Oh, Aubrey, stop playing with our emotions — you know we love you already.
At this point, Drake releases are more than just albums and singles — they’re events. What other rappers are releasing album-of-the-year-caliber surprise mixtapes and Grammy-nominated diss tracks while maintaining a public profile constantly in flux between being rap’s most memeable and most memorable?
So it’s no surprise that his forthcoming album Views from the 6 — due out this month — is one of the year’s most anticipated releases (assuming you forget Frank Ocean exists, which is getting easier and easier to do). And now Views is two steps closer to becoming a real thing — even if calling Toronto “the 6” never will be.
On Tuesday, the rapper released two singles, both apparently album cuts: “Pop Style,” a dark, braggadocious track featuring, fittingly, Jay Z and Kanye West; and “One Dance,” a bouncy Caribbean song that continues Drizzy’s 2015 dancehall aspirations.
And in classic Drake fashion, not only are both solid songs with serious radio potential, but they also sound like they’re by totally different artists.
“Pop Style” brings back the Drake of 2015’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late: brash, confident and aggressive. “I can’t trust no fuckin’ body/ They still out to get me cause they never got me” he raps with the paranoia that comes with a year of incredible success and bitter beefs.
Of course, when Kanye shows up — after a rather pointless Jay Z couplet — he makes Drake look like some sort of child actor. In fact, this is arguably the best Yeezy feature in several years. Gone are the bleached assholes and Taylor Swift hostility that plagued The Life of Pablo — this is Kanye West laser-focused in a way only Drake could accomplish. “They like, Pablo, why are all the windows tinted on your Tahoe?/ Why do you know every single bitch that I know?/ Why can’t you just shut your mouth and take the high road?/ Fuck if I know,” he spits with a sense of self-awareness not always seen in Kanye verses.
“Pop Style” is a pretty standard post-If You’re Reading This Drake song, which still isn’t a bad thing. But when a song featuring two rap legends and a chorus boasting “All my n—-s wanna do is pop style, pop style/ Turn my birthday into a lifestyle, lifestyle,” is paired with a second song that could be very well be described as “pop style” — that’s just Drake bragging about his versatility.
“One Dance” is about as far from “Pop Style” and If You’re Reading This cuts like “6 God” and “Know Yourself” as Drake gets — but it’s not a new sound for him, either. The song, which features Nigerian singer Wizkid and Filipino R&B artist Kyla, toys with what has been Drake’s — and Toronto’s — pet sound for a minute now: dancehall. “One Dance” is closest in sound to Drake’s 2011 hit “Take Care,” but it trades the U.K. electronic influence for the Caribbean sounds he’s used on his 2015 remix of Ramriddlz’s “Sweeterman” and his verse on Rihanna’s “Work.”
At this point, the biggest question about these singles isn’t if they’re any good (they are), but what an album that features both of them will sound like. Will it be a long, diverse sprawl like Take Care or a focused rap record like If You’re Reading This plus a few scattered experiments? Right now, only Drake knows. But if one thing’s for sure: If anyone can make them work, work, work, work, work, it’s the 6 God.
