Circles was released in 2020 as Mac Miller's sixth studio album and his first posthumous album. It was created as a companion piece to Swimming, the 2018 album that had shown Miller moving into a warmer, more reflective space where rap, soul, jazz, funk, and quiet singing could sit together. Before his death in September 2018, Miller had been working on this material with producer and composer Jon Brion, who had also contributed to Swimming. Afterward, Brion completed the album based on the conversations and direction he had shared with Miller. The title gives the album its emotional shape. Swimming suggested endurance and the effort to stay afloat; Circles suggests repetition, return, and the difficulty of breaking old patterns. But the record does not feel like a collection of unfinished sketches. It is calm, carefully arranged, and unusually intimate, built around soft drums, bass lines, keyboards, guitar textures, and Miller's understated voice. There is still hip hop in its language, but Circles often leans closer to neo-soul, funk, soft rock, and singer-songwriter music than to a traditional rap album. The opening title track immediately sets the mood with gentle resignation rather than spectacle. 'Complicated' turns frustration and everyday pressure into a light, melodic groove, while 'Blue World' uses brighter production to contrast with Miller's reflective writing. 'Good News' became the album's central song and its first single. Its plainspoken sadness, quiet humor, and exhaustion made it one of the most affecting songs in Miller's catalog, especially because it did not dramatize pain; it simply let the listener hear someone trying to keep moving. The album also contains some of Miller's most open-hearted writing. 'Everybody' is based on Arthur Lee's 'Everybody's Gotta Live', and Miller's version fits naturally into the album's larger concern with acceptance, survival, and impermanence. 'Woods' and 'Hand Me Downs' bring warmth and intimacy, with the latter featuring Baro Sura in a way that supports the song without pulling focus from Miller. 'That's on Me' is one of the record's barest moments, built around accountability and emotional fatigue, while 'Surf' offers one of the album's clearest images of patience and release. Circles was received as a deeply respectful completion of Miller's final creative direction rather than a posthumous product assembled without care. It debuted at number three on the Billboard 200 and was widely praised for its tenderness, restraint, and coherence. In Mac Miller's catalog, it stands as the closing half of the Swimming in Circles idea: a soft, vulnerable, musically adventurous record about cycles, self-knowledge, and the fragile hope of finding peace inside repetition.