Future ‘The Real Me’ Review: Stripped Down Self-Discovery

Like 2024’s underrated Mixtape Pluto, Future’s The Real Me loosens the conventions of his own songcraft in a manner that might generously qualify it as “late style,” with the familiar components pared down to their barest forms. Both projects feel tossed off, assembled from short, oddly shaped songs and ideas that disappear as quickly as they arrive. Strange vocal inflections, like the squeaky register that Future reaches for on the first half of “2018,” seem pursued for the sheer pleasure of seeing how far he can push them.

And beneath all that lies something faintly avant-garde. “This not for the radio,” Future croons on “Radio”—ironically, perhaps, the only cut on the album that’s conventional enough to garner potential airplay. These songs register less as finished compositions than flashes of instinct, as though Future were working through each musical notion in real time, unconcerned with how haphazard the final product might appear.

The most useful way to approach’s 22 tracks may be as fragments of melody, mood, and menace whose contours emerge only through accumulation. Taken together, they provide a compelling snapshot of the tools at Future’s disposal at this stage in his career.

Reminding us of the offhand brilliance with which Future can conjure a sticky chorus or unforgettable line are the wistful R&B hook of “California Girls” and the reptilian glide of his flow on “One Two” and “Off the Hinge.” There are also rare moments when his numbness splits open into something wounded and truly strange. On the synthwave-pop-rap hybrid “Hollywood,” he transforms a torrent of ad-libbed phrases into an argument for the album’s disjointed approach, while the eerie “Build a Bitch,” constructed around a drumless, ghostly loop, finds him imagining how he might build his next romantic interest from the ground up.

At the same time, the album’s looseness can just as readily leave promising material underdeveloped: “Tank Top Pluto” and “Trench Coat” both cry out for a second verse, a beat switch, or some kind of escalation. Elsewhere, “Alice” sounds like the party song a teenage protagonist in a Disney Channel movie might blast the second that their parents leave town for the weekend. At its best, though, The Real Me turns Future’s formal minimalism into a source of excitement, testing how little structure he needs to remain unmistakably himself.