What time is it? Time for the Jukebox to namedrop Ryan Adams twice on a day in which we’re not reviewing him…
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Jonathan Bradley: The world has a lot of anhedonic Future tracks that stretch away like the early hours of the morning and glisten like those diamonds he has. Does 2019 need another? Sure, I guess.
[6]
Julian Axelrod: Seven years and seven thousand mixtapes in, Future’s still finding vivid ways to detail his vast array of jewels. (I’m particularly partial to “I just stuck my whole damn arm in the fridge”) But it takes a lot to make a Future single stand out amidst his deluge of content. Luckily, Wheezy’s winnowing music box melody adds a dash of weirdness to the formula. It sounds like a Future song without sounding like just another Future song.
[6]
Josh Love: I’m probably going to have to quit my job if I really want to put in the time it would take to properly keep up with Future’s career. I didn’t even bother with Wrld on Drugs and only barely had a chance to internalize Beastmode 2 after having failed to properly digest Super Slimey in part because I was still too busy absorbing Thugger’s solo album from 2017. And now the Ryan Adams of rap is back with a new 20-track platter, for which “Crushed Up” serves as a pretty inauspicious lead single. It’s a short song, two-and-a-half minutes, but the impression it leaves is less of having gone hard in a concentrated burst of energy and more of having just run out of things to do. I’m a big Wheezy stan but even he seems to be on auto-pilot here.
[5]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The difference between Future and his long stylistic lineage of middle of the road trap dudes (Gunna et al.) is that he can pull off a song as truly vapid as “Crushed Up” without seeming utterly uninteresting. It’s good in the same way as watching a mediocre Tom Cruise movie is good — the basic level of competence and charisma is there, but wasted in a morass of the artist’s own making.
[4]
Nortey Dowuona: Warped, toy piano keys wash over lumpy, helpless bass while screeching synths wail away and the popping drums push out Future masks at your face, while you feel cold and wonder when you can get home and unpack from your recent trip to somewhere warmer and listen to something else.
[5]
Ryo Miyauchi: The hook is all I end up remembering, though I doubt Future expects anyone to retain anything more either. He’s much more concerned about that cadence, which melts “see it” into one slurry rhyme, and the whole song mainly exists as a product of him coming up with filler bars to play with it as much as he wishes. It’s a breath of fresh air when he switches half way in to instead try to say “bonjour” in the weirdest way possible, and then there he goes again, slurring the melody like he’s rapping with candy drops in his mouth.
[5]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Every single point for the squirming, sci-fi synth melody that adds another dimension to the glistening production. Hearing that in conjunction with Future rapping about bust down watches sells “Crushed Up” as a song about being cartoonishly stupefied by the shine and allure of diamonds.
[6]
Alfred Soto: The production does its duly appointed glistening, the beats go clap-clap, the mantra gets repeated. He’s not bored with the formula yet, but a nation turns its eyes to a timekeeper, perhaps not crushed up with diamonds, wondering when he’ll start yawning.
[5]