808s & Heartbreak Review

Stripped to a drum machine, a synth pad and a voice pushed through pitch correction until it stops sounding human, this is the sound of a man with nothing to say and a need to say it anyway. His mother had died and his engagement had ended, and instead of writing about either he built a grey box and stood in it. Heartless and Street Lights are genuinely beautiful, tribal drums and reverb and a melody that will not resolve.

Say You Will spends four minutes on an outro that is just the pad, and it earns them. The lyrics are the problem and always were: blunt, repetitive, sometimes plainly clumsy, and the emotional register never widens past cold. What it did to the culture is not in question, since most of what rap sounded like from 2010 onward is downstream of this. Whether you actually put it on is a different question, and the honest answer for most people is not often.