This past Thursday, Future, dropped his seventh solo studio album officially titled “Future Hndxx Presents: The WIZRD.” The album is named “The WIZRD” after one of Future’s various alter egos. Future goes by many nicknames. Other nicknames and alter egos include Hndrxx, Super Future, Pluto and Fire Marshall Future.
“The WIZRD” has a tracklist of 20 songs, including features from just three other artists: Young Thug, Travis Scott and Gunna. I found that these features were perfectly fitting for the songs and complemented the bottom half of the album.
This album came a week after Future released a documentary titled “The WIZRD” that details his past experiences growing up in East Atlanta in what is known as “Zone 6.” This documentary also shows his creative ability and influence on hip-hop culture. If you’re a fan of Future or even hip-hop, this documentary is perfect and interesting throughout. If you don’t know much about Future or don’t know a lot of context behind him or the album, “The WIZRD” documentary offers that information.
Throughout the album, Future reflects on the state of the hip-hop world with the aid of a sonically pleasing, bass-boosted, star-studded production. “The WIZRD” gave us what any real Future fan wanted, various flows and cadences, the raw emotion and retelling of experiences growing up in Atlanta, and of course, hits to jam out to with your friends. It seems with every song Future is trying to one-up himself, boasting about his Richard Mille watches, VVS Diamonds and influence on the southern hip-hop sound.
The popular songs that the mainstream listeners will probably gravitate to will be “Crushed Up,” the first single Future released for this album and “First Off,” that features La Flame, aka Travis Scott. But I encourage listeners to also give songs like “Servin Killa Kam,” “Baptiize,” and “F&N’” a chance.
After several listens, I noticed myself wanting to play back the final 10 songs on the album every time. In my favorite song, “Krazy but True,” I heard the classic Future that many fans love. The decadent flow mixed with bold lines like “who is a bigger influence than me in fashion” and “I never depend on any of these rappers, they bite me anyways,” called out other rappers that have mimicked his flow. The ad-libs and style made me listen to the album on repeat. Not to mention the beautiful production from Wheezy makes you listen intensely to every skip, drum and chord.
The argument against Future is that the content of which he’s rapping isn’t the highest of quality, meaning that Future tends to continuously rap about the materialistic things in life. Everyone likes to say “all of Future’s music sounds the same,” or “what he’s rapping about is too raw and inappropriate.” Like Future says himself, “I got my name from poverty, I know I came from poverty.”
What Future says may not paint a picture in your head and make you think outside the box like Kendrick Lamar. However, in the documentary Future says he likes to be someone that anyone can listen to and someone anyone can imagine themselves as. Future has the ability to show you what he’s gone through, what he’s done and gives someone the idea that they could be like him one day too.
I can see Future fans putting this album in their top three of his albums. The runtime for “The WIZRD” is just over an hour long, which was a perfect length because I did not feel like the songs were watered down or recycled content. It was the perfect amount of Future, and there aren’t many songs that could be considered as skips. The album is full of clever sports references like “I just joined the big league, lonzo,” and “I make more than Dwayne Wade, baby.”It also has Instagram worthy captions and a ton of other classic Future lines. “The WIZRD” carries a lot of tempo and energy on every song, and I hope others will appreciate this as well.
Future is a rap giant, and with this album, we see that giant more than ever. When it’s all said and done, Future will go down in music history due to his influence and impact on the rap game and culture. The album is predicted to be the No. 1 album in the world by next week and reach approximately a total of 130,000 album sales within the first week, according to “Hip Hop N More” on Twitter.
Right away in 2019, Future has set the bar high for other rappers. I would have to give this album a solid four out of five stars. Future has given his fans something they should be proud to bump everywhere.