The 2010s File Feature
Enemies
Post Malone Featuring DaBaby: The Making of "Enemies" Post Malone's commercial dominance of the late 2010s was built on an ability to release music that felt…
01 The Story
Post Malone Featuring DaBaby: The Making of "Enemies"
Post Malone's commercial dominance of the late 2010s was built on an ability to release music that felt effortless while achieving chart performance that was anything but accidental. "Enemies," featuring DaBaby, arrived in September 2019 as part of the album Hollywood's Bleeding, a project that became one of the defining commercial statements of its era. The collaboration between two of the most commercially potent artists of that moment produced a track that debuted with genuine force and sustained its presence on the Billboard Hot 100 for an extended run.
Hollywood's Bleeding and Its Cultural Moment
Hollywood's Bleeding was released on September 6, 2019, through Republic Records, and it immediately established itself as one of the year's most significant albums. The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with first-week equivalent album units that ranked among the largest of 2019, and it remained a dominant commercial presence for months after its release. "Enemies" was embedded within this larger album context, benefiting from the enormous listener attention that surrounded the project's release and from Post Malone's status as arguably the most commercially successful solo artist in American popular music at that moment.
Post Malone had spent the preceding two years accumulating a series of chart achievements that were genuinely unprecedented in the streaming era. His album beerbongs and bentleys had shattered streaming records upon its release in 2018, and his singles had occupied the top positions of the Hot 100 for extended periods. By the time Hollywood's Bleeding arrived, expectations were very high, and the album largely met them, generating multiple chart entries simultaneously and keeping Post Malone in continuous conversation with popular culture.
DaBaby's Featuring Role and Career Context
DaBaby's appearance on "Enemies" arrived at a moment of particularly strong career momentum for the Charlotte-based rapper. His debut album Baby on Baby had established him as one of rap's most commercially vital new voices in early 2019, and his relentless release schedule had maintained his visibility throughout the year. The collaboration with Post Malone gave DaBaby his highest-profile placement to date alongside one of pop music's biggest stars, and he executed the assignment with the assured delivery and sharp construction that had made him a breakout figure.
DaBaby's verse on "Enemies" demonstrated the qualities that made him so appealing to listeners and collaborators during this period: a rhythmic precision that gave his lines an almost percussive quality, subject matter that balanced braggadocio with self-awareness, and a charismatic presence that dominated its allocated space without overwhelming the track's overall mood. The chemistry between the two artists was noted by critics as one of the song's assets.
Chart Performance and Billboard Hot 100 Run
"Enemies" entered the Billboard Hot 100 on September 21, 2019, debuting at number 16, which was simultaneously its peak position. The song's chart trajectory moved downward from that debut peak, settling at 26 in its second week, 36 in its third, 52 in its fourth, and 62 in its fifth. This descent from a high debut reflects the pattern common to album tracks from blockbuster releases, which draw enormous first-week streams from fans consuming the full album and then settle at a more sustainable organic level.
The song spent a total of 15 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, a run that demonstrated its ability to hold audience interest well beyond the initial album rollout period. Fifteen weeks on the Hot 100 for an album track, particularly one that was not selected as the album's lead promotional single, is a mark of genuine resonance with listeners. The sustained streaming performance that kept the song chart-eligible throughout that period reflected the deep engagement that Post Malone's core audience maintained with Hollywood's Bleeding as an album experience rather than just a singles vehicle.
Production and Sound Design
The production on "Enemies" drew from the atmospheric, melancholic sonic palette that had become associated with Post Malone's most successful work. Dark synthesizer textures, understated percussion, and melodic elements that blurred the boundary between hip-hop and alternative rock created an environment in which Post Malone's blended vocal approach, part rapping, part singing, felt entirely natural. The track's production was credited to Louis Bell, a frequent Post Malone collaborator who had helped define the sonic signature of his biggest commercial moments.
Louis Bell's production throughout Hollywood's Bleeding maintained a consistent atmospheric quality that gave the album coherence as a listening experience, and "Enemies" exemplified that consistency. The sonic texture was immediately recognizable as Post Malone music without being derivative of specific previous tracks, a balance between artistic identity and creative variation that is difficult to sustain and that Bell navigated effectively throughout the project.
Streaming Dominance and the New Chart Reality
The chart performance of "Enemies" and its companion tracks from Hollywood's Bleeding illustrated how fundamentally the streaming era had transformed the relationship between album releases and chart positions. In the pre-streaming era, album tracks rarely appeared on the Hot 100 alongside the promoted singles; by 2019, an artist of Post Malone's commercial stature could expect multiple album tracks to debut simultaneously, a phenomenon that compressed the space available for other artists and reshaped how the chart functioned as a measure of popular taste.
The song's approximately 47 million YouTube views contributed to this broader streaming picture, representing one part of a multi-platform consumption pattern that aggregated across Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and other services to generate the streaming figures that drove its Hot 100 position. This kind of multi-platform presence was characteristic of how music functioned commercially in 2019, and "Enemies" was fully embedded in that ecosystem.
Critical Reception
Reviews of Hollywood's Bleeding generally acknowledged "Enemies" as one of the album's more effective moments, praising the DaBaby collaboration as a well-matched pairing and noting the production's atmospheric effectiveness. Some critics identified the song as emblematic of Post Malone's particular commercial genius: the ability to create music that felt emotionally accessible and sonically distinctive without demanding too much active engagement from its listeners, a quality that translated readily across demographic groups and listening contexts.
02 Song Meaning
Betrayal, Wariness, and the Aftermath of Trust in "Enemies"
Post Malone's "Enemies," featuring DaBaby, addresses themes that recur throughout the emotional landscape of his work: the experience of betrayal by people who were once trusted, the resulting wariness that success and fame generate, and the particular kind of loneliness that comes from not knowing whose affection is genuine and whose is contingent on continued prosperity. These themes are not unique to Post Malone's music, but the way "Enemies" treats them, with a combination of melancholy and hardened resolve, gives the material a distinctive character within the song's genre.
Success and Its Social Complications
A significant portion of "Enemies" is concerned with the social consequences of success, specifically the way that achieving fame and wealth transforms social relationships in ways that are difficult to navigate. The narrator describes a landscape populated by people who present as allies but whose actual motivations are opportunistic rather than affectionate. This experience of having one's social world destabilized by success is a frequent subject in hip-hop and rap, and it connects to a broader tradition of examining the psychological costs of achieved ambition.
Post Malone's treatment of this theme draws from his own biographical experience of extraordinarily rapid ascent from relative obscurity to mainstream dominance. The speed of that ascent created circumstances in which genuine relationships and purely instrumental ones became difficult to distinguish, and the emotional residue of that difficulty is present throughout his work, reaching a concentrated expression in "Enemies." The song articulates a kind of protective wariness, not paranoia exactly, but a cultivated skepticism that the narrator has developed in response to experience.
DaBaby's Contribution: Confidence as Counterpoint
DaBaby's verse functions as a thematic counterpoint to Post Malone's more melancholic framing. Where Post Malone inhabits a space of vulnerable honesty about the costs of betrayal, DaBaby's delivery is more assertive and less emotionally exposed. He engages with similar subject matter, the unreliability of social allegiances and the need to maintain a degree of self-protective skepticism, but from a position of declared invulnerability rather than felt hurt. This contrast between the two performers' approaches gives the song a more complex emotional texture than either would produce alone, creating a space between Post Malone's confessional mode and DaBaby's armored confidence.
The contrast also reflects something genuine about the two artists' respective public personas at the time of the song's release. Post Malone had cultivated an image that combined commercial dominance with emotional openness, a willingness to discuss his feelings and anxieties in public that was unusual for an artist of his commercial stature. DaBaby's public presence was built more on bravado and performative strength. The song captures both these modes and demonstrates that they are compatible rather than contradictory responses to the same underlying experience.
Musical Mood and Thematic Environment
The production environment that Louis Bell created for "Enemies" serves its thematic content with considerable precision. The dark synthesizer textures and atmospheric sonic palette establish a mood of reflective unease, a soundscape that feels simultaneously intimate and slightly threatening. This sonic environment is appropriate to the song's subject matter, which deals with social relationships that have curdled from warmth to danger and with the emotional work of processing that transformation.
The melodic elements in the production carry a quality of restrained sadness, something that in Post Malone's hands becomes a signature emotional register. His voice moves between rap and singing with a fluency that makes the distinction feel irrelevant, and this vocal approach, blurring genre boundaries to prioritize emotional directness, is well-suited to the material. The atmospheric production and Post Malone's blended vocal style together create a listening experience that emphasizes feeling over technical display, which aligns with how the song constructs its emotional argument.
Cultural Context: Fame and Authenticity
The themes of "Enemies" participate in a broader cultural conversation about the relationship between fame and authentic human connection that was particularly intense in the late 2010s. Social media had made parasocial relationships with celebrities more intense and more immediate than ever before, and artists were increasingly navigating the experience of being simultaneously hyper-visible to millions of strangers and genuinely isolated from meaningful personal connection. Post Malone's music addressed this experience with unusual consistency and honesty, and "Enemies" is one of the clearer expressions of how he understood the social landscape of celebrity in that environment.
The song's cultural resonance also draws from its relatability outside the specific context of fame. The experience of discovering that trusted relationships were not what they appeared is universal, and the emotional logic of developing protective wariness in response is widely shared. Listeners who had never experienced anything resembling fame could find in the song an articulation of the ordinary human experience of betrayal and its aftermath, which accounts in part for the song's broad cross-demographic appeal.
Composition and Repeated Listening
One of "Enemies" more notable structural features is the way it rewards repeated listening. The initial encounter with the song is dominated by its atmospheric production and the broad emotional statement of its chorus, but subsequent listens reveal more specific and carefully constructed observations in the verses. This quality of increasing disclosure with familiarity is a mark of songwriting craft that extends beyond the surface appeal of mood and production, and it helps explain why the song maintained audience engagement across a fifteen-week chart run rather than exhausting its appeal quickly.
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