A dull, detached attempt at a house/hip-hop music hybrid where Drake’s effort level seems to be at an all-time low.
Drake is back with his 7th studio album, titled Honestly Nevermind. It’s 14 tracks with a total run-time of just over 50 minutes.
21 Savage is the sole featured artist across the entire project. This marks a rare change of pace for Drake, who has collaborated with dozens of artists on his projects over the years.
This album was a complete surprise release, with Drake announcing it just over seven hours before it dropped. This, compounded with the fact that it hasn’t even been a year since his last album release, meant that fans weren’t sure what to expect.
What we got was a change of genre from Drake. It seems like his goal was to create a sort of house/hip-hop fusion project. The tracks all contain primarily electronic instrumentation and are carried by dance beats. There are even a few “EDM”-style beat drops interspersed throughout.
That said, the result is a completely and utterly bland mix of tracks that sounds like the background music at a party that’s slowing down for the night.
There is little to nothing to analyze here; the lyrical content on every track is just vague rhymes about relationships and they’re delivered without any sort of emotion. The vocals are tirelessly monotonous, the beats rarely go anywhere, and the vast majority of the tracks sound and feel near-identical.
It really doesn’t feel like much passion or effort was put into this project. Neither the surprise release nor the change in genre can hide the fact that it seems Drake has nothing left to prove.
The man has broken nearly every record there is in music and is one of the biggest artists of our generation, so it’s not like a bad album is going to negatively impact his career much. But for someone with access to the very best producers, artists, studios, and everything else, this project just feels empty.
It doesn’t feel like the desire to grow and innovate as an artist is there anymore for Drake. Rap is the genre of music with the most lyrics and as such is most directly based on personal experience. Part of what makes this album so dull is that the lyrical content feels fake. For someone with as much skill lyrically as Drake, this feels like a first draft.
The repercussions of this lack of drive seem to have left Drake in a space where his music tops the charts but is completely passionless. Passion for his craft is the reason he became popular in the first place and it’s something that he has sorely lost over the years.
The only track really worth mentioning here is the one that doesn’t fit in at all with the others: “Jimmy Cooks”. It’s the only track with a feature, a decent beat, and a verse that actually sounds like there was some thought put into it.
The rest of the content here is slow, dull, and just sounds unfinished. His vocals across the entire project are relentlessly monotonous and his use of autotune is excessive.
Overall, this project is completely unmemorable and has nothing of substance to it. It’s not that the music itself is beyond horrible, just that Drake has so much more potential than what is presented here. It’s music that feels devoid of passion and that, above anything else, is simply meant to put money in Drake’s pocket.