Drake — Habibti
Drake gives up on even pretending that he’s trying.
If its predecessor, Maid of Honour, already was beginning to feel dragged down by excessive filler, then Habibti, the third, final and shortest project released by Drake on May 15th via OVO/Republic/UMG, essentially consists entirely of tracks that feel like half-finished throwaways.
Despite the fact that this album only has eleven tracks, compared to fourteen on Maid of Honour and eighteen on Iceman, it feels like the longest of the three. The album already starts off at a lethargic pace, and progressively gets slower and slower, less and less energetic — it feels at times like Drake is the victim of some kind of curse which traps him 80% of the way to falling asleep, unable to wake up or to fully drift off. He truly comes off like he’s purposely trying to do as little as possible, to put in the barest of minimums when it comes to effort. And this time, the lifeless beats don’t have nearly enough in them to carry the flow of the record where Drake himself can’t. The best example of this lack of investment is “Classic”, where Drake only appears on the first half of the song, with the second entirely occupied by a repetitive sample. The second Sexyy Red verse in three albums, which is uncharacteristically low-energy and is the only feature on the record, doesn’t exactly do anything to elevate the energy or the quality of the album either.
Of course, the questionable lyrics haven’t gone anywhere either — there are fewer of them on this album, simply because most of the lyrics are far too generic and uninteresting to make any real impression — but there are still a few notably bad lines, such as “Let your pussy talk, I'll do the ad-libs” on “High Fives”, "Insurance on the dick if you want, cover me with Geico" on “White Bone”, or “A good job is like Waldo, don't know where to find ‘em” on “Prioritizing”. One that stands out as particularly bad is the bizarre line on “Gen 5” where Drake casually uses the fact that the woman he’s talking to is a victim of domestic abuse in her other relationship in order to lift himself up (“I know that I'm treatin' you better than him/'Cause you do not come home with no blackened eye”).
Overall, Habibti is an incredibly dreary end to an exasperating trilogy. Almost nothing about it is even slightly memorable, it drags tremendously despite being only just over half an hour long, and it shows off Drake at his very laziest and least inspired. On the closer, “Prioritizing”, Drake accuses his partner of using ChatGPT to write her texts to him — and all that really does is make the listener wonder if maybe he himself used the AI chatbot to write this album.
2.6/10
