The Jamaican patois is back on the Popcaan dancehall cut “Amazing Shape,” and while they’ve made better songs together before, the groove is smooth and he’s got just the right amount of dick puns: “You could make a dead man rise,” Drake sings, a little flat but still catchy. He found a new muse via his TikTok For You Page in viral rapper Stunna Sandy, who I never thought of as anything more than an Ice Spice variant, until “Outside Tweaking,” where she sounds like a star flirting with Drake over the lush Jersey club breakdown like he’s the middle-aged trick at the bar buying all her drinks. No idea why he’s wailing over distorted guitars about his girl getting too fucked up and passing out on the bathroom floor on “Princess,” like a 16-year-old with an XXXTentacion poster on his wall, but I take it as Drake putting his my dreams of being cool forever are slipping away anxieties on wax. I approve of dropping coming-of-age whinefests at almost 40.
I won’t even bother listing all of the producers on MAID OF HONOUR because it seems to have been made by an entire roster led by Gordo, but with so many contributors reinterpreting all of these regional dance trends, some of the sounds are flattened. The Brazilian funk of “Q&A” has none of the edge, sounding more like the sexy drill rip-offs; with his unlimited budgets, he could surely fly out DJ Ramon Sucesso or whoever and get the real thing. The same for the Chicago juke rap of “True Bestie,” where the tempo feels far too slow.
Surprisingly, that’s not a bigger issue, for the most part, the beats scrap together samples and loose instrumental parts into collagist club beats that remind me of reading about the early ’80s Miami park battles of Uncle Luke’s Ghetto Style DJs. Back then, Luke’s trick was stitching together elements of the music they sponged up all around South Florida into their mixes to try to shock the crowd: Latin music tempos, reggae basslines, and eventually, the booming 808s passed down when Queens production pioneer Marley Marl came to town.
Even if it isn’t Drake turning the knobs himself, the production seems personal and specific to him—it’s also completely unpredictable. The moody So Far Gone-era atmosphere of “Hoe Phase” that erupts into a high-octane sample of Afro-Rican’s “Give It All You Got,” and then finishes with a spooky Afrobeats rhythm; the near-Mantronix electrofunk pulse of “BBW” that incorporates a blown-out techno palette Drake might have picked up at his night out at Berghain. This is the music of a man with nothing to lose, who feels the end of the run coming for him and is trying to stave it off, just a little longer, by any means necessary. He gets at that notion on “New Bestie,” a classic Drake breakup anthem that could be interpreted to be about his crumbling relationship with hip-hop: “I don’t know when and how to tell you goodbye,” “You make me do things that jeopardize my pride.” He sounds more hurt by the possibility of losing his spot than he ever did about losing Lorraine or Bria or Erika. It’s ridiculously over the top. Unearned self-pity that is as manipulative as it is a little moving. That might not be the Drake we get so much of anymore, but that’s the Drake I’ll remember.
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