Drake & Future

What A Time To Be Alive

'What A Time To Be Alive' often sounds more like a Drake album than the jazzier, busier records that Future usually creates. Yet the Atlanta rapper dominates the record, demonstrating his impressive adaptability.

It’s cutting and honest and self-congratulatory and vindictive. It’s fantastically decadent and brutally real at the same time. It won’t be leaving the playlist any time soon.

Though it’s not sustained over the tape’s eleven tracks, two of which are solo tracks, one for each rapper, the collaborative spirit remains the strongest selling point.

What a Time is the sound of two of our biggest current pop figures using each other’s strengths to bring out their own.

Drake takes his talent as a hook man to another level on What A Time To Be Alive and in putting his elevated skills alongside Future’s, he creates some truly must-listen moments.

These are creative guys bouncing off a group of similar ideas and seeing where the muse takes them. It isn’t always pretty. It isn’t really innovative.

Drake’s disclosure that the project was made in six days is less of an impressive stat than it is an accurate summation of what we have here: two rappers who maxed out on their chemistry and made some cool songs.

After all the hype has worn off and the music is offered up on a diamond crusted platter, it's an unfortunate reality to note that What A Time To Be Alive doesn't quite hold weight as the cultural force it was expected to be.

What the tape lacks in congruence, it makes up for in glimmering Metro Boomin production.

Reportedly made in just six days, it's rarely, if ever, sloppy, but it never achieves perfection either. It's merely a strong collection of songs made by two unstoppable forces in their primes.

This is the sound of Future's Dirty South meeting Drake's Great White North, both artists playing off their louder-than-life personalities without overthinking the details.

What A Time to Be Alive feels more like a Future album featuring Drake.