A wholly inessential chapter that adds nothing to the stories of Canada’s top crooning crodies.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you’ll be aware of Drake’s battle with Kendrick, and the constant ‘diss-course’ around it. I can’t open social media without a meme or another angle to their exhausted beef. Even after putting up a solid fight with ‘Push Ups’ and the expertly written ‘Family Matters’, the consensus is that Drizzy got his ass kicked. After his defeat, he dropped some decent but quickly forgotten material in his 100 Gigs EP, and he didn’t win over any favour by suing Kenny over ‘Not Like Us’ containing false, inflammatory rumours – as if he didn’t get just as scrappy with his own taunts. It must have stung seeing the Compton boogeyman perform at the Superbowl, with the whole crowd ready to sing that famed “A Minoooor!”.
But even before the war, his last few albums have followed a formula – bloated, bland and banal. It’s like watching a film franchise that keeps churning out sequel after sequel. There are always a couple bangers, some enjoyable moments. Unfortunately, they’re mostly suffocated in a swamp of forgettable material. With each record, the effort and quality control sinks lower. On first listen, I swore Certified Lover Boy was his worst release so far. After hearing 2023’s For All The Dogs, his past flops seemed like great efforts in comparison.
Now, with the world watching for his next move, he’s enlisted fellow OVO-crooner PARTYNEXTDOOR to bring out a joint album. These two have given us some classic, atmospheric R&B/hip-hop tracks before like “Recognize”, “Over Here” and “Come and See Me”. They usually follow similar sonic blueprints, never venturing too far into experimentation, but they spearheaded this 12 AM in-the-Six, snowy, washed-out trap ‘n’ B sound. Making “some sexy songs” has been one of their main selling points for their whole careers. With a title like this, surely, they can’t miss… right?
Well, anyone looking for some cool late-night drive music should be careful, because this drop could certainly put you at risk of falling asleep at the wheel. Honestly, you could replace most of the vocals here with waves and whale sounds and get your full 9 hours. The highlights on this are few and far between, more than ever for a Drake release. Most of it is a sludge of Auto-croon, 808 slow jams that bleed into one another – if someone switched around the names of 80% of these tracks, you’d probably be none the wiser.
There’s a few strong melodies and concepts within opener ‘CN TOWER’, with a minimalistic, spacey beat, and some enjoyably corny lyrics, saying that the Tower is “red tonight/like the text I sent you from the bed tonight”. But then, like mad (mid) scientists, the recipe repeats itself on the next track, ‘MOTH BALLS’, only with some added booming bass and a snoozy beat slowdown. PARTY’s lyric of “She tastes like water” makes sense, considering his vocals sound like they’ve been recorded at the bottom of a swimming pool. You’d think two of the world’s biggest artists wouldn’t skimp on at least having decent sound quality, and that’s without mentioning Drake’s singing on this project – robotic, sterile and smothered in pitch correction.
But no amount of polish can make up for the uninspired songwriting on these tracks. On “SMALL TOWN FAME”, an icy instrumental that feels like an IYRTITL throwback gets the wind taken out of it with Drake’s “I’m haaaating way too hard” chorus, that sounds like he’s reading from an Instagram comment section. The passionless “something about you” melody repeated umpteen times on the track of the same name exemplifies how the craft has taken a backseat to the general vibe. PARTY’s brightest moment comes in the solo track “DEEPER”, with a spacey backing that incorporates some nice harmonic textures, a fitting interlude in the first half of the tracklist. But for the most part, he feels like an extra on his own show, claiming the most monotonous, mumbling moments of this lengthy tracklist.
One of the most exhilarating turns on this rollercoaster log flume ride is “GIMME A HUG’, where Drizzy delivers his strongest rap performance above a filtered Aaron Hall sample, building tension and picking up dynamically with a banging brass-trap beat switch. There are some confident lines like ‘funny how it’s only bitch n***as waiting on the boy’s obituary’, and some classic cheesiness with ‘them Nike tights is hugging on that ass like they missed it.’ Some might dislike its evolution into a “where my hug at?” anthem, begging his favourite dancers to embrace him in the club, but I think it might be self-aware in leaning into the ‘soft rapper’ label people give him – a music video of him crying and cheering at the strip joint, wiping his tears with bands before throwing them would fit perfectly.
Another fun bop is the Atlanta-Bass inspired ‘NOKIA’, which cleverly buries the classic Nokia ringtone within its bouncy beat. Drake adopts a nearly old-school 2000’s kinda cadence, with some Graduation-Kanye style quips – ‘I see your waist shrunk my love/you got some bass in the trunk, my love.’ The 80’s electro-pop synths and drum machines add some light colour between the murky tracklist, playing a similar role to “Rich Baby Daddy” from For All the Dogs. The call-out chorus and “who’s calling my phone?” backing vocals provide one of the greatest earworms on this project.
Annoyingly, there is a good record lost somewhere in-between its odd sequencing. Why is the closing minute of ‘CRYING IN CHANEL’ not the foundation for the whole song? Its Sampha-esque vocal chops and intriguing hook sound like a bonus track from Nothing Was the Same, infinitely more interesting than the parts that precede it. Why was ‘PIMMIE’S DILEMMA’ not made into a proper song with both artists featuring? It plays like a rough draft, but you can hear the potential in its airy guitar plucks and Pimmie’s delicate performance. Even the last rap number, ‘GLORIOUS’, feels like a moment where Drake could have flexed his lyrical muscles, but it wastes time oddly splicing Ice Spice quotes into his verses, and his dejected drill flow seems like he doesn’t care anymore that deep into the album.
And don’t get me started on the first-week-of-Duolingo disaster that is ‘MEET YOUR PADRE’. I don’t usually subscribe to the ‘culture chameleon/vulture’ labels detractors give him, but his Spanish here is as convincing as when Cartman drew Jenifer Lopez on his hand and said, “my kisses taste like tacos”.
All in all, this feels like a wasted opportunity to prove himself – Drake’s always had his artistry and authenticity as “the most successful rapper alive” brought into question. In previous projects he’s shown himself capable of balancing between insightful, clever lyricism for the rap fans and infectious melodies for the pop crowd. For the most part, this project delivers neither. After his public flogging, right now would have been the perfect time to remind us why we loved him in the first place. I guess maybe they did tell us it’d just be ‘Some Sexy Songs’ in the title – truly, nothing more.
RATING: 3/10