Drake

More Life

On More Life, you can literally pick out your favorite type of Drake and have a handful of those songs within ear’s reach, which not a lot of contemporary rappers have the ability to do.

22 songs is a challenge — too many tracks can easily jump the rails, leading to an uneven and tiring project. But, as the first three songs bear out, More Life doesn’t lose too much momentum even as it stumbles along its path.

Despite its playlist tag, it is unmistakably a Drake album—it even has a Blueprint highball closer like each of its predecessors—and as an album, it is probably Drake’s worst. But as a collection of totally atomized songs and ideas, it’s up there with anything he’s released. Maybe that makes it a playlist after all.

More Life is a serious commitment, if not a test of one’s patience. But Drake does at least have a better grasp on how to maintain momentum this time.

More Life offers little solace for those who never bought what the Canadian rapper was selling but for his fans that gave his songs billions of streams last year, they’ll hear no issue.

The playlist is less an embodiment of the “experience,” Drake-playing-Drake via others, and more a headspace in which these voices, genres, and styles are given breathing room.

More Life ... is less of a return to form and more of an expression of Drake’s hunger for widespread acclaim beyond the borders of rap, and is indicative of where the arc of his career and legacy is trending towards.

More Life is his finest longform collection in years, cheerfully indulgent at 22 tracks and 82 minutes, a masterful tour of all the grooves in his head.

With plenty of guests dropping by to chip in a verse or a rap, over 80 minutes’ worth of grooves and beats sculpted by a veritable army of producers. Pleasingly, two of the best are British, Sampha capping “4422” with an emotive outburst, and Skepta getting an entire “Skepta Interlude”.

Drake has convincingly positioned himself as an architect for a borderless age of pop music.

He allows the various sounds, guest features and flavours of the production, which he and his crew adopted from all over the world, to steal the show.

While VIEWS served as an ominous soundscape to a never-ending winter and reflected a booming hunger in the city, his newest release, More Life, presents the fruits of that labour in a sunnier, more celebratory arrangement.