The Singles Jukebox

I can’t top Patrick’s line.

[Video][Website]
[4.86]

Patrick St. Michel: Hold on, we’re going nowhere. 
[4]

Micha Cavaseno: OVO world is often tormented by its sketchiness. Not in the quality of the characters who’ve emerged, but their actual admission of who they really are. Drake’s been rapping for half a decade, but he’s perennially vague and fails to describe with success anything beyond a series of images, situations and vague feelings. He never fits inside. Likewise Majid and their friend PartyNextDoor (The Weeknd, an outsider groomed by producers long before Drakkula’s Kiss, never belonged in the camp) are masters of the sonics of evocation, a trick they’ve learned from Drake’s 40 and Weeknd’s Illangelo, the inheritors of a mood music. Majid are playing specifically with the sounds of James Blake’s discography, and they manage to say nothing on this track (much like Blake’s debut album contained nothing beyond some warbly ramblings, a post-808s plague that spreads like wildfire in music). But they’ve stewed up a specific kind of interzonal unease. Something that really tunnels within its shoes while it debates making the next step, unable or unwilling to commit itself to the confines of a future. OVO do not live in Toronto; they appear to live in hollow gestures of self-belief, a desperate attempt to undo the anxieties of life. OVO are rap’s eternal scream of “I DESERVE THIS.”
[7]

Alfred Soto: Imagine the Burial trick of unearthing a slurred vocal from several layers of percussive substrata but with tuneless Miguel mimicry.
[4]

Megan Harrington: I challenge you to play this song for a friend and ask afterwards who the artist is. Twenty different friends, twenty different answers, I promise. Majid Jordan provide a serviceable four and a half minutes, but they’re eclipsed by their own generic, faceless desire. 
[6]

Brad Shoup: A place like this has to be a McMansion. Static goes off like the hissing of nighttime lawns; voices ping off the tile of an empty foyer. The architecture haunts the song, but Majid Jordan do not themselves haunt. It’s cinematic despite them.
[6]

Luisa Lopez: Oddly compelling, despite the synths going in and out like weary waves which makes this lament less impressive than it means to be, but sometimes sound is cradled by mood and that’s the case here, like Childish Gambino suddenly woke up in the floodlights and left a lesser shadow.
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: It’s nice that Drake’s ears are open to alt-R&B like Majid Jordan and the Weeknd. It’d be nicer if he was into alt-R&B that was actually, y’know, interesting. As snoozy as Nyquil, all smooth surfaces, no texture. Imagine Ghostly International releasing an R&B record in 2004.
[3]