Drake's new album "Certified Lover Boy" sounds like it smells: like musk and velvet

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Rapper Drake 2019

Photo: Chris Delmas / AFP

Since 2020, the world has not only known what Drake sounds like, but also how he smells.

Allegedly.

The Canadian pop musician not only brings albums onto the market, but also scented candles.

One of them, the product description said, "actually smells like Drake."

Notes of musk and suede, but also of cashmere and velvet.

Aha.

Drake, whose full name is Aubrey Drake Graham and was born 34 years ago in Toronto, is one of the most successful and influential rap superstars.

Next to Kanye West.

Both singing rappers or rapping singers are among the wealthiest musicians in the world - and among the particularly feared album shifters.

After Kanye West's "Donda" finally came out late on Sunday, Drake has now delivered too.

His sixth studio album, "Certified Lover Boy", has been out since Friday.

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It sounds like Drake smells.

Like musk and velvet.

In the eleven years since his debut album "Thank Me Later", the musician has tried out many sounds and temperaments, but he has apparently understood: The gesture of someone wearing sunglasses, who at first glance just looks cool, suits him best behind the dark ones Glasses but also seem to hide his sad eyes.

Drake has perfected this gesture.

Already on the cover of »Views«, his fourth studio album from 2016: Drake is sitting, naturally alone, on the CN Tower in his hometown.

Lonely top.

Coking supermodels and fake friends

On "Certified Lover Boy" he doesn't try too hard to deviate from this gesture. In the 86 minutes - at least four minutes more compact than his fifth album "Skorpion" - he decorates the tracks, in the tried and tested Drake manner, with shiny covers full of inner emptiness. “Cashmere knits for the nighttime boat rides”, it already says in the opener “Champagne Poetry”, but then: “Lived so much for others, don't remember how I feel.” To emphasize a few lines further that he is lonely top is, "above me I see nobody". Or, just one song later: "I'm standing at the top."

It goes on like this.

With private jets.

Fine restaurants.

Parties in Miami.

Sex fantasies.

Koksenden supermodels.

Even his son Adonis, who has been rumored about in recent years, sometimes looks like stucco in the texts when he is mentioned immediately after a luxury watch.

That's the page.

The one from which one cannot see the eyes of the sunglasses wearer.

One beat, one bass, lots of white space

“That shit you tell Chanel,” Drake sings in the middle of the album, “I wish that's how you called me.” The other side: The wrong friends. The proud mom. The heartache. "Try to suppress my emotions, they're bursting like fountains, baby." Oh, that pain! "Pain is just a place that I go to get the bars from", he basically sums up himself in the closing song "The Remorse". "Anxiety's a drug that I use to get the job done." Getting the job over with - that sounds like "Certified Lover Boy" a few times too often.

That also means the music, which relies on the Drake mix, which has been successfully tested for years, of a beat, a bass, a wobbling, hushed, plexiglass sound in the background and a lot of white space. This seldom results in fantastic pop songs like “Fountains” with its syncopation and the great vocals of the young Nigerian Tems on “Certified Lover Boy”.

Almost the most beautiful, because strangest, are the frayed samples and zombie-like quotes on "Certified Lover Boy": The sample of a sample of the Beatles song "Michelle" in the intro, in which Paul McCartney sounds like a potty singer Android with the record jumps in the head. The fundamentally unsuccessful “I'm Too Sexy” trap-style (“Way 2 Sexy”), which sounds so broken that it's all over again (at a “Now I somehow ended up at the flat rate party, so get drunk me too «way) is fun. These are moments in which Drake's sound sounds as if it did not arise in reality, but in an apocalyptic simulation. Moments when it deviates from the standard. Unfortunately there are few.

In the end, Drake's “Certified Lover Boy” and Kanye West's “Donda” have something in common.

Above all unpleasant: the length of the feature film, which is not worth going to the cinema.

The quantity instead of the quality.

The mediocrity that doesn't smell like a superstar.