Over the Beatles-via-Masego-sampling intro, “Champagne Poetry,” Drake breaks the fourth wall by mentioning his status as king of misguided IG captions, before making his place on rap’s throne sound wildly depressing and isolating: The peak of the album is easily its first two songs.
In typical fashion, on Certified Lover Boy, Drake distills the highly unrelatable (being a beloved multimillionaire at the top of music) into the very identifiable (humans feeling slighted by other humans). A double-platinum song like “Laugh Now Cry Later” would be another rapper’s biggest hit, but for Drake that distinction doesn’t even make it worthy to go on the very album it was meant to promote. Even at this current creative nadir in Drake’s discography, the projects may be uneven ( Views), bloated ( Scorpion), or forgettable ( Dark Lane Demo Tapes), but they’re never outright bad. It’s as if the lessons gleaned from the creative fumble of 2010’s Thank Me Later were burned into his cerebellum, and in the wake of such a misstep, he hardwired a certain level of undeniable quality into his music. The aesthetics change, but the underlying formula rarely does. Every hit is more massive than the next, each meme begets another, and each new album is destined to strangle a variety of charts in commercially gruesome ways. Like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a new Bachelor season, death, and taxes, Drake’s success often seems inevitable and too big to contend with in any meaningful way. Across 21 songs and 86 minutes, CLB vacillates between a perfectly fine if inconsequential album from a great artist to a stunning display of unconscious self-parody. Thus Certified Lover Boy, Drake’s sixth studio album and first since 2018, is at once an awe-inspiring monument to the financial wonders of stasis and an unintentional examination of an artist uninterested in the idea of maturation (or perhaps incapable of it).