, “I was still trying to figure out who I was at this point. When you’re a young kid and you’re trying to rap you listen to the radio and you don’t know what you want to talk about. I didn’t know what I wanted to talk about. I just wanted to tell people I could rap.”
Mac previously went by the rap name Easy Mac, also stylised at EZ Mac, and released his debut mixtape But My Mackin’ Ain’t Easy in 2007 when he was just 15 years old. Mixtapes played a huge part in Mac’s come-up, making a name for himself with projects such as The Jukebox: Prelude to Class Clown and The High Life, but most importantly, K.I.D.S., which was inspired by the 1995 movie Kids and is considered a classic hip-hop mixtape from the blog era.
“I was sure of it from the time I was ten years old,” he told The Line of Best Fit. “I was sure that I was going to be doing music. I used to just play guitar and sing and I remember I was sure because I would always write songs.”
So, how many albums did Mac Miller release while he was alive?
Mac released five studio albums during his lifetime, starting with Blue Slide Park in 2011, which served as his only number one album on the Billboard 200. He released his ambitious follow-up, 2013’s Watching Movies with the Sound Off, two years later, which attempted to move away from his “Easy Mac with the cheesy raps” persona, alongside notable guests such as Tyler, The Creator, ScHoolboy Q, Earl Sweatshirt, Ab-Soul and Action Bronson.
He then signed to Warner Records and released GO:OD AM in 2015 and The Divine Feminine in 2016. His final album, Swimming, was released just one month before his death. The album debuted at number three on the Billboard 200 with 66,000 units. Mac produced it alongside Jon Brion, J Cole, DJ Dahi, Dev Hynes, Flying Lotus, and others.
Since his death, his family have released two posthumous albums. Circles arrived in 2020 after being completed by Jon Brion, while Balloonerism dropped in 2025 after being recorded in 2013, with Thundercat playing a significant part in its production.