drake views from the 6 album instrumental

The album exists in a gleaming blue sadness-cloud, one that only breaks for rare moments of genuine joy like “ One Dance” or “ Controlla.” Even Take Care had a few big slappers, and Drake has mostly lost interest in those now.

(A typical smart-dumb lyric: “Girl, I had your back when all you used to do was front.”) The music has gotten hazier and more ornamental, and Drake probably spends more time singing and less time rapping than on any of his previous records. In a 73-minute album, Drake spends most of the time morose and adrift, mourning past relationships and blaming everyone but himself. It’s still early, but Views is pretty clearly Drake’s attempt to return to that Take Care well of inspiration. And now that the newly-renamed Views is out there, it seems he merely disappeared back up his own ass when it was time to get serious. The whole time, he was supposedly working on Views From The 6, his magnum opus. He called If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late a mixtape even though it was the biggest-selling rap album of 2015, and one of the best. But to hear Drake talk about it, he was just spinning his wheels, having fun before really getting to work. I’ve never seen a single person control a vast crowd the way Drake did when he headlined Coachella. Drake turned SoundCloud loosies into genuine anthems, and he talked the kind of shit you can only talk if you’re the biggest and most important rap star in the world. He had a great 2015, largely because he’d taught himself to have fun and to sound tough. Since Take Care, Drake has proven himself to be a master of that sound, but he’s also been able to step outside it. This sound, largely devised by Drake’s right hand-man Noah “40” Shebib, was a new type of rap instrumental - one that evoked not clattering subway trains or jacked-up subwoofers but expensively appointed kitchens.

It’s a spectacularly messy album, best exemplified by the gorgeous six-minute possessive drunk-dial ramble “Marvin’s Room.” And it’s the album where Drake also figured out his own aesthetic: a sleekly spacey and regionless computer-soul. On 2011’s Take Care, his second album, Drake managed to turn himself into a compelling and fully-formed character: an ascendant rap god, excited but freaked out by his own sudden success, trying to figure out why all these people were around him now and whether he wanted that. It’s been five years since Drake discovered the wonders and mysteries of his own ass.

Drake views from the 6 album instrumental