


Musicality drives The Off-Season, where Cole croons, hollers, and spits through a tangle of satisfying melodies and complex rhyme schemes. He does this with personal and interpersonal anecdotes that are interesting but safe, as he leans into his passion for rap and sport and away from his predilection for social commentary. Cole continues to muse on the themes weaved throughout his discography: life and death, success and lack thereof, the divine and the mortal. Over a tight twelve tracks of nimble songwriting and outstanding composition, J. In turn, the album is as highly proficient and non-revealing as the documentary foreshadows. “Let me try to reach new heights from a skill level standpoint,” he says in the doc.

The film isn’t particularly revelatory, but indicates that Cole was prioritizing the technical proficiency of The Off-Season ’s songs over the construction of an arc between them. The album was preceded by a short documentary on the rapper’s mindstate while making the music. His next songs came and went with much less fanfare, a two-track EP announced as the first singles from his upcoming album, The Fall Off.
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After, in a series of tweets, Cole reiterated his incapacity to act as a thought leader: “a nigga like me just be rapping,” he relented.ħ0 Greatest Music Documentaries of All Time Noname, who has spent the last couple of years publicly learning and sharing anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialst ideas, responded with “Song 33,” a one-minute eviceration of his tone-policing with reminders of the tragedies people across the country were rectifying. Last summer, on “Snow on tha Bluff,” his last lengthy engagement with ideas of Black liberation, he began by disputing that reputation: “Niggas be thinkin’ I’m deep, intelligent, fooled by my college degree/My IQ is average, there’s a young lady out there, she way smarter than me.” From there, the song becomes a well-intentioned but wildly insecure and paternalistic confrontation of the rapper Noname, likely a response to tweets in which she questioned her peers’ participation in the moment’s anti-racist movement. Still, the album is generally absent the overt social critiques that have built his reputation as a rapper of substance. His latest release, The Off-Season, finds him pondering inventive gun violence prevention measures one moment, and lobbing sexist locker-room insults the next (“Check your genitalia, pussy-niggas bleedin’ on yourself,” he raps on “95.South”). Cole has rapped as the enlightened everyman, navigating issues of race, class, and gender like a thoughtful jock. Cole have been at the top of the game over the past decade, although we can argue Drizzy more so than any other rapper.For over a decade, J. This is shaping up to be a clash of the titans as both Drake and J. The Off-Season is perhaps the most anticipated hip-hop album this year, along with Drake’s forthcoming project, Certified Lover Boy, which has yet to receive a release date. Cole Announces ‘The Fall Off’ Mixtape Ahead Of New Album & Retirement KOD has since been certified Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) after selling more than a million copies by the end of 2018. It will be interesting to see if this project will have any guest features. Cole’s 2018 album KOD, which saw huge commercial success despite not a single feature being on the album. My new album The Off-Season available everywhere 5/14 /aBw4po8fvx Needless to say, he appears quite upbeat about what he heard, saying, “Just rode through the city to The Off-Season.
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Cole gave fans a rare update on the project via his Instagram Story. “My new album The Off-Season available everywhere 5/14.”įans are already trying to decode the burning hoop. “Just know this was years in the making,” Cole tweeted on Tuesday (May 4th) while sharing the cover art of himself standing beside a burning basketball hoop. He highlighted his long absence, saying that the album has been years in the works. Cole has been teasing the album The Off Season for the past few weeks, but this is the most conclusive message we have to date that the project is finally coming. The highly anticipated album will be released on May 14th, according to the latest announcement from the Dreamville rapper.
