We almost managed to go a whole month without a song with Ella Langley in…
[Video]
[3.17]
Callie Petch: “Oh, brother, this guy STINKS!“
[1]
David Allun Jones: Some rapper was bound to try to flip America’s apparently forever-more new National Anthem, the only questions being in what regional style, whether Ella and team would officially approve and how BigXThaPlug would be involved. No BigX to be found sadly, but instead we get Drake setting the Auto-Tune to robo-ghoul and offering another victory lap of his usual arrogant sadboy-loverman shtick. It’s still amazing that with all the discourse surrounding his oft-questionable takes on women, Drizzy wouldn’t think to give the persona a different tweak (or complete rest), but here he is, at age 40, reminiscing on college town cowgirls and bringing up menstrual cycles. Then again, I did smirk at the penis-as-“wood grain” line so I guess I’m part of the problem. All that problematic aside, I actually really like this, partly for recalling the genre–hopping exercises that made Drake a music blog darling early on, but mainly for the contributions of the other two men involved. Producer Noel Cadastre’s woozy Houston trap&b is all late-night blunt-rotating seduction, marrying the essence of iLoveMakonnen’s “Tuesday” with some stank-face-prompting injections of Bun B’s “Get Throwed”. Meanwhile, a woefully underused Don Toliver makes the most of his limited time with another winning dose of his thuggish ruggish nursery rhyme ramblings, inspiring personal alternate universe musings of how much better this song could be if the two artists traded credit positions.
[7]
Julian Axelrod: It was only a matter of time before the unstoppable force of Drake’s shameless trend-chasing met the immovable object of “Choosin’ Texas.” The screwed down codeine crawl is as effective as the previous 50 times Drizzy deployed it, but the secret ingredient here is Don Toliver, who bridges the gap between Texas grit and digital sheen. If we remove Drake from the equation, does Don in 2026 have the juice to land a feature on a Ella Langley remix? And would he have the vision to strip it for syrupy parts?
[6]
Ashton Arbus: Drake’s music in recent years reminds me a lot of what Mark Kozelek puts out nowadays: once generational troubadours of heartbreak and heavy emotion, they now make overly-long albums full of rambly, meandering tracks full of constant name drops to people and things they expect you to care about, that serve more as portraits of the person making them than normal, conventionally enjoyable music. Usually boring and pointless, but occasionally captivating. Unfortunately, “Solar Eclipse” lacks any of the odd idiosyncrasies that made a lot of Drake’s previous snoozers stand out to me (Think something like his really gross wails of “mommyyyy” on “Search and Rescue” for what I want from him). This is a continuous drone of white noise that only got as big as it did off inertia from Drake’s current success and hitching its wagon to another uninteresting star (two if you count the dumb-as-rocks Ella Langley interpolation at the beginning). Pure, cheap filler.
[1]
Tom Feckerdt: Noel Cadastre is one of the best-kept secrets in OVO’s sonic arsenal. Originally an engineer before getting his first production credits on Scorpion, Cadastre is responsible for some of Drake’s most liminal and atmospheric beats in the ambient-R&B lineage: ultra pristine and polished in sheer audio quality, but so sparse and empty, with just a few elements hushing away in the background, leaving Drake with all the space in the world to unleash his sing-songy petty ranting. But while Cadastre’s production work continues to be as cold and impenetrable as ever on “Solar Eclipse,” Drake’s rapidly declining state of mind (and shortage of things to talk about) lends the instrumental a lot of dead space, making the end result so, so lethargic and disquieting, even vaguely apocalyptic. The “punchline” (the “Choosin’ Texas” interpolation) comes in right out of the gate, peaking early with that hideous opening line and only getting wearier as the interpolation ends. By the time Don Toliver picks it back up two minutes later, it plays out like some twisted joke, the song poking at its own corpse. Drake, meanwhile, sounds concerningly deflated, with way too many moments where it seems like he’s about to physically melt: the flat pronunciation of “notebook,” a half-hearted chuckle at the end of a botched pick-up line, and most startlingly the crack in his voice on “And I don’t even know what that is…” It’s like he’s approaching death. As his verse ends, a dungeon synth-esque MIDI guitar shows up to gracelessly carry him out of the track. And finally, Don Toliver (useful in a song for the first time ever?) quickly wraps up his hook and verse, the whole section being a mere formality to make us feel like the song had a semblance of a structure. You may rightly scoff at Drake’s commercial cynicism and increasingly off-putting real-life demeanor, but when I hear this song, I get vivid, concrete images that tell a real (if unpleasant) story of exhaustion and decay that only seems to reach new lows. Doom trap.
[10]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I know that everyone else is going to hate this so much but every bad sonic impulse of Drake collides here into some unholy fusion so evil that I am unable to deny its charms. This is easy listening from the 9th circle of hell, “Choosin’ Texas” corroded and submerged in mercury and intermingled with UGK; no other pop star in recorded memory could have recorded something so strange and vile. If I heard this off of some random soundcloud account it’d sound like perfect outsider art; knowing where it came from dulls the appeal, but not enough to snuff out the fascination.
[6]
TA Inskeep: When’s the last time Fucking Drake had an original idea or made an interesting record: 10 years, probably, at least? Interpolating “Choosin’ Texas” the way he does is just another lazy indicator of “nothing new to see here.” And enough with that fucking Auto-Tune.
[0]
Alfred Soto: The fuck outta here with that vocal choice.
[1]
Jel Bugle: The bored robot laments.
[4]
James M Errington: Top comment on YouTube – “WHOS HERE BEFORE 10 MILLION VIEWS, I’ll give more people a chance” – is from four weeks ago, just a day after the video was released. We are now on only 6.9m views. Does this mean Drake is over? Will this be the last boring Drake song I hear? Please make it so, I’m counting on you guys.
[2]
Nortey Dowuona: …the fact you guys keep forcing Drake down our throats is embarrassing. I guess he made a couple good songs when I was a kid but I’m a bald 30-something and he still rapping about Johnny Manziel? Nah bruh.
[0]