Wreckord Reviews: Drake's latest brainchild is a life playlist

Header image for Interrobang article CREDIT: YOUNG MONEY ENTERTAINMENT
More Life is the album View should have been.

For those of us who felt let down by Drake’s last album, Views, his latest undertaking will come as a wave of relief.

On March 18 the new project More Life debuted on his Apple Music radio show OVO Sound. The album is not a studio release, but it’s not a mixtape either. According to Drake, it’s a playlist. In an inter­view with Complex U.K. he said, “I’m off like mixtapes, I want to do a playlist. I want to give you a collection of songs that become the soundtrack to your life, so this [is] More Life: The Playlist.”

Lines like, “40 got a house on the lake, I ain’t know we had a lake”, may not be the relatable content that people are looking for in their life playlist but it’s still catchy as hell. If Drake is writing a life play­list for the summer then he’s leav­ing the rest of the scene in the dust. Tracks like “Free Smoke”, “Fake Love” and “Gyalchester” all have potential to blow out speakers at beach parties all over Southwestern Ontario.

While there are a lot of party tracks on this album, the down tem­po songs like “Passionfruit” and “4422” are the perfect backgrounds for late night drives or smoking weed on the roof at 1 a.m. The latter of these tracks, “4422”, is primarily written and performed by the Brit­ish singer Sampha.

Sampha is just one of the U.K. influences woven throughout More Life. On top of Drake’s attempt to incorporate popular British slang, the album features collaborations with Skepta (“Skepta Interlude”) and Giggs (“No Long Talk” and “KMT”) both of whom seem right at home on this playlist.

Drake hasn’t ignored his fans on this side of the ocean though. His Kanye collaboration “Glow” screams of The Life of Pablo while his “Madiba Riddim” is possibly the closest we get to last years hits “Controlla” and “One Dance”.

Most of the summer-ready tracks on More Life come in the first half of the album but that doesn’t mean that the back half doesn’t have its own gems. “Lose Yourself” is the moody monologue about how peo­ple want to watch others fail, while “Teenage Fever” saunters through Drake’s new romantic entangle­ment with Jennifer Lopez. His slowed down sample of Lopez’s track, “If You Had My Love”, is the most unassumingly perfect sample on this entire album.

At 22 tracks it’s hard to create a fluid consistency throughout More Life but the varied styles do won­ders to keep it interesting. Jumping between hip hop, R&B, grime and afrobeat the album is more like a bulletin board of Drake’s influences than it is a studio release. Cut with plenty of voice-overs and collabo­rators including 2 Chainz, Young Thug and PARTYNEXTDOOR, the album feels more like the group is holding your car’s auxiliary ca­ble than anything else.

Rating: 4 out of 5