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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.
