Drake: "How Bout Now"

Nobody runs a victory lap like Drake. Fresh off turning 28 a night earlier, he nonchalantly dropped three new songs on Saturday in an effort to beat some hackers to the punch. Even if the release was more counter-piracy than coronation, it was a reminder that few other artists—like, you can count them on your hand—can loose a few C-sides onto SoundCloud and momentarily make the world stop. “How Bout Now” is the best of the bunch, and it’s an inadvertently neat summary of his last few years atop the throne.

Built on a chipmunked Jodeci sample, it blends the sinew and shadow of Nothing Was the Same with the soul and baroque flourishes of Take Care. It’s slinky and amorphous, it’s emotionally unvarnished, it’s rich with Toronto slang and Jamaican patois, and it’s petty as hell. (“I bought your dad a bunch of shit for Christmas/ He ain’t even say thank you”; somewhere in America, Courtney from Hooters on Peachtree solemnly nods.) It’s a vindictive statement from someone who doesn’t have much around him in the way of competition right now. And it’s thanks to that internal fire that, a year after “Trophies”, Drake is still holding them.

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