Album Breakdown: "Honestly, Nevermind."

By: Alex Peterson

Last week on June 17th, 2022 Drake surprised the world with the release of his 7th studio album: “Honestly, Nevermind”. After mixed reviews came with his previous album “Certified Lover Boy” Drake has turned to a new chapter with his fans, and the music he creates.

Unless you’re living without internet access, I’m sure that you’ve heard about Drake’s new album in some capacity, and it’s not what anybody was expecting. Instead of the litany of raps, bars and Instagram captions I’m sure his fan base was expecting to kick us into summer, he provided us with club beats and melodic vocals throughout the project to the disillusion to most of the fan base. I’m sure that Drake somewhat anticipated that this would be the response, considering the absence of any kind of roll out or promotion for the release of this album. This was most likely to keep the subject material and the vibe of the album under wraps as Drake has had problems with leaks in the past, but this album was dropped with the only notice that the public got being an Instagram post posted hours before the release.

Drake worked with a regular on a lot of his songs and projects Noah “40” Shebib, along with 2022 Grammy Winner, Black Coffee in order to executively produce this album. If this information was available before the release, I think it would’ve been much more apparent as to the direction the album was heading because Drake and Black Coffee’s most famous collaboration, the song “Get it together" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev8TtZVO_MY largely follows the vibe of this new album. Of course, the quality of the production is the best that money can buy. Along with the African influenced beats with steady drums that almost feel like metronomes, these beats were definitely meant to be danced to. Black Coffee really has his fingerprints all over this one, and that will be the reason why someone hates this album or loves it. Put simply, if you've listened to "Passion fruit" you have a good idea of what this album is all about.

Someone like me on the other hand who prefers when Drake gets to rap, this album may be tough to get through as it was for me. Songs like the ones on this album have their place in every artists body of work, especially an artist like Drake, but for every song to almost have an identical vibe can be fatiguing to the ears. This is why I loved the change of pace halfway through the album and at the very end with the songs “Sticky” and “Jimmy Cooks” respectively. With these songs Drake steps into that mode where I think he’s one of the best rappers in the world, from the flows to the punchlines, these two songs are really good ways to take us out of the house party mode that the rest of the album puts you in. The only feature on the project besides the production credits also comes in the song “Jimmy Cooks” which is a play on Drakes character from Degrassi, Jimmy Brooks. Where 21 Savage delivers a great feature to cap off the album. Even though I enjoyed the song it did seem like Drake just slapped the A-list feature on to the end of the album in order to help the sales, knowing this projects numbers could suffer for multiple reasons. These two songs were still a bright spot on the album for me.

Drake has been one of the best artists in the game for over a decade, and after the mixed reviews of CLB, and the even worse reviews for this project even though they were completely different it is clear to see that Drake takes public opinion as a non-factor when it comes to the creation of his music, and he is going to make the music that he wants to make, and whoever likes it likes it and whoever does not doesn’t have to, and Drake has proven to the world that he is perfectly content with that fact.