Eight years ago, a Jewish-Canadian former child-star released Thank Me Later; a polished, glittering debut rap album with enviable production credits and features from the likes of Kanye West, Lil Wayne and Jay-Z. The album dominated the annual charts and announced the arrival of rap’s newest star – an 808s and Heartbreaks descendant who made accessible, everyman rap from a not-so-everyman. The music world met Drake.

Fast-forward to 2018 and Aubrey Graham now dominates not only the rap universe, but music and pop culture altogether. His idols, like West and Pusha T, are now rivals who envy his streaming numbers. Over his impressive career, Drake has managed to give listeners a constant output of music – he casually dropped both ‘God’s Plan’ and ‘Nice for What’ this year to huge acclaim (and gaudy listening numbers). He’s now gifted us Scorpion; a pretty yet long trudge of an album that feels like it misses a lot of the fire and passion of his better work.

Scorpion is split into two sides – Drake’s hard-talking, braggadocio rapping dominates the first side (think If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late) while the B-side is a series of  very familiar crooning tracks. The issue is that it often feels as if Drake doesn’t have all that much to say, and when he does, it feels oddly flat and non-descript for someone with such a fascinating and incomparable position in music.

This is particularly evident on the A-Side, which is really just 12 tracks where Drake celebrates his brilliance over admittedly gorgeous production. Tracks like ‘God’s Plan’, ‘8 Out of 10’, ‘Is There More’  and ‘Emotionless’ ebb and flow beautifully courtesy of Noah “40” Shebib, Boi-1da and Wallis Lane. If Scorpion proves anything, it’s that 40 and his team can still boil their production down into an opulent, gorgeous syrup of hi-hats, drum patterns and orchestral flourishes.

The issue lies with Graham. Drake’s rapping has never been truly transcendent but he sorely lacks anything creative over the first collection of tracks (‘Got a lot of blood and it’s cold/They tryna get me for my soul/Thankful for the women that I know/Can’t go fifty-fifty with no ho’). They’re lyrics that could have been written by any rapper, which is doubly disappointing when you consider Drake’s actual life has always been filled with constant drama and volatility – look no further than his newly-born illegitimate child or the bloodbath left in the wake of his feud with Pusha T.

There are slashes across the album where he addresses some of these aspects and looks like he may come through with a truly cutting track. He mentions his son often, but it never feels anything more than manipulative (‘Look at the way we live/I wasn’t hidin’ my kid from the world/I was hidin’ the world from my kid’). There are other subliminal references to feuds with rappers, but nothing explicit or particularly enthralling. When Jay-Z enters on ‘Talk Up’ and delivers a verse on autopilot it still feels like it has more character and personality than anything else on the album.

Scorpion’s B-Side holds a bit more creative license overall, and as a result is at least infinitely more vibrant than the murky, brooding A-Side. ‘Peak’ and ‘Summer Games’ see Drake in trademark Lothario mode and represent two of the better offerings. ‘Nice for What’, released months ago now, still feels as if it comes out of the nowhere to jolt the album into life with its cascading vocal breakdown. It might be the only song across the record that can stand proudly alongside Drake’s classics. ‘In My Feelings’ has a nasty cut from City Girls sliced through it to give it some life, shifts into a bounce track half-way through, and has Drake in full-on manipulative-lover mode (‘Kiki, do you love me/Are you riding/Said you’d never ever leave from beside me.’).

But it’s also filled with complete throwaway tracks that make the album feel as if it might finish in mid-2019. ‘Jaded’, ‘Finesse’ and ‘That’s How You Feel’ feel like they were included to meet a quota. ‘Blue Tint’, featuring a truly awful Future assist, should be destroyed in a self-containment chamber. The album then caps off with ‘March 14’; a classic Drake air-out closer where he goes into much more depth on his supremely awkward relationship with his son. It’s hardly the strongest track on this project, but it at least hints at some personality in the rapper. Unfortunately, by the time you’ve gotten to the 25^th track, the intrigue left long ago.

Ultimately, Scorpion never gets off the ground because Drake never takes hold of the wheel. We’re so deep into the Drake catalogue now and it sometimes sounds like the artist has run out of things to muse on. He leans on his headline-grabbing turmoil with his son to coax some life out of the album, but it doesn’t send it far. The listener is left with a turgid, glossily-produced soup of tracks that often struggle to feel personal at all, which is surprising considering Drake’s calling card has regularly been his ability to make people feel -especially in relationships – as if his struggles mirror their own. Maybe now he’s a Dad, he isn’t so relatable.

There’s still hope in him though. On the second verse of Side-A closer, ‘Is There More’, Drake sounds like he might be piercing the veil; transitioning from a twenty-something fuckboi with too much dough into a jaded veteran of life (‘I got a fear of having things on my mind when I die… Is there more to life than goin’ on trips to Dubai/Yachts on 4^th of July, G5 soarin’ the skies… Am I missing something that’s more important to find/Like healin’ my soul, like family time…’). He almost sounds uneasy, as if he’s losing control of his image. An album focused on that feeling would have been infinitely more vulnerable and daring. It likely would have been better, too.

6.7