Review Summary: Bloated and boring and long in the tooth.
“STILL” does a lot of heavy lifting in the title of Future and Metro Boomin’s latest collaborative project,
WE STILL DON’T TRUST YOU. It’s a sort of sequel/continuation of
WE DON’T TRUST YOU, barely three weeks old, and is nearly incomprehensible in its aims and accomplishments without a fairly decent understanding of its characters and the current drama unfolding in the world of hip-hop. Metro Boomin is one of the few producers today, often prodding (pun intended) his co-workers into making some of their best work. Future is an auto-tuned wizard who has been instrumental in paving a way for less-lyrical, more vibe-oriented artists in drugged out, muted flows. Together, they’ve worked with just about everyone who has come through mainstream hip-hop in the last decade, and -for reasons that far exceed the scope of this review- come to the same thesis that that I have for the last several years: Drake sucks. That animosity was made manifest by ceding the stage to Kendrick Lamar, who hasn’t exactly made his feelings towards Aubrey a secret, and allowing to issue a kinetic callout on “Like That”. While Drake has remained mostly silent since (his instagram captions, however, have never radiated more Devil Smiling Emoji energy), J Cole has since dropped a rebuttal, only to recant that rebuttal in less than 72 hours in one of the most embarrassing L’s in recent memory.
If none of that made sense, please move on. There is nothing to see here. If that read more as a “Previously on DBZ….” segment, well, you may still want to move on.
WE STILL DON’T TRUST YOU has little to offer on basically any front. On the drama front, there are no haymakers or grand declarations. There are a few guests that stop by ala Mr. Rodgers style to give low-effort mumblings to the effect of “Drake Sucks,” but much of the project is devoid of anything compelling enough to hang your hat on.. J Cole is the most shocking such instance, continuing his press tour of misery on “Red Leather” with a verse that manages to match the NyQuil beat (“My energy was never on some toughest n**** sh
it/I was just a conscious rapper that would *** a n**** b
itch”) is a helluva line given his current predicament). Metro does an adequate job of providing enough studio magic to make the songs have requisite flair, but Future completely drops the ball in the process of delivering another career assist. While the man has hardly ever been a compelling lyricist, opting instead to get by on vocal hypnotism, his verses here are more akin to field recordings of him mumbling things mid-bender than any concentrated effort in the booth. “Amazing (Interlude)” is the worst offender here -coincidentally, also the album’s worst track- as Future rattles off a list of things that he thinks are pretty cool, like “Girls kissin’ girls,” that reads like a test of memory conducted by a medical professional.
Such a test may be necessary, as the album’s runtime at eighty-eight minutes becomes somewhat of a tortuous war of attrition. Songs like “Luv Bad Bitches”, “Nights Like This”, “Mile High Memories”, and “Right 4 You” are all id-coddling slop, sounding more like the result of pressing record mid-party than an effort to suggest an anonymously good time. “Came to the Party” is almost quaint in how honest it is in being little more than a play to caption someone’s monthly Instagram dump (“Came to the party for the photos/show off my new outfit, show off my new b
itch”). Things don’t get much better when the project takes a start turn on its second disk and we are suddenly gobsmacked with lo-fi horror vibes that sound plucked out of time from the second Bush administration. A puzzling addition that provides temporary relief from monotony, only to settle into its own sort of slump. The album’s best song is mercifully its first. The title track is more akin to s b-side Weeknd song off of
Dawn FM than it is something that plays to the image of the project’s main duo, and that is genuinely a compliment.
WE STILL DON’T TRUST YOU is an airy, forgettable chapter for everyone involved that is ultimately a byproduct of all the issues currently plaguing mainstream hip-hop, writ large. The sheer amount of homework needed to make this thing even the slightest bit compelling due to the mere suggestion of drama is more akin to pointing out that some background extra in a phase 5 Marvel film is actually Triangle Boy, or something. The mammoth runtime is a transparent bid to throw as much material out there in the hopes that something sticks. Quantity over quality, always suggest instead of perform. Here, even that incredibly low bar seems too tall of a task.
