4:44 Review

One producer, thirty six minutes, no filler and no attempt to sound current. The beats are soul loops, sped and chopped and left warm, and against them he does the thing everyone had stopped expecting, which is to admit things. The title track is an apology to his wife delivered without any of the deflection that defined his previous three albums. The Story of O.J. is the clearest thing he has written about money and race, a cartoon sample and a hard lesson about equity.

Legacy and Smile are about his family, one of them about his mother's life. Kill Jay Z opens the record by taking apart the persona he spent twenty years building. It is not something you put on for pleasure very often, because the tone is uniformly serious and the tempos barely move. But as writing it is the second best album of his career, and the only late one that would survive without his name on it.