Album Review: Drake - Views

It's not easy when a record is not able to just be a record, when it has to be an endpoint. It's understandable how we got here. Drizzy's first post-mixtape venture in 2010, Thank Me Later, was a lukewarm achievement elevated with hindsight. 2011's follow up Take Care was a statement of intent: Drake was not content with stardom, or occasional cute lines — remember, "I am a star, no spangled banner"? Ugh. — he had to run the game. In 2013 with Nothing Was The Same and 2015's If You're Reading This It's Too Late he showed he was, arguably, the best there's been. Views was to be another notch, this time dedicated to our hero's city.

And it's pretty bloody good, if bloated. U With Me? reaches complete perfection when our host calls out his competitors who "cut the cheque so they could take this flow". The ecstasy of Still Here is perhaps the album's crowning achievement, matched only by the Rihanna-driven Too Good.

But the difficulty Drake faces is that he has reset the bar. Jumping the same heights he jumped last time, with a few tweaks thrown in, is less than his previous efforts have led us to expect. That means that even though Views is searing stuff it's a little like watching a man catch bullets in his teeth when he should be dismissing them with a wave of his hand.