How do you go about opening up substantially when you've built yourself up to be the pioneer of confessional trap music, when the public knows all your personal successes and failures, when your every insecurity can be transformed into banger after timeless banger? You keep the grind going. You figure out new ways to express yourself. You switch the vibe up, and you keep going confidently with it even when it feels a little off compared to everyone else in the game.
That's innovation. That's artistic ambition. That's what Future's done with SAVE ME.
Seven tracks, twenty minutes. Stellar album artwork and consistent visuals (in collaboration with avant-garde visual artist Henri Alexander Levy). Lyrics that (mostly) don't have to do with Ciara. Sounds like a recipe for the perfect Future album, if you ask me.
And the point of my review, to be concise, is that in this effort Future comes dangerously close to fulfilling those expectations. The very first airy moments of "Xanax Damage" are as haunting as the best songs of HNDRXX; cuts like "St. Lucia" and "Please Tell Me" feel like the best of Future's darkness, where he's boasting and flexing his moral transgressions over pulsing bass and 808s. Yet for as much as things can sound similar to what we know of him already, it's wrong to say this simply retreads known ground. We see consistent lyrical transparency that we usually don't get this realized from Future ("St. Lucia"s "...feed me grapes" line is a memorable standout, as is pretty much all of "Xanax Damage" and "Love thy Enemies"), not to mention the very well-realized production and the aforementioned avant-garde aesthetic.
(Speaking of the aesthetic, I really recommend you go on YouTube and check out the music videos - they're really, really great, and do wonders to help the cohesion of the album. I would have embedded them here, but I guess because of some copyright stuff I can't get that to work.)
The first thing you'll notice after probably being impressed by the cover art is how weird this EP sounds. Xanax Damage starts off acoustic, echoing; Shotgun's instrumental is packed with moaning ad-libs, various melody lines, and more acoustic instrumentation; "Government Official" is a bass-heavy banger with an anxious sample and constantly changing vocal tempo. Almost every song on here has something odd about it, something that keeps it just one step away from the generic, both familiar and enticingly new.
I bring up these points to tie into my headline, the thesis here, that Future is doing much more than churning out basic trap releases this year. This is experimental, purposely artful, even expressive. Enfants Riches Déprimés, Levy's fashion line, has a distinctive look that emphasizes "revolt against the luxurious fashion world [...] juxtaposing tailored wear with brutally ripped garments". SAVE ME attempts this very same mission sonically, where we've got these perfectly polished beats layered beautifully with autotune and strings and intercut samples of Future haunting his own songs.
Like never before he throws out lines with devastating emotional power ("I'm getting cocky / I can't feel nothing at all..."), anecdotes of sobering intensity, and of course badass flexes ("Please don't tell me you want it, 'cause I'm buyin'"). There are many moments where his flow seems tenuous and unstable, and the performance feels all the more raw for it; it's both impressive and a little concerning to think that Future freestyled many of the key lines here considering how well he sticks to his image as the wounded trap god, a man with a permanently broken heart and permanently stuffed pockets. There's a ton of skillful experimentation here in all parts of the package, and it's genuinely exciting to be getting this from one of the most inhuman pillars of the scene; for all his stumbling and crooning over the beats (I keep bringing up "St. Lucia" but it's a great example of the sort of stumbling I mean), Future feels more like a guru doing exactly what needs to be done rather than someone unsure of themselves or relying on the production. All this is to say this album feels solid and polished despite its edges, a natural result of all his career's trials and errors.
Unfortunately for all its strengths, the writing leads to a few faults over the runtime. Certain lines and phrases are blatantly recycled, even over the course of just this album. (How many times is he going to tell us he's got WiFi on his jets? What even is "big dog status"?) I mentioned the depth of the lyrics with full sincerity, but I can't cap and say that any of the songs reach the intensity of HNDRXX's "Sorry". And while it's generally better to have songs that are too short over songs that are much too long, "Xanax Damage" needs another verse and "Shotgun" needs one less. "Government Official" could have worked with a great feature, but I get why there isn't one on here.
Engineer FXXXXY called every song on this project "a [crazy] moment", half numb freestyle and half genius intent. I think that's the perfect way of seeing this album, with its fragmented beats and moody, apprehensive videos; a collection of sparkling, corrosive, breathless moments, snapshots of Future's star-studded image and the shadows of the broken man underneath them. In the hearts of every random girl and in the depths of every double-cupped Styrofoam we see Future's unhinged reflection searching for fulfillment, companionship, and salvation. Maybe he'll find it or maybe he won't... but as long as he keeps putting out projects like this, I'll keep listening.
Overall a stellar effort, likely one of the best we'll be seeing from Future for some time.
(originally posted on rateyourmusic.com here)
DREAM...
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