On Oct. 6, Aubrey Drake Graham, also known as Drake, came out with his 15th music album “For All The Dogs”. Previously, Drake was most known for his hit song “God’s Plan” which gained him a lot of popularity when it came out in 2018. This new album is made up of 23 songs with one hour and 25 minutes of play time.
The album did not receive as much of a positive response as expected. Fans were excited for the album, only to think it was one of his weaker releases. Fans consider “For All The Dogs” boring and nothing special.
With that being said, the album does have a few adjective songs. “First Person Shooter” featuring J. Cole, “Slime You Out” featuring SZA, and the album opener “Virginia Beach” are the albums top hits as of now.
Another song that has grown popular through social media memes is “IDGAF” featuring Yeat. A similar situation happened in 2022 with “Her Loss”, Drake’s collaborative album with fellow rapper 21 Savage. The song “Rich Flex” also gained mass popularity partly because of memes that made fun of Drake’s background vocals.
One of Drake’s typical traits in music production is switching up and experimenting with musical genres, which he included in “For All The Dogs”. His fans got a taste of hip-hop, trap, and R&B.
The most different part of this album is how it is simultaneously supposed to be playing on a fictional radio station titled BARK Radio, hosted by Snoop Dog, George Clinton, and Sade Adu. While this was definitely an interesting concept, it couldn’t save the album from how uninteresting it was.
Drake didn’t move too far away from his typical song releases, which I believe is the problem. A goal of many musicians is to create an album that was better than their one before, but it seems he didn’t exactly meet that mark with “For All The Dogs”. However, he did show out with the amount of debut-week streams. Receiving an all time high of 514.01 million streams in the first week of its release and placing all 23 tracks on the Billboard Hot 100.
“For All The Dogs” definitely had some appealing characteristics within the music. Even though it was one of his more unappreciated releases, it did great on music charts and in stream count. It was nice to see new musical experimentation from him, like the radio station and talking during different songs . The album definitely wasn’t terrible, and certainly not difficult to listen to, it just didn’t meet many of the expectations it had – such as the album being a more rap based album as he has dabbled in the R&B genre for a lot (if not most) of his recent song releases. There is hardly any rap at all in the album.
