Views Review

It spent thirteen weeks at the top of the album chart, and it earned every one of them. The sound is the argument. 40, who executive produced it with Drake, builds long stretches of cold synth and Toronto winter imagery, and then the record swings into dancehall: One Dance, Controlla and Too Good arrive like windows opening, and pop spent the next two summers copying them. One Dance is a genuinely great single, and it held number one for ten weeks.

Feel No Ways and Redemption are as good as anything he has made, and Weston Road Flows, built on Mary J. Blige's Mary's Joint, is the purest rapping on the album. The price is the length and the grievance: eighty one minutes of exes who wronged him and friends who changed, women addressed in the second person and never given a line back. It is a lot of complaint, and the writing finds more in it than its reputation allows; the bitterness is the album's weather, not its failure. Hotline Bling was tacked on at the end and never needed the album at all, which says how much the album already had.