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There’s a new Drake album—Some Sexy Songs 4 U—and boy, it’s as exhausting to talk about as it is to listen to. This one clocks in at 74 minutes, as he happily cops to in the album notes even though listeners have been begging him for nearly a decade to make his albums shorter. About 55 minutes of that runtime are pretty solid; maybe 20 are truly worth sitting up in your seat for, or bending that corner during a Car Test.
Technically, Some Sexy Songs is a joint project with PartyNextDoor, Drake’s inaugural OVO label signee and one of his most potent collaborators. In fact, when you look at their handful of songs together, like Drake’s explosive appearances on Party’s first three projects, then take it a step further to solo Drake songs that just have Party’s stamp as co-producer or co-writer—some of his best, like “Legend,” “Days in the East,” even recent songs like “Fucking Fans”—I’d argue PND is quietly one of his all-time greatest collaborators.
Between that, and, you know, the beef, the expectations for their project together were set sky high. Impossibly so. That said, I’m still a little underwhelmed. While Drake album debates have been hopelessly pedantic going back at least as far as Views, this one is especially fraught for obvious reasons. The fans who love Kendrick—and more importantly were just already tired of Drake before last spring—are calling it a weed plate bunch of love songs. The Drake faithful, ATF and Wordonrd-core, eager for their fave to get some flowers after he’s been shot more times than Sonny Corleone at the tollbooth for two back-to-back Sundays on national television, are reacting like this album is an unearthed Dead Sea scroll.
It’s neither! It’s fine! There are at least five songs I never need to hear again after this weekend, two or three genuine heaters, and a few that may grow on me like a lot of Drake album cuts sneakily do. It’s almost too boring and straightforward to talk about at length—devoid of any of the versatility he and PND have proved capable of together before, not nearly as even-keeled as his previous joint projects with Future or 21 Savage—which is why this is not an album review. Instead let’s just call this project what it is: a heat check, a sampler designed to take the collective temperature before Drake can come back out on his own, reputationally and also legally (he’s in a bitter courtroom feud with Universal Music Group over “Not Like Us”; standing next to PND allows him to release new music through OVO Sound instead.)
I hate those thinkpieces and tweet threads people have been doing for years that counsel Drake on “what he should do.” I’m objectively enjoying Kendrick’s victory lap as much as anyone with good taste, but let’s just be real: Drake’s career defies our advice. He rarely takes heed, and even though it may lose him a beef or two, he’s still here, commanding attention. He can do whatever the hell he wants. But it is prudent to step back and look at what’s working on $$$, what isn’t, and why—and if and how he might apply those lessons as he works on what could be his most pivotal solo album yet.
Barring up about beef: First with the leaked “Fighting Irish Freestyle” and now “Gimme a Hug,” Drake is clearly inching that much closer to going full Timestamp with a record reflecting on his, well, disastrous 2024. And he’s getting closer to finding the right tenor to talk about it all. “No Face,” the loosie he let off last summer, was way too aggressive coming from someone who waved the white flag before “Not Like Us” was even a day old. “Fighting Irish” was laughably despondent self-victimizing from someone who’d dared his opponent to drop. “Hug” is more balanced; Drake slips in a few hilarious digs just PG-13 enough to keep him off of Kendrick’s Summer Jam screen, picks fights with everyone else, and all throughout pulses with You can’t kill me swagger. (It’s still a work in progress though: lines like “Twenty-five deep when they walkin’ me out/Cause too many pussies been fuckin with me” are not the flex he thinks they are.) And most of all, it’s Drake closest to his most genuine. Which leads me to my next point.
Drake’s gonna Drake. Not to get all “I like Drake with the melodies, I don’t like Drake when he act tough” but the music hits a little harder when his bars feel authentic. And Drake never sounds more like Drake, to me, than when he’s rhapsodizing about how much he loves strip clubs and the strippers in them. “Gimme a Hug” isn’t as exceptional as the Stans are making it out to be—it wants what “Middle of the Ocean” has, but is far less potent—but its core concept is just so Drake that you have to love it. “Walk in the strip club, damn I missed you hoes, give me a hug!” then proceeding to rattle off a bunch of different stage names like he’s listing out close homegirls, then harmonizing how happy he is to see them with an Aaron Hall interpolation, is instantly one of the funniest Drake runs of all time. It unseats the previous title holder, 2023’s “Drew a Picasso,” where Drake tells a girl, with a straight face, that “just because I go to the strip club doesn’t mean that I don’t love ya.”
Get Weird Does Drake’s next album need to be full of risks and big swings to work? Of course not. But he hasn’t really thrown any curve balls since he brought NOLA bounce flavor to Scorpion’s best songs back in 2018. “Nokia” instantly caught everyone’s attention because it sounds so unexpected, the one song that defies those “Every Drake Song Be Like” tiktoks. True to its name, “Nokia” sounds like something you can pop-lock to while playing Snake on your phone, and it only gets more bizarre from there—I don’t know what producer Elkan really sounds like, but when he joins Drake to implore the “babygurrrrrls” to hit a “twirl” it sounds like an Ali G character (complimentary)—but dammit it sounds different and if you ask me, Drake slid on it. Rapping in more modern flows with cues from Yachty, Central Cee and Cash Cobain is fine, but it’s always welcome when Drake really goes left field, especially because it’s so rare.
Remember OVO Sound exists. On the titanic “Over Here,” Party and Drake’s first song together, Drizzy bragged that OVO Sound was about to be “the new Cash Money, the new Roc-a-fella,” and he was so in command of the game at the time that matching those runs seemed halfway believable. Fast forward five years later to the Scorpion intro “Survival,” where a sullen, jaded Drake (fresh off his first embarrassing beef loss) raps “I’m pretty sure we still got a label, I’m still independent.” No one is going to look back and call OVO one of hip-hop’s great dynasties, but between Party, Majid Jordan and dvsn, there’s still a lot of talent there. So it was nice to see that “Die Trying,” one of the standout songs on $$$, and one of the only songs that felt sonically and formally distinct, was produced by Jordan of Majid Jordan. Remember “Feel No Ways,” the MJ-produced cut most Drake fans would rank among his very best? Remember how dvsn slid on “Faithful”? Hey Drake, maybe give your employees a call every now and then. Even dusting OB Obrien off for another CollegeHumor skit would go a long way to restoring the feeling.