#Drake more life album features free#

Two of More Life’s highest points arrive courtesy of Young Thug, who contributes a showstopping verse on “Sacrifices,” (“You come with beef, I eat the beat”), then takes another feature on the glorious “Ice Melts,” the album’s penultimate track and a song that feels destined to rule the spring, and perhaps the summer as well. Many of the project’s best moments come via other people, such as Quavo’s turn on “Portland,” Jorja Smith’s surreal digitized hook on “Jorja Interlude,” and the sampled specter of Jennifer Lopez’s “ If You Had My Love” on “Teenage Fever,” a sly and blessedly fleeting allusion to Drake’s personal life. “4422” is given over to R&B crooner Sampha while “Skepta Interlude” is a showcase for the British grime rapper Skepta. More Life feels like Drake taking a well-deserved and perhaps overdue vacation from Drake, or at least from “Drake.” Its cover boasts a photo of Drake’s father and is credited to “October Firm,” and there are several tracks on which the 6 God’s presence barely registers. All this can obscure the fact that, as Stereogum’s Tom Breihan has argued, Drake has the best ear for talent in music, and his greatest asset as an artist is his flair for putting equally (or sometimes even more) talented people in dialogue with each other. Drake is an extraordinarily talented musician with an Achilles’ heel for navel-gazing, a tiresome but lucrative tendency that’s allowed him to become the voice of a generation that enjoys living in public almost as much as complaining about living in public. One of the reasons More Life succeeds so well is that it’s the first full-length work Drake’s made that seems to recognize that Drake, himself, isn’t all that interesting. It follows in the footsteps of Beyoncé, Rihanna, Kanye, and Chance in its conceptual challenge to the album-as-form, but it also feels like a conceptual challenge to something like Drake-as-form. We look forward to the debates we’ll more than likely ignore.More Life is compulsively cosmopolitan and collaborative, a pan-Commonwealth rap album that folds Toronto into East London into Kingston into Johannesburg into who knows where else, stops over in Atlanta, and then drops the whole thing onto the internet. The variety of genres on More Life stratifies the many sides of Drake, succinctly displayed in the diversity of the record’s top four songs.Įnjoy my ranking on behalf of VIBE. Moreover, what’s notable about this list of 22 Drake songs is more than half of them are good if not great, which can’t be said of very many artists.

What this list reinforced is that the best Drake songs are carried by their memorable moments, Easter egg-laden songwriting, and, of course, the emotion he both conveys to listeners and elicits from them.

#Drake more life album features free#

It’s easy to say, “T his is top five,” but actually creating the order and then quadrupling that number is my villain origin story (*cues “ Free Smoke”*). Ranking this project was challenging yet fun. More Life is often kept out of the “ top Drake projects” conversation for a variety of reasons: His labeling the project a playlist (perhaps to alleviate pressure), its technical “ commercial mixtape” title a la Wikipedia, the underutilization of the compiled songs post-release, and other potential factors. Everyone may not love everything, but there’s something, possibly a lot, for everyone to enjoy here. He packed so much into one project, delivering at a high clip within each sub-genre. More Life was one of Drake’s most daring efforts, and it landed. I now have more empathy for my fellow list-writing journalists. In fact, I hate my editor, Austin Williams, for making me rank songs that mean so much to me, but, of course, thank him for the opportunity to put my pen to work. Now, revisiting this project wasn’t all pleasant. I reflect fondly on being able to bounce back from the losses the same way Drake touched on his ability to do the same, following his commercially successful yet critically panned 2016 album, Views. This collection instilled in me a much-needed, two-pronged sense of confidence, in that there was more to life than the failures that bogged me down because I had “ more life” within me. Today, on its five-year anniversary, I reflect on being in the midst of my (first) senior year at Cornell University and coping with the reality I would graduate a semester later than planned. More Life is one of my favorite projects ever, as the music transports me back to one of the most pivotal times of my life.