Drake’s house is a gleaming monstrosity. Inside the 50,000 square-foot Toronto mansion called the Embassy, the rapper girdles himself with spikey chandeliers, slabs of Spanish marble, and sumptuous-looking fabrics. In one room, a shiny golden art piece constructed out of semi-precious stones occupies an entire wall. In another, beneath a microphone and requisite pop filter, there is a daybed upholstered in technicolor Jean Paul Gaultier and Louis Vuitton textiles. Dark Lane Demo Tapes, the 14-track mixtape Drake has released ahead of a proper studio album he says is coming this summer, shares the house’s gilded finish. As he toggles between a decade and several cities’ worth of rap styles, there is a consistent sheen, as though the project was furbished in the same workshop as one of his coffee tables.
Though Drake has spent much of his career predicting and synthesizing trends in rap and pop, Dark Lane Demo Tapes proposes not a new sound but a new format, formalizing recent snippets, one-offs, and collaborations onto streaming services. He experimented with the mixtape as album on 2009’s So Far Gone, the album as mixtape on 2015’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, and the LP as playlist on 2017’s More Life. Last August, he dropped Care Package, a collection of songs he’d casually released or teased over the years. Billing these tracks as demos may offer the slight advantage of lowered expectations, a kind of ad-hoc market test. But it’s also a clever rejoinder to the current internet economy, in which artists like Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert have had their momentum derailed by endless leaks. The concept of the compilation may ultimately wind up being more useful in their hands than in Drake’s.
Contributions from a broad range of producers—including Southside, Cardo, MexikoDro, and Axl, each representing their own little corner of hip-hop—allow Drake to travel. Earlier in his career, he likely would have tried on new subgenres like “SoundCloud rap” and transcontinental drill closer to their emergence. And yet the lag isn’t much of a hindrance. On “Pain 1993,” a Pi’erre Bourne-produced song that leaked earlier this year, Drake sounds comfortable softening his consonants alongside SoundCloud emissary Carti, even as the style is past its peak. On “Demons,” he matches the energy of Fivio Foreign and Sosa Geek, a pair of Brooklyn rappers who have been at the forefront of the borough’s drill subgenre; both sound genuinely thrilled to have earned his recognition. The single “War,” released this winter in support of longtime manager Oliver El-Khatib’s partnership with a high-end incense brand, is a spot-on UK drill track. It’s one of Drake’s most effective songs in a while, harnessing the genre’s menacing energy, barbs delivered convincingly.