In the wake of a disastrous 2024, Drake faces an existential question: what can only he bring to pop music? The five-alarm synth-horns of “Like That” presaged the devastation that was to come, capped with his chief nemesis calling him pedophile in front of hundreds of millions of people. If Drake can return to a dominant position, it’s hard to imagine it resembling anything like the one he once occupied.
It took longer than usual, but Drake has succumbed to the same cycle as a lot of Canadian artists: after falling on his face in America, he returns home and starts waving the national flag. But not in a surrender-y way, oh no: “It’s not a retreat, it’s a return to my roots!” he practically screams from pictures evoking the Take Care album cover. This time around, on the cover for Drake’s PARTYNEXTDOOR collaboration $ome $exy $ongs 4 U, they’re posted up in front of the Absolute Tower complex in Mississauga (there are also allegations that this cover art was lifted from a local artist, while Freddie Gibbs has taken issue with the back’s cartoon rabbits. What’s more classic Drake than a plagiarism debate?)
“Fuck a rap beef, I’m tryna get the party lit” he raps on “GIMME A HUG,” the $exy Songs track that directly addresses his past year and attempts to fashion it into a hit, with an admittedly funny title tying it together. There’s a moment of genuine vulnerability — “Savage, you the only nigga checkin’ on me when we really in some shit” — resonant enough to make you wonder what could have been if he’d doubled down on the transparency.
Instead, he goes back to the poisoned well and sneaks in a Kendrick diss, one so tepid you have to wonder what the point was: “‘Cause if I die, it’s these niggas that become the sole beneficiary/And what the fuck are they gon’ do with it?/Have the girls up at [Houston strip club] 29 on stage twerkin’ with a dictionary?” This would hit harder if “Not Like Us” wasn’t one of the biggest rap songs of the decade, and gives the impression that, even as he attempts to “get the party lit,” Drake is still licking his wounds in the corner.
What Drake needed was a clean break. Instead, he delivers a “moment” way too on-the-nose to be organic. On “GIMME A HUG,” Drake announces a mid-song beat switch from syrupy drumless gospel to big brass and bigger 808 (“Fuck that, make the beat switch, turn the hoes up, give a million to ’em”) like he’s fishing for compliments. This song comes roughly at the album’s halfway point – likely intentionally, to jolt the bored streamers out of the chair and give them something they can really react to.
Being one-step ahead of the internet’s whims helped Drake conquer music, but more often than not he had the musics to back it up. While a return to the fan-favorite lovesick puppy dog routine makes sense, “GIMME A HUG” reveals that Drake isn’t quite ready to commit, either to looking to the past for guidance or to the future for a new direction.
