for fans of The Weeknd, Kanye West, J. Cole

singles to download ‘Know Yourself,’ ‘Star67,’ ‘Used To’

If there’s one thing “If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late” makes clear, it’s that Drake is very, very lonely. But don’t mistake this for the “it’s 4 a.m. and my booty call won’t pick up” despair he’s expressed on albums past. This is an existential isolation, one that comes with the harrowing recognition that you’ve become a commodity, a cultural industry unto yourself. The kind that overloads your central nervous system and forces you into a paranoid stupor.

Because in Drake’s world, everyone is out to get him—the girls, the fans, the paparazzi. In response, he’s walled himself in an impenetrable fortress of self-pity. Maybe it’s the only way to cope with a bloodthirsty celebrity culture; maybe his suspicions have metastasized and consumed him. No matter—Drake isn’t one to suppress his woes, so he returns with 68 minutes of dead-eyed misanthropy. It’s chilling stuff, peeling back the layers of charisma until the black marrow of his ambitions lies bare.

As a lyricist, Drake’s never been one to fuss over diction or structure. He’s a talker, removing the filter between brain and page while spilling the contents of his consciousness. In doing so, he lays his worst impulses bare. It takes a particularly shameless strain of egotist to call out former flings by name and workplace (remember “Courtney from Hooter’s on Peachtree?”) or air the specifics of family drama on national television (as he did when performing “Too Much” on Jimmy Fallon in late 2013), but empathy isn’t Drake’s forte.

The specificity of his breathless missives has long twisted these incessant whines into vivid soap opera. He names names, betrays trust, wallows in his nagging insecurities. But here, he’s pared his signature torrents of intimate detail into broad, clipped strokes. Rambling confessionals no longer suit the king of the overshare. He spits in declamatory statements: “I got enemies, got a lot of enemies,” “Nobody really likes us except for us,” “Running. Through The. Six. With My. Woes.”

What his lyrics lose in narrative color they gain in brute force. Drake’s been alluding to this transformation since closing sophomore album “Take Care” with the promise that his “juniors and senior [albums] will only get meaner”; now that guarantee has reached its logical conclusion. He counters every jab, every slight, every inconvenience with a jarring crack.

Because old habits die hard, Drake’s knack for verbal specificity pops up from time to time, and some of the tape’s finest moments find his obsessive-compulsive impulses colliding with his newfound economy, such as when he groans about female companions “askin me about the code for the Wi-Fi/So they can talk about they timeline/And show me pictures of they friends/Just to tell me they ain’t really friends” on “Energy.”

These moments find Drake at his paradoxical best: funny, petty and endearing all at once. Though “If You’re Reading”’s sparse diatribes work in discordant harmony with its bleak production, these synergies of past and present advance the always-captivating Drake narrative in ways the black-and-white barbs can’t.

As always, longtime collaborator Noah “40” Shebib remains essential to the execution of Drake’s bleary vision. While 40 cedes the lion’s share of production duties to fellow OVO compatriots Boi-1da and PartyNextDoor, his fingerprints cover what may be Drake’s most impressionistic release to date.

Drifting toward an indefinite sonic horizon, the trio dissolves “Nothing Was the Same”’s (Drake’s previous full-length release) windswept tundras to haunting effect. Once again hovering between Drake’s populist and avant-garde impulses, these songs sprawl and swirl and bleed into each other, sprinkling the stark atmosphere with fragments of icy melody.

It’s easy to take the subversive beauty of 40 and Boi-1da’s aesthetic for granted given their consistency. Since finding another gear with “Take Care” and its accompanying non-album singles, 40 and his cohorts have charted a slippery course through contemporary pop, hip-hop, and rhythm and blues, finding new ways to bend their conventions just beyond recognition. Here, their affinity for minor key piano loops, viscous synth tones and insistent percussive ticks moves further into abstraction while still hanging tenuously to the sensual. This is a spiritual crisis as slow jam, each synthetic whoosh only lengthening the distance between Drake and, well, everyone else.

The potency of this effect becomes clear when placed in contrast with “Jungle,” the 14-minute short film that preceded “If You’re Reading”’s release. As a piece of visual art, it’s largely useless, grasping at insight without the means to express it. In short, we learn Drake is conflicted and back in Toronto—his hometown—which is very cold. But the brief snippets of the mixtape contained therein serve as something of a light at the end of the film’s dreary tunnel.

In particular, a wistful music-box jingle sends a shiver up director Karim Huu Do’s empty imagery. The sample (taken from the song “Tinted Glass,” by Network) holds a similar spell over “Know Yourself,” in which it produces a delicate counterpoint to Drake’s sneering bluster. Slowed and submerged in an echo chamber, the sample pings with an ephemeral glow, threatening to evaporate at any moment.

It eventually does, but it’s not the tape’s final instance of hypnotic bliss. There’s the fluttering cloud of distorted vocal sample that sends “Star67” into a brief fit of ecstasy, the vacillating grumble—as if emitting from the furnace of Satan himself—that rocks “Company” and most poignant of all, Drake’s weary interpolation of Erykah Badu’s hook from The Roots’ 1999 single, “You Got Me.”

This is “If You’re Reading”’s great trick. Almost nihilistic in its evocation of internal crisis, it mixes the sublime and the fatalistic within its frigid climate. Beneath the foreboding exterior, Drake’s still a pop star, albeit on his own terms. Few of his chart-topping peers would reckon with the fading remnants of a corrupted soul. Only Drake could make it sound this pretty.