WE STILL DON'T TRUST YOU

Card-carrying members of the #FutureHive remember where they were on the two consecutive weekends of February 2017 when rap’s reigning king of gorgeously toxic masculinity dropped a pair of albums that nailed the yin and yang of the whole Future thing. The first one, simply titled FUTURE, exemplified his singular breed of haunted club crushers, like “Mask Off,” a Metro Boomin joint that became his highest-charting single at the time. Hot on its heels was HNDRXX, named for his softer, trippier side, a buoyant return to the romance of his Pluto-era hits. Both albums debuted at No. 1 and felt like a return to form for a rapper who’s had more thrilling returns to form than just about any other rap star of the past 15 years. A similar feeling floats on the breeze with the release of WE STILL DON’T TRUST YOU, Future’s second collaborative album with Metro Boomin in less than a month.

From the spacey and vaguely French disco pulse of the Weeknd-featuring title track, you get the sense that WE STILL DON’T TRUST YOU is the HNDRXX to WE DON’T TRUST YOU’s FUTURE—a balmy sunrise after a dark night of the soul. That feeling is confirmed by the shimmering bacchanalia of “Drink N Dance” and the Brownstone-sampling “Luv Bad Bitches,” an instant addition to the canon of Future’s best love songs (“I like good girls, but I love, love, love bad bitches!”). Metro’s productions have rarely sounded prettier, and Future Hendrix fires on all cylinders, reminding you that for all his red-eyed “fuck love” bangers, at his core he’s a romantic. Kendrick Lamar’s surprise verse on WE DON’T TRUST YOU reopened the “Big Three” debate floor; with WE STILL DON’T TRUST YOU, it’s time to start seriously considering the idea of the “Big Four.”