In 2023, it’s easy to treat Drake like a problem to be solved. With his 2011 album Take Care, the Canadian megastar began an unimpeachable run of records. He single-handedly changed the sound of pop on multiple levels, popularising glacial, minimalist production and obliterating the church-and-state separation between singing and rapping for rappers and singers. But his recent output, with the exception of the occasional transcendent single, has been profoundly tedious, the work of a musician whose once-deft vocal style and omnivorous taste had given way to empty solipsism and uninspired trend-chasing.
So each new Drake record gives fans an opportunity to decide how said project could be reshaped into another Classic Drake Record: 2021’s Certified Lover Boy needed a heavy edit, fewer features and a good deal more introspection. Last year’s house record Honestly, Nevermind could have used more rapping. Its rap-heavy follow-up, Her Loss, a collaboration with 21 Savage, swung too hard into Drake’s most misogynistic impulses. For All the Dogs, his latest project, is harder to fix. It features some of Drake’s most invigorated songs in many years, and sees him going toe-to-toe with younger rappers (Yeat) and producers (Cash Cobain) who force him out of his comfort zone.
On the Chief Keef collaboration All the Parties (which has made headlines for its unauthorised Pet Shop Boys interpolation) Drake sounds a little like a more introspective Lil Uzi Vert, until the song slows like a cassette player slowly losing battery. It’s surprisingly effective, the equivalent of hearing someone plead to a partner long after they’ve hung up the phone. Gently, featuring Bad Bunny, is downright goofy, Drake slipping between Spanish-language rapping and fake-Spanish-language rapping like the Puerto Rican superstar’s cartoonish sidekick. These songs are as moreish as any past Drake hits, delivered with the featherlight touch that seemed to have deserted him.
At the same time, Drake rarely has anything interesting to say here – about his life, about women, his contemporaries or rivals. The pettiness that was funny and insolent on 2016’s Child’s Play gives way to ugly, unreserved contempt for women on Slime You Out, on which he airs out indecisive women; on Fear of Heights he complains that “the sex was average with you” – a dig seemingly aimed at his ex, Rihanna. For All the Dogs is rife with these limp attempts at riposte from a rapper who once turned snark into an artform. Sometimes, it’s plainly funny how pathetic Drake’s raps are: on Rich Baby Daddy, a spry Miami bass highlight featuring Sexyy Red and SZA, he tells a woman that she “just might get that G-Wagon out of me” if she sparks affection in him, a buffoonish simplification of the brokenhearted, desperate figure that was so compelling on his early records.
This tension leaves For All the Dogs in a strange limbo: its highs are higher than many recent Drake records, and its lows are far lower. All the Parties leads straight into 8AM in Charlotte, the latest entry in Drake’s vaunted series of “timestamp” songs, and the drop in quality is steep: Drake has always been prone to clangers, but has he ever dropped anything as depressing as “So many cheques owed / I feel Czechoslovakian”? A song later, Sade – the Sade – drops in to deliver a fake radio station tag, a gimmicky but delicious detail; a few songs after that, Drake mournfully interpolates Florence + the Machine’s Dog Days Are Over, another cheap but effective trick. Perhaps on a shorter record, all these moments, good and bad, could have congealed into one love-to-hate-it, hate-to-love-it mass; maybe they could have reinstated Drake as a star whose talents are so great that even his missteps are charming. Such is the problem with For All the Dogs: it’s not a good album, but an album good enough to make you wish it were better.
