The album-length collaboration between the pop star of the North and the rap star of the South seems like a good match, but it turns into a drastically uneven project in almost every way.
At its beginning, Her Loss hints at a looser, more natural interplay. After a brief intro from Atlanta’s Young Nudy—whose roving inner-monologue style would have been a welcome destabilizing force on this album—Drake opens “Rich Flex” with the kind of rapping-to-one-another hook (“21, can you do somethin’ for me?”) that blows past So Far Gone to recall groups from the 1980s and early ‘90s.
And throughout, he and 21 are most effective when they either imitate one another, as 21 does on “Hours in Silence” and Drake does on “Major Distribution,” or when they retreat to their opposite stylistic poles: Drake bounding across “BackOutsideBoyz” like the only man to ever be sad in a nightclub, 21 rapping on “More M’s” that “I been in them rooms/I never did no contemplating,” his trademark economy of language unsettling as ever.
Things never quite coalesce. On the intriguingly atonal first half of “Broke Boys”—a beat odder and heavier than anything Drake has rapped over in ages—he sleepwalks through a passage that aims to tout his decades-long commercial dominance but communicates, instead, just how flat his output has become, a project that now privileges year-over-year incrementalism over fits of excitement. “Nothing had changed,” he raps, “I’m just harder to please.” He then notes that Ferrari has begun to produce SUVs, and that he and his friends have already ordered several. “We ain’t got a choice,” he says. You imagine him pointing to a conveyor belt.