It would be amazing to see Drake rebound with a banger of an album after getting ethered for a year straight by an objectively better rapper, Kendrick Lamar. Too bad that’s not what has happened with the artist’s latest offering, $ome $exy $ongs 4 U.
Drizzy’s new Valentine’s Day record recasts the Toronto rapper as a lover, not a fighter. Notably, on a track titled “GIMME A HUG,” he declares the feud with Lamar over (“Fuck a rap beef, I’m tryna get the party lit”), even though that’s not really how these things work.
PartyNextDoor, OVO stalwart and generally unremarkable, plays second fiddle on this long, bloated, 21-song snoozer. In Drake’s world, it’s quantity over quality. You don’t have to make great music; you just have to make a lot of music. It makes you wonder what was left on the cutting room floor — if there was any editing whatsoever.
The intention seems to have been to make a record to sleep with someone to. In practice, it’s more like a record to put you to sleep. There aren’t really any highlights, and not too many lowlights, either; the album is just consistently beige, like so much of Drake’s output and aura.
This isn’t the first time Drake has had to come back from a rap battle shellacking. Pusha T notably revealed his secret child on “The Story of Adidon.” And he’s locked horns with dozens of other rappers over the past decade, from Joe Budden to Rick Ross to Diddy. His CV of beef is a who’s who of mostly middle-aged MCs.
Every time Drake has been humbled, he pivots back to his safe space — the “I’m just a softy loverboy, not a gangster” persona — to project that he doesn’t take things personally. And maybe he doesn’t. Maybe it’s all kayfabe. But to what end, other than racking up more Spotify stats? At times, his penchant for getting publicly humiliated verges on kink.
There isn’t much rapping to speak of on the new album. It’s mostly R&B crooning and warbling, set to very low BPMs, with little variety. Moreover, every single track is dripping with AutoTune. It’s 2025; are we still pretending this is a stylistic choice and not merely a means of covering up an aesthetically flawed voice? Even the beats, sometimes the strongest aspect of Drake’s oeuvre, feel like they were programmed by AI here.
Lyrically, things are hardly more impressive. On “CELIBACY” Drake sings, “Pour me a shotty, let it flow through my body/Flow through my body, flow through my body/Is this what you want?/Audemus is all in our cup/We got a lot of things to discuss/Like these men you know you can’t trust/Or these girls that just don’t give mе enough.” The couplets are clunky at best, and at times downright confused.
On album closer “GREEDY”, Drake asserts, “Not surprised by nothing, I just take it in stride/On the bright side, everyone on my side.” Judging by the response to Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show — when it seemed like all 133 million people watching were screaming along to “Not Like Us,” an all-time drubbing of Drizzy — that’s not an accurate statement.
What Drake is doing here is technically music, but there’s nothing musical about it. It’s flat — no soul, no swing, no bangers, no vibe. It’s just there. And there are certainly people who will lap it up as they try to convince themselves it’s champagne (papi); unfortunately, there is a market for even the most insipid tunes you’ve ever heard.
(A minor quibble: All of the song titles are in ALL CAPS, which presumably means IT’S IMPORTANT. Or SOMETHING.)
I’ve held a theory in my head for a while: Drake thinks he’s Prince. What if Prince couldn’t play instruments, couldn’t really dance or sing, and couldn’t write classic songs, but had a similar tier of fame? Drake’s behavior and demeanor suggest confidence in a level of craft that’s just not there.
It would be way cooler had Drake taken a real chance, swung and missed. Instead, he just sticks to his uninspired guns. He probably won’t stop churning out tracks at this rate. After all, he’s now as much media construct as musician. It’s a harsh comparison, but in a way he’s even a bit like Trump: We may not need him — or, in many of our cases, want him — but maybe we deserve him.
