Drake & 21 Savage Her Loss Review: A Lopsided Side Project

This is, for all intents and purposes, a Drake album that just happens to feature 21 Savage.

Drake & Savage 21, Her LossWhile Drake and 21 Savage share top billing on Her Loss, it would be misleading to classify the lopsided project as a genuine joint effort between the two MCs. This is, for all intents and purposes, a Drake album that just happens to feature 21 Savage on most of its 16 tracks. (Out of the album’s five solo songs, four belong to Drake, with one sole Savage track that unceremoniously pops up near the tail end almost like an afterthought.)

Considering how the best moments on Her Loss occur whenever Drake and Savage revel in a certain boys-being-boys brand of depraved Dionysian energy, it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity that Savage is too often regulated to the role of wingman. He works much better as a sinister foil to Drake’s smug impudence, like on the opening track, “Rich Flex,” where his violent disposition counters Drake’s cheeky demeanor.

Better yet is the giddy first half of “Broke Boys,” which might be the duo’s finest collaboration since 2017’s “Sneakin’” off of Drake’s More Life mixtape. Each of Savage’s straight-faced boasts are immediately followed by one of Drake’s customarily frenetic ad-libs, creating a call-and-response rhythm that suggests that he’s Savage’s hype-man and not the other way around. “Whoa, I got more stripes than Adidas,” Savage vaunts, but Drake’s swift arrogance comes out on top in the end: “Yeah, I got the stripes, but fuck Adidas,” he retorts.

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Although Drake and Savage are both entertaining, egotistically minded characters who display little to no remorse for their many juvenile actions, the latter at least carries a steadfast conviction with his bellicosity, as opposed to his partner in crime’s proclivity to simply provocate. While Drake implicitly disses a 22-year-old rapper on the sing-songy, Lil Yachty-produced “Backoutsideboyz” by alleging internet sensation Ice Spice is “a 10, tryin’ to rap” and that her music is “good on mute,” Savage would much rather go straight for the jugular, as he does on “3AM on Glenwood.” In retaliation to his friend Skinny being murdered, he promises to “spray the witness, I ain’t leavin’ no Jehovah for them.”

Savage’s simple, Seussian chorus on the ominous “More M’s”—“Strike like a match, knock him out his hat/Knife to a gun fight, this ain’t none of that”—is far more effective at positioning him as the type of alpha male that Drake seemingly aspires to be. When supposedly partying it up over a sped-up, blocky sample of Daft Punk’s “One More Time” on “Circo Loco,” Savage still finds time to threaten his enemies, albeit with more humor than that specific instance when he promises that “all the opps get a bullet on some Oprah shit.”

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If Savage’s dry wit is his defining characteristic, then Drake’s is his ability to easily embrace self-deprecation. Her Loss’s entire fake promo run is proof enough of this. But his usual fourth-wall-breaking observations lack any sense of modesty or depth here: “On BS” finds him reflecting on “the Drake effect” with little to no regard for any of the artists he previously collaborated with, and while there’s some truth to his central conceit—that whenever Drake “jump[s] on your song,” his very presence will “make a label think they need ya”—it’s a condescending point, especially coming from someone who once greatly benefitted off of another person’s name.

When viewed as an extension of the Drake brand—as opposed to an actual collaborative effort, for which this is largely an unproductive outing—Her Loss could be seen as something of a course correction from the house-oriented Honestly, Nevermind, released earlier this year. That divisive album was considered a flop by Drake’s usual standards, with many devotees demanding that the 6 God actually “rap” again. He certainly fulfills that implicit obligation on many tracks here, and gets especially testy during the early one-two punch of “Major Distribution” and “On BS,” but also frequently simmers down whenever things get too heated.

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In particular, the nearly seven-minute “Hours in Silence” threatens to derail the album at about the midway point. One of those dopey Drake ballads that overstays its welcome sometime after its third beat switch, the track is loaded with faux-deep insights into romance that read like nauseating Instagram captions. “There’s three sides to this story, girl/The one you subtweet/The one your group chat gets to read/The one you come and tell to me,” goes a choice howler.

Perhaps more representative of the album as a whole, “Hours in Silence” barely features 21 Savage in any substantial capacity (he sings a 30-second verse that’s so poorly mixed that it sounds like he’s underwater). Like the rest of the uneven Her Loss, there’s simply too little give and take between this pairing to justify calling this a mutually beneficial partnership.

Score: 
 Label: Republic/Epic  Release Date: November 4, 2022  Buy: Amazon

Paul Attard

Paul Attard is a New York-based lifeform who enjoys writing about experimental cinema, rap/pop music, games, and anything else that tickles their fancy. Their writing has also appeared in MUBI Notebook.

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