Consider the second half of the decade Future’s slide into comfort. A lot of people describe young rappers starting out their careers with the word ‘hunger,’ and not only has Future lost that as he became more famous (although his work ethic certainly hasn’t changed; I count 14 releases across these 5 years), he also lost what made him truly unique in the first place: the emotional content is barely there anymore outside of a few choice cuts (typically closers: “Purple Reign,” “Feds Did a Sweep,” “Sorry”), replaced by boring decadence. He’s no longer looking for salvation in bad places, and any lines that recall the old Future (i.e. “You smell codeine when I pee”) feel like pandering to an old audience. (“I miss the old Future, the straight from the go Future…”) The autotune is still being applied liberally, but it’s not being used for interesting effect anymore, and he plays around with his voice less and less too; I think it’s telling that the infamous falsettoed “Slob on me knob” on the Black Panther soundtrack wasn’t exactly his idea to include.
All that being said, there’s still a few great releases to look forward to and plenty of great songs to curate your own post-2015 Future playlist. Here’s the rest of the guide:
Purple Reign was released in the first month of the new year, and it was well-received by critics and fans and then promptly forgotten about when Future released his studio album follow-up to DS2 one month later. Talk about shooting yourself in your own foot because Purple Reign deserved better. As it stands, it’s also the last Future mixtape that anyone truly needs: after this, songs that would normally have ended up on a mixtape were added onto increasingly longer albums. (I blame Spotify.) The first two songs emphasize the weirdness of beats from Monster or DS2: “All Right” sees Metro Boomin et al. dropping clusters of chords whose wooziness is emphasized by detuning the notes such that it feels like the beat is destabilized; “Wicked”’s barrage sounds like it’ll be the template for Rihanna’s “Woo” except this one was released 11 days prior. The middle section does sag until “No Charge” where Southside drops a beat constructed out of sonar radar pings while Future gives you drugs for free because he sees himself inside of you, and then DJ Spinz modernizes Pharrell/The Neptune’s classic sound on “Run Up.” And closer “Purple Reign” actually somehow earns its ridiculous reference by sporting one of the strongest melodies Future has ever crooned; whereas once he claimed “Best thing I ever did was fall out of love,” now he’s begging for a girlfriend.
EVOL was his studio album follow-up to DS2 and thus was ostensibly supposed to be different than the mixtapes in the interim but it played like just another Saturday smoke with Southside, and if Beast Mode/DS2 was the exact moment I started taking him seriously as an artist, EVOL was the exact moment where I started doubting him. All in the span of one year, no less. (Young Thug had a similar issue at this time.) The cover of burnt roses and album title of ‘LOVE’ backwards (“We’re gonna kill the California girls…”) suggest a far more emotional album than what this actually is. There is the small blessing that he has yet to take on Drake’s tactic of maximizing streaming numbers by increasing the number of songs per album, but there are no great songs on EVOL and I’d happily take one great song with 16 others than no great song among 10 which is my way of saying I’d rank FUTURE ahead of this. One point for “Low Life,” and in general Future and the Weeknd work well together (because their voices are so different and both made lonely party music in their early years that just changed to party music as the money rolled in) in a way that makes me wish they collaborated more. Ignoring the Drake collaboration, this is his weakest project since Astronaut Status; everything sounds good but also feels stale.
Another mixtape attributed to DJ Esco so Future fans might miss this, Project E.T. Esco Terrestrial (honestly not the worst pun) has Future on all but three of its 16 songs. But if you never heard this, you’re not missing out: it’s actually quite awful. Many of the beats feel like experiments that never found homes: I am really not sure what Zay was going for with that percussion on “Too Much Sauce” while Metro Boomin & G Koop do this artificial choral sound for “Benjamins Bun” that doesn’t come off. Southside’s piano loop on “Party Pack” kills brain cells: animals were actually harmed in the making of that beat. Meanwhile, the tracks without Future are straight up awful: I can see Stuey Rock has been up to no good in the past 5 years while Rambo So Weird on “Super Dumb” is just, well, the jokes write themselves; “Stupidly Crazy” sounds like a radio hit so generic you’ll forget what it sounds like immediately afterwards. And while I’m at it, no one tries on posse cut “100it Racks”: it’s like hip-hop’s own little bystander effect where a bunch of big names get together but no one steps forward. “My Blower” is the best song here, sporting a spacious beat from DJ Spinz and a hilarious Juicy J verse.
Future released four projects in 2015 and to match it in 2016, he linked up with Gucci Mane and knocked out the Free Bricks 2: Zone 6 Edition EP near year’s end. Unlike the previous mixtape, the two are on equal footing now (represented by the fact that they handle hook duty equally). Gucci Mane is still riding his post-prison high and gets in plenty of funny and/or memorable lines: “When I get a chance to vote, I'm votin' for Monica Lewinsky '/ Cause I'ma paint her face like Leonardo DaVinci”; “I got that shit that make a junkie walk from Mississippi / I got these bitches selling blood to get a fix in”; “I'm from Bouldercrest Road B, but you can call it blow street / Where junkies buy a 8 ball 'fore they buy some groceries.” The usual beat-makers hook the two rappers with some choice beats—the knock-knock beat from Zaytoven for “Kinda Dope”; the wafting melody on London on da Track & Southside on “Selling Heroin.” Too short to be deemed essential, so it’s not as good as Purple Reign from Future or Everybody Looking for Gucci Mane that year, but it’s better than EVOL or Wobtober.
What I think happened here is that Future had about 10 tracks lying around of top-grade material and 24 tracks that were listenable, and rather than release another tight project like Beast Mode or EVOL, he dropped a 17-track hideous thing that was FUTURE and then released another another 17-track album the week after so that he could tell everyone that he was the first artist to release two Billboard 200 chart-topping albums in two consecutive weeks. It’s like J. Cole going big without features - who cares about these random accolades?
FUTURE is easily the worse of these two albums; in fact, it’s basically a carrying case for “Mask Off”: the beat selection is far less interesting than those that comprise HNDRXX such that when a similar flute loop come up again on “Feds Did a Sweep” (by Zaytoven this time), it’s like ‘finally, an interesting sound’ instead of ‘this sound again?’ The filler isn’t soporific; it’s just loud and uninteresting and what’s always struck me as odd is that FUTURE opens with its two worst songs. “Rent Money” is huge and empty, and the sort of lame-ass production that you’d expect from a Rick Ross album, produced by three nobodies named The Beat Belly, Chef Tate and DJ Khaled. “Good Dope” is even dumber: ‘Where you goin?’ ‘Shopping at Tiffany’s!’ The small highlight reel: “I’m So Groovy” is fun: the ‘mm’’s and ‘hm’’s and Tarentino’s high-pitched bleeps falling wherever they may and making the second-drawer track a very addicting listen (i.e. actually groovy). “POA” is ridiculous in how the drums and piano fill out the mix; “I don’t care if you was my daddy / Bitch, I’ma cut off your neck” is funny in its absurdity. And no matter what I said about “Feds Did a Sweep,” it’s still clearly the album’s second-best song after “Mask Off.” As for that song, that the indelible Tommy Butler sample in the dead middle of “Mask Off” only happens once always gives me “He’ll give us what we need” flashbacks although of course it’s not used to nearly the same extent. Also, “Mask on, fuck it, mask off” popped in my head walking out of the vax center even if we all kept our masks on.
This was the last truly almost-great Future project. “My Collection” is the closest we’ve gotten to another “Thought It Was a Drought.” “Comin Out Strong” and “Sorry” update 2016’s “Low Life” and “Purple Reign,” respectively. “Use Me” and “Hallucinating” are unbelievable productions that sound like nothing that Future has ever rapped on before, the richness promised by so much dull-ass cloud rap achieved. Southside’s video game synths are boiled, bubbled and looped on “Testify” until the molecules bounce around happily; it’s such a strange little number. “I Thank U” makes me think of the strung-out guitar in parts of Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange but fleshed out into an actual song. The album’s chief issue is (again) the number of songs lets him down: “Looking Exotic” is too normal a banger for an album with beats that are different than the stuff Future tends to settle for now; “Fresh Air” sounds like something from Drake’s Views; “Selfish” (the Rihanna collab) sucks so much. I’d say stick around to hear her sing ‘suddenly’ and jump ship. And though the album is supposed to be an exploration of Future’s alter-ego in Hendrix (Future Hendrix literally split into two), it barely does that - no more than Beyonce tried on I Am… Sasha Fierce. Not enough of an R&B influence even though it’s clearly there in tracks like “Fresh Air,” “Damage” and the two features. What I would personally do is whittle FUTURE and HNDRXX into one great 10-track album but I know it would contain 8 songs from this one and only 2 songs from FUTURE.
Like Madonna teaming up with Prince in 1989 or Prince teaming up with Kate Bush in 1995, this came way too late. Imagine a Future-Young Thug project in 2015, with “Check” backed by Zaytoven on da track instead of London, a song that might be the happy medium of “Where Ya At?” and “Best Friend,” a song with the combined strings of “Lay Up” and “Numbers?” This is not that. By 2017, both of these artists were no longer operating on the same level as they were just two years ago. The four solo cuts—two apiece—would typically point to how low-effort a collaborative album of this nature might be (i.e. they don’t even collaborate that much), but because they shine more than some of the songs around them, it demonstrates that how little these two are trying in the others’ presence. To say nothing of the beats! Literally no one brings their a-game, although Mike Will Made It at least tries with that weird vocal sound on “Mink Game” (which Thugga naturally harmonizes with perfectly).
In 2018, the Future-curated soundtrack to Superfly was released, and no one talked about it because, I assume, no one saw the film. (I haven’t.) But it is feature-loaded, and so it plays like Future trying to replicate the success of Kendrick Lamar’s Black Panther soundtrack. I’m sure Future was ecstatic to finally collaborate with Sleepy Brown considering his deep love for OutKast but he doesn’t show it: he puts in no effort into his verse on “Struggles.” “No Shame” has a bluesy bass-line but it’s much too languid; two of the Future-Young Thug collaborations feel like leftovers from the SUPER SLIMEY sessions. And whereas Kendrick Lamar incorporated South African rappers (truly, the most interesting part about that soundtrack which everyone liked and no one listened to after 2017; vapid like the film), Future leaves the less-famous collaborators to themselves, shoving HoodCelebrityy and A.CHAL right at the end and not even bothering to drop a verse or pair them up with a different famous artist like Lamar did. 9th Wonder’s drums on the Rick Ross joint (already plenty appealing, I know) sound flat and dull; I cannot wait for Lil Wayne’s verse to end on “Drive Itself” (Lil Wayne will redeem himself shortly). Across two discs, I walk away with two cuts, a pretty abysmal rate: the Zaytoven banger “Walk on Minx” which I’d take over about half the songs from the upcoming Beast Mode 2 and the final Future-Young Thug song “Georgia” which sees both croon-singing instead of rapping and stands out among all this low-effort rapping.
This was received as a disappointment to everyone who waited 3.5 years for Beast Mode’s sequel (which feels twice that long in Future time considering the clip at which he releases music), which goes to show that hip-hop artists should never cater to fans who keep asking for sequels to classic albums: it’s never going to live up to expectations! This is actually Future’s best release in these post-HNDRXX years of 2018-2020, in part because Beast Mode 2 thankfully keeps the original’s intense brevity, but also because Zaytoven is a more thoughtful producer than most of the others that Future typically works with: “Wifi Lit,” “Cuddle My Wrist” and “Racks Blue” owe a lot to Zay. Elsewhere, Future does impress, first by playing around with his voice on “Doh Doh” (most any other rapper would just repeat those syllables in the same note whereas Future spins a small melody out of them) and then inventing some rhymes by shaping the words with autotune on “Some More” (“My Cinderella, I'm keeping' her spoiled / Danced with the Devil so hard to avoid / Hand on the chrome, don't you never ignore it”). The original was great; this is merely good.
A collaboration from two earnest musicians that doesn’t capitalize enough on said earnestness. For one thing, this isn’t the Future of 2015 but the Future of 2018 where he doesn’t have a worldview anymore; a new line about piss in his codeine lands with a thud instead of concern. Not helping is that the beats don’t even bring you to care about what either rapper is saying; Wheezy phones it in on “7AM Freestyle” and it’s just the dumbest loop around; what sounds like oddly synthetic (but colourful) acoustic guitars opens “Ain’t Livin Right” promptly disappear as soon as the drums start and the song loses all colour, purpose (although they do show up again near the end, but too little too late at that point). Juice WRLD’s choruses on “Fine China” are annoyingly tone-deaf in their “Her last man was a pussy, had a vagina”-“So if she leaves, I'ma kill her, oh, she'll die” double whammy, and so it surprises me that the song was as a hit. Meanwhile, his solo spot has rhymes ‘kissy-kissy’ with ‘hickey-hickey.’ Lil Wayne kills his verse, at least: starting off a new rhyme scheme with “Make that pussy open, close” and then going ‘nose’, ‘rose’', ‘clothes’, ‘dose’, ‘those’, ‘ghost’, ‘comatose,’ ‘vamonos’ and—the craziest one—‘Galapagos.’ But then Nicki Minaj has a line comparing her friends wanting to eat her pussy to Jeffrey Dahmer which is truly horrifying. A mixed bag, you see.
Where once different projects at least had different vibes, now the studio album is the same for him: just a content dump that generates income. There is virtually no distinction between Future Hndrxx Presents: The Wizrd and High Life the following year: both are 20 songs, 60-minute-long feels-like-80-minute albums whose tracks you can shuffle into one another without batting an eye. Corporate wants you to find the difference between the songs. They’re the same song. The Wizrd follows a major lifestyle change after Future revealed the previous year that he quit drinking lean; “I didn’t wanna tell nobody I stopped drinking lean […] Because I felt like, then they gon’ be like ‘Oh, his music changed because he stopped drinking lean.’” In that context, The Wizrd plays like a conscience attempt to prove he’s the same artist even though he’s not the same person, which is hip-hop’s general problem of not letting its rappers mature. Not a single top-drawer track, although the beat switch that Southside et al cook up for the second half of “Baptize” makes me think of driving down the pacific coast highway, windshields whipping back and forth. It gets to the point that when Future references the lawsuit with Ciara right at the end, it plays like he just remembered ‘oh yeah, people liked it when I got vulnerable.’ No, we liked it when you got real.
High Life features Travis Scott and I detect a slight influence from Scott in the way autotune is applied to the choruses of “Trapped in the Sun” and “Life is Good”’s stitched-together parts, but it’s not exactly like “Stargazing” or “Sicko Mode” anyway. Otherwise, par for the course. Southside’s “Touch the Sky” sounds like every Southside production of the past 4 years. Future and Young Thug make you yearn for SLIMEY SEASON on “Harlem Shake” (one positive: there’s more features on this record than The Wizrd). “HiTek Tek,” “Ridin Strikers” and “One Of My” have beats that sound very similar to each other in their chimes chankin’ around. Future’s first verse is so oddly short on “Last Name” and so it feels like you’re hearing the chorus repeated four times in quick succession, and Lil Durk ruins his touching verse about death with an additional verse about why he doesn’t respond to DMs. Whereas you could make a great album from FUTURE and HNDRXX, there’s not enough to fill out a playlist from these two albums. Between these two long albums came a 7-song EP of leftovers called Save Me hinting at a past when he actually sought salvation. “XanaX Damage” and “Love Thy Enemies” strike me as instrumentals that could have appeared on Frank Ocean’s Endless; “XanaX Damage” pitch shifts Future’s voice lower than normal, setting you up to expect a far more experimental release but the beats afterwards are just too cookie-cutter for my tastes.
The consensus around all of these one-off collaborations with Future and other rappers is a resounding ‘meh’ but “Marni On Me” actually has Future and Lil Uzi Vert feeding off each other in such a way that I’m tempted to rank Pluto x Baby Pluto over the ones with Drake, Young Thug or Juice WRLD. “I push a button, my car need no keys” Lil Uzi Vert flexes. “I push the button, the car drive by itself,” Future says, one-upping his competitor. “I push a button, my bitch on her knees,” Uzi re-asserts. “I push the button, the bitch (come) from overseas,” Future says, one-upping Uzi again. And then they keep that back-to-back going for the rest of the verse, each line starting with the press of a button and ending in the same rhyme. It’s a shame no other song does that (why not?) but regardless, Uzi brings out a Future that tries a little harder than he has on his past two albums, maybe because Uzi had a better 2020 than Future. Most of the beats are pretty standard (what else is new), although 12Hunna & Hagan use a lilting guitar for “Drankin N Smokin” and London on da Track & Lab Cook bring in a string sample that makes me think of Ghostface Killah’s “We Made It” on “Plastic.” Like most every other Future project since Trump, it definitely doesn’t sustain interest all the way through: Future’s producers that typically do him justice show up and collect paychecks, first Zaytoven on “Real Baby Pluto” and then DJ Esco on “Off Dat.” Meanwhile, Lil Uzi Vert re-makes “XO Tour Llif3” for the choruses of “I Don’t Wanna Break Up.”