Travis Scott is one of the world’s biggest rappers right now, and while he’s far from being the only Future imitator out there, his career would be utterly impossible without Future’s example. When Future sings about all the people he’s influenced, he might as well be erecting a gigantic blinking arrow and pointing it at Scott. And while Metro Boomin isn’t on The WIZRD, one person is on both albums, and that’s Travis Scott. Metro Boomin, a frequent Future collaborator, is all over Assume Form both as a collaborator and an influence. Both Future and Blake are singing architectural Auto-Tune melodies through synth-glimmers and seismic bass-swells. Blake sings about the redemptive power of love, while Future sings about its total impossibility, but those are two sides of the same coin. The two albums play nicely together, almost as if they’re in conversation. In a weird way, The WIZRD works as a nice companion piece to another album that came out the same day: Assume Form, the new one from Future’s “ King’s Dead” collaborator James Blake. But its numbness also works to build an immersive mood. With 20 tracks spanning an hour, it’s too long. Musically, The WIZRD is very much a winter album: sparse, tingly, synthetically bleak. But it’s still a dark, deep, nasty, heavy-hearted fog of a record. Maybe Future’s head was a little clearer when he made the album, and maybe you can even hear that in the album itself. The WIZRD is closer to the top of the pile than to the bottom. Future has made incredible music in that groove, like DS2, and he has made suffocatingly boring music, like Project E.T. Samples of Future’s older songs appear throughout, reminders and callbacks to previous iterations of that groove. It’s a comfort-zone album, an album that works in the same cyclical groove where Future has been ever since his holy triumvirate of post- Honest mixtapes. Future may have quit lean, and he may have walked away from music for the better part of a year, but he has not altered his approach. All because he’s been “afraid to change.”Īnd judging by The WIZRD, Future hasn’t really changed. That Future persona depends on soul-deadened hedonism, and that, in turn, made him afraid to talk about even the tiniest break in that soul-deadened hedonism. Virtually every young rap star to emerge in these past few years has drawn on Future’s sound, viewpoint, and persona at least a little bit. Over nearly a decade, he has changed the sound of rap music, bending it toward his fried, regretful, traumatized brain-fuzz blues. But at least to me, it was a lot more interesting when Future, in a Genius interview, talked about quitting lean but being reluctant to let people know about it: “I didn’t wanna tell nobody I stopped drinking lean… It just be hard when your fans so used to a certain persona, you be afraid to change.” I’m your husband! You better not even bring Future’s name up!'” Ciara and Wilson responded by posting Instagram pics of themselves in defiant happy-family poses, a large-stage version of a parental Facebook feud. “He not being a man in that position… You not tellin’ her, ‘Bro, chill out with that on the internet.
“He do exactly what she tell him to do,” Future said of Wilson. In a Beats 1 interview before the album’s release, Future said some foul things about his ex Ciara and about Russell Wilson, Ciara’s husband, who is currently raising Future’s son. There is, of course, the celebrity-gossip angle. But a couple of revealing Future interview moments have, at least on my timeline, utterly overwhelmed the music. And yet its release doesn’t exactly feel like an event. Future’s new album The WIZRD is the first real A-list album of the year, the first full-length release from a genuine star. When this week’s album charts come out, though, it’s all but guaranteed that Future will replace his young admirer in the top spot. In this extremely depressing formulation, Future Hndrxx is Hendrix, and the pharmacy bottle is his guitar.Īs I’m typing this, Hoodie SZN is the #1 album in America. It reminds me of the way previous generations of artists used to gush to their own idols, talking about being inspired to pick up instruments for the first time. Something similar happened when Future recorded WRLD On Drugs, his collaborative album with the young emo-rapper Juice WRLD, and learned that Juice WRLD had tried lean after hearing Future rhapsodize about it. “Used to bump ‘March Madness,’ popping Addys because of you,” A Boogie singsongs. There’s a moment on Hoodie SZN, the new album from the young Bronx sing-rapper A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, where A Boogie delivers a few words of praise for Future, his favorite rapper, saying all the things he wishes he’d said when he was in the studio with the man himself.