On October 6th, 2023, Drake dropped his highly anticipated album For All The Dogs to streaming services to mixed reviews from critics and fans. The cover is Drake’s son Adonis’ artistic interpolation of a goat which is a reference to the phrase Greatest Of All Time (G.O.A.T). On top of this, his son has a verse on the song “Daylight” which later turned into its own song released by Adonis. As a music fan, this is one of my problems with the album. A high percentage of this project seems to be filler just put there to extend the run time. This album could have been cut down to around 11 songs. Music critic platform Pitchfork states in an article written by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd that the album “struggles to keep it interesting.”
On the bright side, this album does have a couple of memorable tracks, the most major one being “First Person Shooter” featuring long-time rumored collaborator J Cole. This song marked Cole’s first number-one charting song in his illustrious career. The flow from Cole throughout the song is amazing and Drake follows it up with a solid verse. However, where the song starts to get boring is when Drake starts to talk about the fact that he has a lot of girl’s phone numbers which shouldn’t be a surprise as he is a multi-million dollar rapper and he’s bragging about it like a middle schooler. In fact, throughout the whole album Drake has some funny, but questionable lyrics such as “They say love’s like a BBL, you won’t know if it’s real until you feel one,” “Feel like I’m bi ’cause you’re one of the guys, girl,” “We in the club with your gay friends, Always put you on a straight flight,” and quite possibly one of the worst attempted Drake bars, “July, that’s when I found out that Ju-lied.”
Drake’s opening line on “IDGAF” featuring upcoming artist Yeat caused backlash online because it slowed down the whole flow of the song and ruined the previous minute of build up to this part. Drake took one of the lines from Yeat and said it over him, creating this nerdy-sounding line of “I’m counting up money for fun” which turned into a viral Tik Tok trend poking fun at him. I also agree with the fans as this part is atrocious and his following verse sounds A.I generated. However, after the album came out they fixed the mix and now it’s one of my favorites on the album. Another plus to this album is we finally got a Lil Yachty and Drake song, which has been rumored to be happening since the two artists started being close friends around a year ago. The song is more up-tempo and sounds like something from one of his previous albums either Certified Lover Boy or Her Loss, which Yachty was credited for influencing. Fans were also gifted a Chief Keef feature on this project however his verse seemed to be cut short and was not a highlight on this album.
Despite being a stacked album in terms of features, a lot of the verses don’t have a chance to shine. Chief Keef’s feature on “All The Parties” is only 6 lines long, and for such a big name to be collaborating with you would expect at least a full verse. 21 Savage’s feature on “Calling for You” Is just weak. It sounds just like every other feature he did on Her Loss. “Gently” Has a weak Bad Bunny Verse and Drake’s horrible Spanish pronunciation just makes for an awful track.
If you’re a Drake fan or just a fan of hip-hop in general I would recommend checking out at least the highlights of this album. For me, that’s “Another Late Night” “Fear Of Heights, “8 am In Charlotte”, “Slime You Out”, and “What Would Pluto Do”. On the opposite side of the spectrum, my least favorites from this project are “Members Only”, “Polar Opposites”, “Bahamas Promises”, and “Gently”. This project is a solid addition to 2023’s roster of albums but it just doesn’t compare to the top albums that have come out this year such as Jpegmafia And Danny Brown’s collab project, Travis Scott’s Utopia, And Ken Carson’s A Great Chaos.
