Written by: Andrew Kirkpatrick

Reviewing a collaboration between Future and Drake puts me in a weird spot.

On one hand, watching Future transform from popstar to monster has been nothing short of astounding. This marks the seventh projects he’s put out in a little less than two years, right after No Sleep, Honest, Monster, Beast Mode, 56 Nights, and Dirty Sprite 2, if you want to keep track. And while the sheer volume of his output is impressive on its own, pretty much all this material is pure gold. He’s also contributed around two dozen features to other artist’s projects and, again, most of it is absolute fire. Not since Lil Wayne’s mixtape days has a mainstream artist been so prolific and consistent.

On the other hand, there’s Drake, who’s unfortunately lapped every other new-school MC in terms of popularity on the back of some incredibly mediocre material. Much like Blueprint-era Jay Z, everything Drizzy’s done recently has been a surgical strike carried out solely to appeal to new markets. He went full MJ (if MJ sucked) with “Hold On, We’re Going Home,” only to become a traphouse kingpin a month later with the “Versace” remix, only to get all socially conscious on Snoop Dogg’s “No Guns Allowed.” The list goes on, but the point is clear: Drake is simply out to make whatever move gets him more fans, and in the process he’s lost any artistic core to center himself around. There’s nothing singular about him anymore, he’s just an embodiment of demographic-checkbox-ticking mass appeal, and that hollow ambition for ambition’s sake can be spotted from a mile away.

So again, What a Time to Be Alive puts me in a weird place. While these two joining forces isn’t surprising considering they’ve absolutely dominated the rap game this year, Future is an artist who I respect and whose material I enjoy, while I’ve rarely been able to put up with any of Drake’s output.

To Aubrey’s credit, however, his teaming up with Fewtch doesn’t register as him latching onto a fad like the culture vulture he is. Unlike his “collaborations” with Migos, Fetty Wap, and Skepta, which conveniently came out of nowhere within weeks of those artists earning major buzz, Drake and Future have shared plenty of hit songs for years now. The simple fact that this team-up feels genuine goes a long way, especially since both parties could have still had a banner year without making a single new track, much less another full-length.

And to Drake’s credit once again, he tones it way back through most of What a Time to Be Alive. The shifts in mood abrupt enough to give whiplash that plague all of Drizzy’s solo releases are nowhere to be found here. Future’s sound is simple, dark, and hypnotic, and Drake goes with it. In fact, he navigates most of the project sounding exactly like Future in terms of cadence and lyrical content — the only difference between the two is often the distinct timbre of their voices. And yet still, there’s a number of tracks here where he only plays a small, supporting role. Objectively, the fact that the supposed best MC out right now has made a full-length project on which he both sounds exactly like the artist he’s working with and is willing to play second fiddle does not reflect well on Drake.

But for the sake of my own ability to enjoy this album, I’m cool with it.

So, being that What a Time to Be Alive feels mostly like a Future album, it should come as no surprise that it’s basically wall-to-wall bangers. Admittedly, the album gets off to a slow start. “Digital Dash” is decent enough, but never really takes off. “Big Rings,” meanwhile features a pretty horrid hook from Drizzy. Comedian Chris D’Elia has a famous bit during which he wonders whether or not Drake even knows what he’s going to rap about before getting into the booth. If “Big Rings” is any indication, he almost certainly does not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obTYcSzAdmA

But after that, the heat comes. “Live From the Gutter” starts with a soft, smooth piano melody before launching an oscillating sub-bass ambush. When Future chimes in to claim that he is, indeed, “reporting live from the fucking gutter, bitch,” the sonic mire convinces you that he couldn’t be anywhere else. The following track, “Diamonds Dancing,” is a force of nature thanks to its restrained structure. Drake and Future deliver their verses wading in a sea of amorphous synths, but soon enough that addicting, earworm hook comes crashing through with a four-on-the-floor drum beat and some incredibly nice, layered vocals. Major props are due to ATL beatmaker Metro Boomin, who kills it time and again on this project. He might as well be listed as the record’s third author, as he contributed the excellent instrumentals for 7 of its 11 tracks.

From there until the last couple of songs, there’s not much more to say. Like Dirty Sprite 2, the tracks here are incredibly straightforward and the level of quality is unflinchingly high. I’m especially surprised that I don’t really mind most of Drake’s contributions to What a Time to Be Alive; again, he doesn’t make a convincing case for why he deserves the hip-hop crown we’ve handed him, but he fits in just fine.

The record takes an interesting turn with the last couple of tracks, as “Jersey” and “30 For 30 Freestyle” are solo cuts for Future and Drake, respectively. Both songs are solid, but they leave the album off on an odd note. While it can be incredibly meaningful for close collaborators to step away from one another and demonstrate their skill as solo artists (see OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below), Drake and Future aren’t close collaborators and they’re known mostly as solo artists. But considering the fact that What a Time to Be Alive’s main draw is hearing the pair come up with a joint effort, these two tracks feel misplaced.

I’ve written a lot about Drake throughout this review when, really, I don’t care about him or his music much at all. Except for “30 For 30” (on which he really steps up), his presence on What a Time to Be Alive is a mere matter of fact. The reason I was excited for this project and checked it out the moment it released was because listening to Future is, at this point, listening to a true master at work. The Dungeon Family warbler carved his own niche within trap music and is now in complete command of it. Though What a Time to Be Alive isn’t an earthshattering piece of work, it stands as yet another chance to hear Fewtch operating at the peak of his powers. He could have made a project with a text-to-speech program robotically spewing out bars written by an algorithm and I still would have listened to it.

Actually that would’ve been awesome.