Tag Archives: drake

Top Five Rap Albums of 2025 That We Want To Talk About

11 Jun

1. Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals – A City Drowned In God’s Black Tears

I have never heard an album go this hard. Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals deserve a lot of credit for smart, unapologetic, fiercely political stances. Too many artists talk a big game when it comes to politics and then choose an anodyne all-is-love stance or try some pathetic anti-woke grifting. This album has the backbone to call a genocide a genocide and does so right from the opening track.

The preaching is clever too. Ennals is surprisingly funny across the album. He uses the weight of the politics to add heft to an already often-punched out flow. He also just stops you cold with lines like “Bambaataa was a pedophile, Russell’s a rapist / So how far can hip-hop really take us?” in “Live at the Chinese Buffet.”

After a while with the album though, it’s the breadth of music here that astonishes. “Sometimes, Papi Chulo” channels Lupe well but has a wonderfully complex beat, something Lupe only managed a handful of times in his career. It’s more modern than a Lupe joint too. The Latin sounds are an interesting wrinkle. “Two Headed Buffalo” could be a strong Neutral Milk Hotel cut. It’s very legitimate indie rock and one of the best songs in the album. “A City Drowning. God’s Black Tears” is powerful metal.

Sometimes across this breadth, the music doesn’t quite match the killer energy of the album as a while. “The Iron Wall” is sometimes musically flat, the flow is flat and disconnected from the beat. The beats are often unexpected though even if they don’t necessarily groove. The same can be said for “Live at the Chinese Buffet”. It’s unfortunate that the most political tracks are the least musical. Even if that’s intentional, it’s not a choice that I agree with. Meanwhile, “BAGGY” is interesting to add and the submerged beat is a good addition but not one of the stronger tracks on the album. Despite some very strong moments though, it’s too slow paced.

Mostly though, they’re a lot of fun. “Everyone I Love Is Depressed” has a great funk and a liveliness that works better with the anti-suicide messaging than the overly serious Kendrick or Logic. “Soft Pack Shorty” is a fun sex rap that finds time to ground itself in material considerations but finds a lot more time to get dirty.

A City Drowned In God’s Black Tears is dizzying and unmissable. There are no rules for talent like this and Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals glory in their ability to do whatever they want.

2. Saba and No I.D. – From the Private Collection of Saba and No I.D.

Cities are bigger than you think. Give a block of land a name and you think that you can abstract it into a single entity. The people of Lisbon are friendly, the food in Rome is great, and so a city of millions of souls boils down to a simple trait. So also can two musicians as disparate as Saba and No I.D. be welded together

The album has a strong Chicago sound. It’s very reminiscent of old-school Kanye or Common. Given how much space No I.D. has to breathe here, it’s no surprise. He runs great beats throughout the album and when he and Saba sync perfectly, as in “Woes of the World,” it’s exceptional.

Interestingly, there’s also a strong strain of Dilla in the album. “Reciprocity” lets No I.D. go deep in his bag and the Dilla comes through strongly in it as in the great “30secchop.” Dilla frequently collaborated with No I.D. but I never understood him as a Chicago sound until this album contextualized him like this.

Chicago doesn’t always work out as well for Saba and No I.D. though. “Acts 1.5” has an interesting beat that Saba wastes. “Westside Bound Pt. 4” feels perfunctory from both of them. “She Called It” tries an early Childish Gambino flow that doesn’t work despite a strong atonal chorus. “Every Painting Has A Price” could have been a filler Chance the Rapper track.

However, they hit more than they miss. “How to Impress God” lets Saba go hard and No I.D. provides the perfect framing for Saba’s choppy work. From the Private Collection may not be the best work from either half but it’s good reason for their hometown to be proud of both of them, as if further reason was necessary.

3. Xang – Watch Over My Body

Watch Over My Body is a dark, viscous sludge. It is at its best when it covers and suffocates you. It is unsurprising then that it is monotonous but perhaps it was avoidable. The punishment of the monotony fits the experience of the album but still caps its quality. There are not enough ideas in here to make the quite good music do more than be another example of how DMV rap is poised to break out but still looking for the final catalyst.

4. Nino Paid – Love Me As I Am

Nino Paid is getting somewhere. Two albums in two years is no small feat and DMV rap is not far from a breakout moment. He has come as far as anyone into working it into something that can explode. Love Me As I Am isn’t all the way there but it’s getting tantalizingly close

Three tracks here highlight DMV rap as DMV rap; “Joey Story”, “Redemption” and “Play This At My Funeral.” If you want a quick taste to see if this is for you, try these three or at least just the last of them. These are cinematic, claustrophobic songs that are served well by Nino Paid’s storytelling and philosophizing. He’s fully engaged in this zone and his breathless rapping is very compelling.

I excerpt from the album because it does have an unfortunate amount of filler for a 5 minute album. “Be Safe” does nothing. “Progress Report” tries a softer beat and gets no energy from it. “Weekend in Paris” flirts with something more sultry but the mixture doesn’t work.

Much more interesting is “Try Me” that takes a pop maneuver that, while not seamless, adds some good variety. His voice is too sunken to really fit the beat and it doesn’t quite find the groove and gets lost against the peppy beat and hook but it nonetheless feels like the blueprint for something more to come.

Love Me As I Am is the same writ large. It’s not quite a full success as an album but it is both a schematic and a promise for great things to come.

5. Drake – $ome $exy $ongs 4U

Despite everything, this album reminds me how talented Drake is. As ever, he wastes it, but the talent is undeniable. Honestly, “CN TOWER” is Drake in great form. The cringe is over-the-top in his lyrics and that always works for him. The groove to “SPIDER-MAN SUPERMAN” that he plays with and denies expertly showcases how skilled a rapper he is.

The album is lazy though. “GIMME A HUG” has the framework of a great song but he doesn’t workshop it enough. He hams too much in “MEET YOUR PADRE.” He’s capable of much more finesse but pandering generates hits and Drake looks for the easiest route. That’s why so much of the album, like “SMALL TOWN FAME” or “DEEPER” is padding.

Overlooked in the memory of the feud is the energy it brought to Drake’s rap after such a long stretch of boredom. It’s a shame that the loss caused him to forget it too.

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Kendrick Lamar – GNX

12 Dec

I come not to bury Kendrick but to praise him.

GNX is another victory lap in what has become a year of victory laps for Kendrick. It’s not just that he won the highest profile rap battle in twenty years, it’s that he took down Drake. It is very, very easy to root against Drake and Kendrick didn’t just take him down, he eviscerated him. He made a song calling Drake a pedophile into the sound of the year.

This new Kendrick comes out strong right from the start of the album. When he pulls out Wayne’s flow to mock him in “wacced out murals,” it’s the return of the angry Kendrick that we want now. When he drags out “I did that” in “tv off” to remind you of “a minor” in “Not Like Us” that’s a celebration we can all get behind.

This is what makes “peekaboo” great. It’s a legitimately threatening track. Kendrick has remade himself into a truly scary dude in that beef. The chorus of “What they talkin’ ‘bout? They ain’t talkin’ ‘bout nothin’” repeated is a chant that you now know that Kendrick can back up.

This new image works well for him in the first half of “reincarnated”. This has him channeling Em for some compelling storytelling and hard rap with an excellent, propulsive beat behind him. The overarching narrative of Kendrick as the reincarnation of each of the figures doesn’t work but the music and the tone are very well done.

It falls apart in the second half of the song though. His Christianity just doesn’t work as well anymore. Firstly, they’re just not as much fun as the bangers and the takedowns that we now look for and secondly, I think we can now admit that his grasp on the Christianity was always fumbling, especially as we’ve seen how quick he was to drop it when the chance for a feud came up just as he was quick to pick up homophobia and misogyny for cheap points.

At least “reincarnated” is good music. This issue is worse in “luther” and “dodger blue.” These cuts were always questionable but now are nothing more than a waste of time. Similarly, I have less patience for “gloria” than I used to. “I Used to Love H.E.R.” is completely played out by now.

“heart pt. 6” is a nice walk down memory lane. It reminds me a lot of Jay in his look-how-far-I’ve-come mode and is a fresh style of victory lap for Kendrick but I trust him less now than I did before the beef and there’s no value in a biography when you can’t count on the honesty of the author.

GNX is still quite a solid album. Kendrick can absolutely deliver bangers when he needs to and he’s still in the post-beef glow. He’s going to get bored with those bangers soon though and while it’s still recent enough for him to continue his celebrations, it’s not clear what’s left for him when the party stops.

Part 2 – Drake

I come not to praise Drake but to bury him.

It’s not normal for a musician to have more haters than fans. Even the ones with haters for days like Bieber or Swift have a balance clearly skewed towards fans both in numbers and in passion. The only one that I can think of before now is Nickelback.

The beef made it very clear that Drake has more haters than fans. Like Nickelback, you understand it. It feels like the entire world is saturated with mediocre Drake music and he pumps out far too much of it. He’s also just unsavory. It’s not hard to not message teenagers, to not hide children, to just be normal. We all know that this feud isn’t going to end Drake’s career and honestly probably won’t even really dent him, but music would be better without him and the deluge he brings with him.

So, it’s no surprise how dishonest the discourse was during the beef. Until the knockout punches of “Meet the Grahams” and “Not Like Us” the exchanges were pretty much even, maybe shading towards Drake. This beef brought back some of his interest in rap after a long period of boredom. He had the strong flip, he had some barbs that landed and he had some solid rap in there. Kendrick finished the battle and did so decisively, but there was a battle being had.

The hate for Drake was also enough that we let Kendrick get away with a lot that I’m still not comfortable with. I thought the homophobia was lazy when Em pulled it out in “Killshot” in 2018. This is well beyond that and Kendrick dropped in a bunch of extra bigotry to boot. Kendrick admitted to the cheating in his own songs and there’s just so much dishonesty in his narratives.

You really cannot accuse Drake of jumping on trap for profit when it was him on that “Versace” remix, just as it was him recording tracks with Bad Bunny before he crossed over. This is the reality of the past decade of music, many of the biggest trends, including trap, kpop, afrobeats and reggaeton are sounds that Drake paved the way for.

The thing is that rap has taken over the place of rock. It is now the second genre in music and has been for a while. This has been in the cards for a while. The meld of singing and rap and the pop appeal of that fusion has been obvious for a long time. Had Ms. Lauryn Hill been a more consistent musician or Ye been able to actually sing it might have been either of them. Instead, it’s Drake who actually succeeded and in doing so probably made the most significant advance in rap history.

A lot of what Drake is hated for is the stuff that made rap approachable. He’s soft, he’s preoccupied with pettiness, he’s cringe and he memes, these are all things that take away the menace of rap, things that turned rap into mall music and things that made rap vastly more successful than it has ever been before.

There’s no hidden benefits to his laziness though. He’s the only musician of this level of success to never have had a truly classic album. All of his latest music, save for the feud, has been phoned in, padded garbage meant to keep other musicians in the shade. Should this battle have ended him, there would just be so much space for music to outgrow him.

Of course, kayfabe aside, this won’t end him. He won’t even feel the need to record his own MBDTF to flip his image. He’ll just brazen it out, release more mediocre music and continue to dominate the charts. Nevertheless, imagining this obituary does two things at once; show how much of Drake there is to praise and show how welcome an obituary would be.

Part 3 – Pop

The other thing the beef made clear is how much pop has eaten the rest of music. Quite likely you were plugged enough into rap discourse for the beef to have been big but outside of rap circles, it just didn’t seem to make waves. Except for “Not Like Us” there wasn’t much crossover and that was more as a banger than as a diss.

Pop is always going to be the largest genre in music. That’s the definition of popular music. I’ve just never seen it be so dominant before.

Maybe when we look back at this period, the battle will be the first thing we think of but, when it happened, the Taylor-Travis relationship was bigger news. Honestly, brat and Sabrina Carpenter probably were as well. It has been decades since the last time the two biggest names in rap went at each other but this time it’s nothing more than a sideshow to the main pop events of the year.

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Drake – For All The Dogs

11 Oct

I actually really like this album. In many ways, this is a low for Drake. His strength has never been his albums. He’s a man of moments, not of album-sized statements. This is the first time that there hasn’t even been a single to attach to. However, this is the easiest of his albums to just listen to. He’s had higher highs in all of his other albums but he has also had lower lows.

Honestly, I approach this album as background music. This is the rap equivalent of smooth jazz to me. Even the provocations that he puts in here – the shots at Rihanna, at Esparanza Spalding, the J. Cole feature – don’t really register as something worth thinking about. This is now all such well-trod ground. His talk about women is all stuff we’ve heard from him before. The 21 Savage feature is the same 21 Savage sound we’ve heard before. The Bad Bunny one is the same.

There are a couple of things that I do want to highlight. I really like “7969 Santa.” The production is so open and the song has so much space in it and the “I Don’t Like” sample is quite good. I also want to shout out the chorus of “Rich Baby Daddy” which finally brought out a little energy in Drake.

However, these are mostly just far too many songs that provide really easy-to-find grooves. One of the defenses of bloat is that you can build your own 10-track playlist from the raw materials it provides you, but honestly if I do that with Drake, none of these songs will make it. I’m never going to play this album or any track from it again. This is the least interesting Drake has ever been and somehow the most listenable album he’s ever made.

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Drake – Certified Lover Boy

18 Oct

With Certified Lover Boy, I feel like looking back a bit. Drake has always loved his nostalgia anyway. I remember with Take Care, there was a lot to get excited about. “Headlines” was the single and was necessary as that, but it’s not what I look back at. Even “HYFR’s” excited Weezy isn’t quite it. I don’t think anyone really expected how deep he would delve into the sounds of “Marvin’s Room” and “Take Care.” I don’t think we every really saw how normal they would sound.

The thing is that Drake is now a superstar. In fact, he’s now the superstar. His singing in his raps perfectly meets a world where pop has moved toward hip-hop. His corniness is now virality. Everyone’s a Toronto sadboy in this online world.

Also, there’s no one left on the throne. Kanye’s self-destruction is probably far from complete, but it has done its work. Taylor is off in the wilderness. I haven’t heard from Kendrick or Beyoncé in forever. The new kids are all still too new, too formless and too unaccomplished. Pop royalty is relentless and Drake’s the only person to have kept pace.

It’s very much in character that he does so with an album that’s almost unambiguous trash. When the most exciting thing in your album is a Kawhi cameo, there’s just not much that one can say. It’s just a lot of music that I’m happier not hearing and very little that I’m happy having heard. Something like “In The Bible” is irritating. There’s so much music here that’s just bad.

There’s stuff that could be decent if you squint. He’s got his sound down in “Girls Want Girls” even if the chorus is mind-numbingly stupid. “Fountains” is decent Afrobeats, if nothing special. You have to credit Drake with always keeping up with new trends in rap and he’s always passable at them, but they are never his highlights. He’s got solid beats in “7am On Bridle Path” and “The Remorse” but can’t put a good rap in front of either of them.

“7am On Bridle Path” is the album’s failures in a microcosm. He’s clearly the biggest person in music right now, but it’s such a poor look to stunt about it when he got it by default. It’s a diss track in a supremely uninteresting beef. This is the same guy who ended a feud by going on LeBron’s YouTube channel. There was once a time when he bodied Meek Mill but now he just can’t play it straight. Stick to the topic and go hard. Also, “wheel me to defeat like we rollerbladin'” is unacceptable. In a fair world, that would be sufficient for defeat in itself.

At least “7am On Bridle Path” has some decent music to make up for that though. The lyrical failures elsewhere don’t even have that going for them. “They’re doing something that’s not Pepsi” in “Papi’s Home”? The only thing they should be doing is writing Drake better lyrics because he needs all the help he can get. He gets off one solid line in the whole album with “Look, don’t invite me over if you throw another pity party” and the imitation line has a good sneer, but then he throws away all that goodwill and more by trying to rhyme “disability” with “this ability”. That’s just unacceptable.

It’s very often just impossible to understand. He opens a song with being jealous of a handbag. “You Only Live Twice” makes you regret living the once. I don’t know who told him and Future that “Way 2 Sexy” was a good idea but that person was wrong. Forget all of Drake’s tired Bernie Madoff comparisons, if that person was paid for that advice, that’s the greatest scam the music industry will ever see.

He finds himself on “F***ing Fans,” but that’s the kind of track that should be solid filler on a decent album, not one of the best tracks on the whole project. Certified Lover Boy is so bad that any moment of decent music is an oasis in the desert though. He preceded this album with “POPSTAR” and “Toosie Slide,” both of which were some of the best music that he’s ever made. He will follow this soon enough with more great singles, which has anyway always been his greatest strength, but for now, there is nothing in his past, present or future enough to make this album worth listening to.

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Monthly Playlist: Jul. 2021

31 Jul

This month’s top five tracks are an eclectic mix of hip-hop, indie pop, punk and everything in between. Read on for our picks:

5. “Wasting Time” by Brian Faiyaz feat. Drake

What’s Drake doing on a feature with a relatively unknown artist like Brian Faiyaz? That’s what we thought going into this song, but just a few bars made us see why Drizzy chose him. “Wasting Time” is a supple, smooth R&B track by singer Brian Faiyaz (real name Christopher Wood), tapped by the magic wand that is the Neptunes’ production. Drake’s verse layers decently well on the mellow R&B, shaking up your ears at just the right time so that Faiyaz’s vocals sound even smoother afterward. Come for the Drake, stay for the Brian Faiyaz on this one.

4. “INDUSTRY BABY” by Lil Nas X feat. Jack Harlow

At this point, Lil Nas X is an one-man industry juggernaut. We’ve spoken in the past about his ability to harvest outrage from outrage-mongers for his own benefit and, ironically, embodying the supposed right-wing ethic of pulling himself up by the bootstraps – all from a song about horses on a road. “INDUSTRY BABY” is an unabashed self-crowning by one of the biggest hitmakers of our times, and the fanfare horns in the background do add a lot to the coronation vibe. “Get your soldiers, tell ’em I ain’t layin’ low / You was never really rootin’ for me anyway,” he says, ostensibly taking aim at the industry suits trying to knock this self-made artist off his flashy perch.

And yes, the video is risque. Would you expect anything else from Lil Nas?

3. “Blouse” by Clairo

Singer-songwriter Clairo (real name Claire Contrill) has been making gentle waves in the indie pop community since her sparse electro-pop single “Pretty Girl” way back in 2017. Since then, her sound has refined to more on the acoustic and folk edge of pop, and that’s the ethos that she’s brought to her second album Sling which was released earlier this month. “Blouse”, the lead single from Sling, is as pretty as it gets, with a subtle violin that evokes green Irish pastures – or something of the sort. This is a wonderful, calming song that was the perfect gateway for us into the rest of Clairo’s album, and we hope you feel the same.

2. “BDE” by Shygirl feat. slowthai

“BDE” stands for exactly what you think it stands for. The raunchy combination features British DJ Shygirl and ubiquitous British presence, the rapper slowthai. This track is a bop, with its bouncy, club-ready beat, and it turns up to 11 with slowthai’s trademark staccato verse. “BDE” needs to be playing in every club that’s open right now. Be the star of your house party and add this to your party playlist, stat.

By the way – July has been a great month for slowthai features in general. Don’t miss out on the old-school vibes on “SLUGGER” by American rappers Kevin Abstract and $NOT featuring slowthai, and also his presence on the excellent remake of “MODEL VILLAGE” by his good friends IDLES.

1. “Clash” by Dave feat. Stormzy

Honestly, just having Stormzy on a featuring spot is one of the best indicators of a great hip hop track from the UK. And when you have British hip hop darling Dave – recently off of winning Album of the Year for Psychodrama at the 2020 Brit Awards – on the same track as well? Killer. “Clash” loops on a hypnotic piano melody layered with deliberate beats, as Dave and Stormzy talk about their lives and riches. In Dave’s case, life has changed substantially since his rise to fame. In particular, he now lives in a much richer area – to which he alludes in a number of intriguing metaphors. “Freaks, I got more than one, fuck, daddy and daughter one / Tory puttin’ in labour, this that Jeremy Corbyn one,” goes the hook, instantly bringing to mind a posh Tory girl with daddy issues. Seen in that light, even the background piano seems like a subversion of the stereotypically status-symbol instrument into a grimy beat for this duo.

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Monthly Playlist: Mar. 2021

1 Apr

After a slow start to the year, we finally had a deluge of great music this month. It wasn’t easy to whittle down this month’s best tracks to just five – in fact, we actually couldn’t do it, so look for a bonus sixth track at the bottom of the article. Without further ado, here’s our top five tracks for March 2021!

5. “Get Sun” by Hiatus Kaiyote feat. Arthur Verocai

Hiatus Kaiyote is a four-piece Aussie band that melds genres like R&B, soul, jazz and funk into an irresistible mix. The band’s soul lies in the dynamic vocal presence of singer-guitarist Naomi Saalfield (a.k.a. Nai Palm), bolstered by the almost cinematic instrumentation provided by Perrin Moss (drums), Paul Bender (bass) and Simon Mavin (keyboards). The latest track, “Get Sun”, features 76-year-old Brazilian composer Arthur Verocai, whose arrangements provide even more flair to the band’s already flamboyant style. Saalfield’s layered, staccato vocals evoke 90s soul / R&B stars such as Brandy, balancing well against the big-band horns-and-string section on the chorus. In all, the sprightly song is a good sign of things to come – Hiatus Kaiyote release their next album Mood Valiant in June 2021.

4. “The Kiss of Venus” by Paul McCartney feat. Dominic Fike

The original version of “The Kiss of Venus” from Sir Paul was released in December 2020 as part of his 18th (!) studio album, McCartney III. The song is, of course, vintage McCartney – gentle guitar strums that are alternatingly melancholic (a la “Norwegian Wood”) and quirky (a la “When I’m 64”) – but like most of his solo career, it’s perfectly pleasant but doesn’t quite stick beyond a few listens. Now, McCartney has put out a re-take of the song with young, talented singer-songwriter Dominic Fike – and suddenly, “The Kiss of Venus” has transformed into a different song. Fike’s distorted vocals add a catchy rock edge which honestly that works better for the track. Kudos to McCartney for working with new artists – apparently there’s much more of the same to come.

3. “Wants and Needs” by Drake feat. Lil Baby

“Wants and Needs” represents the synthesis of two of rap’s biggest names today, and currently has upwards of 50 million plays on Spotify and 10 million views on YouTube – so chances are, you don’t need us to recommend this track to you. Part of a three-song March 2021 release from Drizzy entitled Scary Hours 2, this track contrasts Drake’s chill, sing-song rap flow with Lil Baby’s fast-paced trap style. Special props for the line on arch-nemesis Kanye West, whose convenient new religion grift deserves Drake’s (and all of our) contempt (“Yeah, I probably should go link with Yeezy, I need me some Jesus / But soon as I started confessin’ my sins, he wouldn’t believe us”).

2. “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” by Lil Nas X

“MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” was released less than a week ago, and like most Lil Nas X songs, it’s already a global hit with a talk-of-the-town music video to boot. Like it or not, Lil Nas X (born Montero Lamar Hill) is nearly unrivaled in today’s music world as a tastemaker and cause celebre, and it’s not by accident. The strangely reggae-sounding “MONTERO” sees Lil Nas X on the chase (“Call me when you want, call me when you need / Call me in the morning, I’ll be on the way”) with sexually-explicit lines that make clear exactly what he wants from his lover. Move over, “WAP” – a new right-wing trigger track now holds the crown. Lil Nas X expertly promoted the song with (what else?) a Bitcoin giveaway and a limited-run sneaker drop, so don’t be surprised if you hear about this track everywhere in the coming weeks.

1. “THE DRAKE” by cleopatrick

For us, the biggest surprise on this list has been “THE DRAKE” by Canadian rock band cleopatrick. Hard-hitting riffs, hard-hitting drums, hard-hitting everything, clearing once in a while for the lead singer’s pronounced vocals – there’s nothing new here if you listen to the likes of Queens of the Stone Age and fellow two-member band Royal Blood. However, cleopatrick make it sound fresh on “THE DRAKE”, where monster riffs and Luke Gruntz’s vocals keep you glued for the entirety of the 3.5 minute run. We’ll certainly be going back into this band’s discography – this is one to keep an eye on.

Bonus: “Boyfriend” by Leah Kate

Leah Kate is an up-and-coming LA-based singer-songwriter with a fairly large hit (“Fuck Up the Friendship”) in 2020. Now she’s back with “Boyfriend”, a catchy 90s-00s meld in the vein of Rina Sawayama and Dua Lipa. Plus, Leah Kate is seemingly backed by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s data-driven music start-up indify which brings the venture capitalist world into music, so you know she’s super savvy. Expect to see her around a lot more.

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Drake – Dark Line Demo Tapes

11 May

Dark Lane Demo Tapes does one thing in particular, it reminds you that Drake has talent. That talent gets lost a little in all of the stuff around him. He’s a superstar in a real sense. He is the upper echelon of the upper echelon of fame and it can be easy to forget the music what with the shoes and the viral videos and all that, but even with a loosie like this, Drake just puts out very good music. 

“Toosie Slide” has the viral dance that it was built around and the virtual tour of his mansion and it’s probably already something I can do in Fortnite, but it’s the song that’s stuck in my head, not the accessories. His flow is excellent. He’s greyed the area between singing and rapping so thoroughly by now that the question of what is what feels empty, but it’s still incredible. The pauses in his chorus are nothing short of genius. The song is infectious and every bit as good as anything Drake has ever put out.

He’s got a great sneer in this album. “When To Say When” takes well-placed shots at the people biting at his heels. The stunting in “From Florida With Love” is excellent bragging, even if the jetsetting lifestyle seems a little quaint at this exact moment, as is also the case in the fun “Landed.” Drake wears his superstardom well.

However, this is where the mixtape fails a little. Drake sticks to comfortable poses throughout. He plays superstar in the ones above, he plays Toronto sadboy in the rest, and I’d like to see him try something new. “Pain 1993” gestures at that growth, but it still feels like the old Drake. “Losses” talks about changing, but he’s still as quick to mope and as petty as he has ever been. “D4L” is quite good trap, but the man has worn these topics through. Even reimagining “Superman” in “Chicago Freestyle” while clever and solid rap feels a little pointless at the end.

Drake is a father now, and while it’s trite to expect family to change a man, it’s unbelievable that it doesn’t. Drake only ever shows us what he wants to show us, but his music suffers for running the same themes again.

Musically though, he’s as inventive as ever. His proficiency at trap is no surprise anymore, but “War” is excellent British rap. Drake has been both willing and able to experiment with everything in rap and beyond and he does it with consummate skill. His shapeshifting is as much a part of his legacy as any of the shinier parts.

This is where the mixtape ends up falling overall. This is some of the most consistent work that Drake has ever put out. It’s all good, high-quality rap. Drake has perfected his molasses sound, it’s sugared, but dark and viscous and it sticks to you, but he adheres to the same limited issues and it’s beginning to hold him back. Nevertheless, he’s good enough to make this mixtape stand out. This has some of the best music of the year and while Drake is definitely capable of more, he still delivers in a way that most cannot.

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The Top Five Songs of 2018: Neeharika’s List

30 Dec

You might have heard a few of our top five songs on the radio; a couple are famous for their blockbuster music videos. All of them, though, have made our year that much better, and we’re excited to share them with you. Read on for our top picks!

5. “Nice for What” by Drake

The women in this Dreezy hit from 2018’s Scorpion work hard and party harder. They don’t get bogged down by bad partners; they put in their best from 8 to 5 and don’t feel guilty to hit the club later at night. With hypnotic beats, a sunny outlook and endearing lyrics, “Nice for What” is a feel-good female empowerment song from a totally unexpected source – a male rapper.

A special shout-out is warranted for the song’s excellent music video featuring some real women role models. Issa Rae, the black writer-actor behind HBO’s Insecure, leads suited-and-booted men in a neon-green jumpsuit. Zoe Saldana, who plays a superhuman fighter in the Marvel Universe, is a doting mom to her young children. Letitia Wright, the scientist-princess from Black Panther, dusts the dirt off her bright red jacket. Like the song itself, the music video captures the true happiness and optimism that comes from being an independent, hard-working woman. And we are here for it.

4. “QYURRYUS” by The Voidz

Tyranny, the debut album from The Voidz, was a genre-defying exploration of eclecticism, peaking with an eleven-minute amorphous beast called “Human Sadness”. On this year’s follow-up Virtue (full review here), The Voidz have sharply toned down the weirdness for a much more accessible album. “QYURRYUS” (pronounced “curious”), though, does not fit into that formula – or any formula, really.

There are no precise words to describe what this song is because there are no others like it. Familiar-sounding synth beats dissipate in the first five seconds into an imagining of what Rammstein, for example, might sound like if they were a belly-dancing nomadic tribe. Julian Casablancas’ strange, indecipherable vocals could be viewed as a musical instrument on their own. The chorus sounds like a robot attempting to create a Bollywood song. Somehow, miraculously, it’s a catchy song, too.

File this one under its own damn category because there isn’t going to be anything like this anyway.

3. “Set to Attack” by Albert Hammond Jr.

In our opinion, the best songs are the ones that can change your mood just by listening to them. “Set to Attack”, the highlight of Albert Hammond Jr.’s fantastic Francis Trouble (full review here), is just that kind of song.

With an achingly nostalgic mix of early Beatles and early Strokes, “Set to Attack” is a sweet, simple ditty about the trials of young love. “I was still hoping that you were the victory / To what had felt like love,” croons Hammond, taking us back to a time when you could know and feel all the words on a love song.

“Set to Attack” is a little happy, a little sad, but ultimately impossible to not love. An instant classic.

2. “SICKO MODE” by Travis Scott feat. Drake

Travis Scott’s new album, Astroworld, is a tribute to a now-closed, much-beloved amusement park in his hometown of Houston. “SICKO MODE”, the stand-out track from that album, is an inspired, three-part roller coaster of a ride that shows why Scott is a cut above the rest.

“SICKO MODE” is so packed with surprises that it might give you whiplash. Drake lays the intro in a verse that seems to build up to a beat drop – except it doesn’t. Travis takes over with two verses of hypnotic flow that lull you until he swerves again, with sludgy beats that lead into a dizzying new section. A few seconds before the end, the tempo abruptly slows down to a halt, and you know you just have to get back in line hit replay.

1. “This is America” by Childish Gambino

It’s been seven months since “This is America” broke the freaking Internet, and we still can’t get over it. The song starts off innocently enough, with gospel-style vocalizations and a gentle guitar. With a gunshot, it breaks into an on-point summary of black America in 2018: racism, shaming and unwarranted police violence.

Of course, no review of this song is complete without talking about its music video. There is no doubt that Donald Glover is the renaissance artist of our generation. He wrote for 30 Rock; he’s an established actor; he produces and often directs his own award-winning show; and he is an independently popular musician. On the music video for “This is America”, he puts it all together in a maddeningly talented way.

There are so many layers to the music video that this short review cannot do it justice, but consider the following images. He grooves along to an upbeat gospel choir but suddenly shoots them dead with a machine gun. He joins uniformed black kids in traditional African dances while chaos reigns in the background. And the camera pans to folks filming the whole thing on their phones.

There are musicians, and then there are artists. And then there are geniuses. No points for guessing which one is Childish Gambino.

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Drake – Scorpion

17 Jul

The thing about Drake is that he is extremely talented. There are a lot of critiques that people make of him in terms of style, substance and originality and they are largely justified, but he is extremely talented. So even when you get something with as little motivation as Scorpion, there’s still enough there to make it worth listening to.

The singles were all quite strong and things like “Mob Ties” and “Finesse” are earworms, and far from the only ones. Given the length of this album though, it would be a travesty if there were not. Nothing is outright terrible, but there some amount of what feels like filler, like “Sandra’s Rose”. Additionally, the album as a whole just feels a little samey. It just lacks fire and it lacks imagination.

I think that this is exacerbated by the idea of splitting it into a rap half and an R&B half instead of the normal merger that he built his career on. The rest of cliches are all still here though, the beats and the complaints are the same as they always were. It’s a pity that of all of his hallmarks, he chose to lose the most interesting of the lot.

This lack of change feels much worse due to the circumstances around the album. You would expect a son to make some kind of a change to Drake, but the child gets barely a mention throughout the album. The shocking entry of that child into public consciousness is even less addressed. Pusha-T dropped him in the hardest diss tracks in recent history and Drake’s failure to use his album to respond cements that feud as a crushing defeat for him.

Despite all of this though, the album is of a remarkably consistent quality. Drake rose to the top due to his immense talent and it looks like despite all of the failings of Scorpion, he will remain there. This is an album deserving of a few listens and is still one of the music events of the year. It’s just also a little unnecessary.

– @murthynikhil

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Drake – Views

2 Jul

Drakeviewsfromthe6

This album needed to be great. To Pimp A Butterfly is a landmark album and while The Life of Pablo is not Kanye’s best, it remains a very strong album. Things were looking good for Drake too, he comprehensively demolished Meek Mill in their beef and “Hotline Bling” was not only the best song, but also the best meme of the past year. Views however is the kind of album that collapses an empire.

The biggest issue is how repetitive it is. A cut like “9” could have survived on a different album, but here it just reinforces the faults of the album, namely that it is repetitive and just slightly boring. We’ve heard the petty Drake for far too long and by this point his mix of hurtful and hurting is no longer interesting. He raps “Why you gotta fight with me at Cheesecake/ You know I love to go there” in “Child’s Play”, but really who cares? This act has gotten tiring and his monotonous beats and flow in Views does not help. I can still listen to the incredibly petty “Marvins Room” indefinitely, but half of the music of this album is tedious from the first listen.

There are some strong pieces to this album though. “Too Good” with Rihanna is quite good and has enough self-awareness to become meaningful and “Hotline Bling” is still fantastic. I just cannot recommend that people track this album down however. Overall, it just lacks in ideas and in quality.

– @murthynikhil

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