Certified Lover Boy Review

Delayed repeatedly, announced with poster campaigns in half a dozen cities, and then simply there, eighty six minutes of a sound he had been making for a decade. The production is expensive and often lovely. Champagne Poetry opens on a soft loop and promises a record that never arrives. Way 2 Sexy is a joke that works exactly once. No Friends in the Industry and Knife Talk are fine.

The guests carry it, and a young Memphis rapper turns up and immediately makes everything around him sound sleepy. What is gone is any reason for the album to exist. The writing is a list of grievances against ex partners and unnamed rivals, delivered in the same cadence at the same tempo across twenty one tracks, with none of the humour that made the early records bearable. It broke streaming records on release and almost nobody has played it since. That is not a coincidence, it is the design.