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If that’s not enough, he comes bearing a gentle pop duet with Rihanna, “Selfish” (featuring delicate production from Detail, Major Seven, and Mantra), and a seven-and-a-half minute apology, “Sorry.” He’s still airing out grievances and self-medicating with a fistful of ‘scripts, but the run from “Use Me” to “I Thank U” is inspired. Plenty of lines on HNDRXX melt hearts and make up for all games and the lies: “I wanna hear your heart pump pound for pound …We conversin’ back and forth like we real partners/Spiritually we bonded through the turmoil.” “I was havin’ trust issues/But I’ve been havin’ way better luck since you,” he starts off “Incredible,” relieved to baby talk again instead of bragging about another random bad bitch. Future sounds like he’s on vacation, loose as his limbs after that hot yoga class. “Incredible” and “Testify” are sun-warmed island beats that smell and shimmer like tanning oil-slicked shoulders. It’s chilly, but dawn has finally broken, and somebody's cooking Nayvadius breakfast this morning. The shivery chorus begins to fade, and birds start chirping. By the time an organ warbles onto the song, he’s spent, his heart wrung dry. The Weeknd’s sniveling on “ Comin Out Strong” aside, these all blur together.īut redemption comes on the ghostly “Use Me.” One of Future’s gifts is imbuing his voice with such emotion that lyrics become putty in his hands. As shadows flit across the wall, the plaintive refrain of “use me” is made all the more gut-wrenching when he belts it. Over a wispy lullaby of a beat that sounds like more like an outro than an intro, Future peels off bills before asking, “You wanna come to Pluto?” Yes! Unfortunately, he lapses into light shaming of Ciara’s sexual history before the cringe-worthy declaration, “Even if I hit you once, you part of my collection.”Ī trio of standard-issue songs follows, filled with flossy verses flush with cash, cars, designer namedrops and a couple funny lines (“I wanna take you out to Paris and buy you better clothes,” he says in “Lookin Exotic” “Baby mama back drinking liquor/Now she tryin’ to fuck my life up” in the DJ Mustard-produced “Damage”). For all of us who missed the old Future-that “Turn on the Lights” Future, that love-you-down-in-the-sheets and buy-you-a-new-Range-for-the-streets Future- HNDRXX’s opener “My Collection” is a bit of a mind fuck.
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That’s not to say there isn’t a little bumpiness upon re-entry. Over a well-played hand of wistful, bright-eyed and reflective beats, HNDRXX strikes a near-perfect balance between a man still licking his wounds and a man emerging from a long, dark night. Heartbreaks heal, especially when you’re a Romeo rapper with an R&B bedside manner and an unending supply of Vicodin. But nobody stays in beast mode forever, and FUTURE, the companion piece to HNDRXX, showed a few cracks in his hardened facade. drive through the desert, Future cartwheeling back into the heart-clutching love songs and sweet-street persona of his 2012 debut, Pluto, might have been jarring. Dudes who lived vicariously through him dredged up all sorts of relationship trauma in order to wail alongside him, once more with feeling.Īfter DS2’s 4 a.m. In its wake, Future measured his pain into cups of codeine-spiked soda and poured it all over his music, most notably on 2015’s Dirty Sprite 2. After a splashy, very public relationship with the singer Ciara, the two had a splashy, very public breakup that spilled from the courts and onto Twitter. Future has become the antihero for men who believe emotional torture is essential to masculinity.
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