If You're Reading This It's Too Late Review

Released overnight with no warning, called a mixtape, and immediately behaving like an album in every way that matters, so it is graded as one. The sound is the story. Gone are the pillowy keyboards, and in come hollow drums, sub bass and beats with almost nothing in the middle of them. Energy is two minutes of pure aggression. 10 Bands and Know Yourself are chants rather than songs, and the second of those produced a line an entire city adopted as a slogan.

Legend opens the record by announcing his own immortality over a choir, which is either the funniest or the most humourless thing he has done. What is missing is warmth and jokes. Seventeen tracks of a rich man sounding annoyed is a lot to take, and the back half thins out badly. It is also the album that reset his register from vulnerable to combative, and most of what came after lives in the mood it established.