Image via YouTube/Dreamville
The floodgates have opened. Five and a half months into a very dry year for major rap releases, we just had our biggest New Music Friday of 2021. Nicki dropped a song with Drake and Lil Wayne, 21 Savage released an EP, Kodak Black put out an album, the Migos unveiled a new single, and much more.
The star of the night, though, was J. Cole. Returning with his first solo project since 2018’s KOD, Cole released The Off-Season, a 12-track project featuring the likes of 21 Savage, Lil Baby, Morray, and Bas, among other uncredited guest vocalists.
This one was a long time coming. Back in August 2018, Cole dropped a freestyle called “Album of the Year” on YouTube, and in the description he wrote: “The Off Season coming soon… All roads lead to The Fall Off.” Nearly three years later, the project has finally arrived, with rumors circulating that The Fall Off might not be too far behind it.
As with any J. Cole album, it’s going to take some time to properly digest The Off-Season and pick up on all the subtleties he packed into it, but we couldn’t help ourselves from writing down our first impressions after a few spins. Here’s a list of our initial thoughts and takeaways from J. Cole’s new project, The Off-Season.
Cole knows how to talk his sh*t when he needs to
J. Cole has a reputation for being a low key and humble guy, but when you put a mic in front of him, he’ll talk his shit when he needs to. The very first bars on The Off-Season set a tone for the rest of the album: “This shit too easy for me now/ N***a, Cole been goin' plat' since back when CDs was around/ What you sold, I tripled that, I can't believe these fuckin' clowns.” From there, he positions himself as an all-time great, rapping, “I'm on that Mount Rushmore, you n****s can't front no more” on “100 mil.” Cole is clearly thinking about his legacy right now, and it sounds like he knows he can’t be humble all the time if he wants his peers to see him as a GOAT. He’s got to say it himself, too. That’s why he goes on a cocky rant at the end of “Applying Pressure,” saying, “That's why I gotta flex sometimes, 'cause n****s just try to act like you just not that motherfuckin' n***a.” Someone had to say it. —Eric Skelton
The hidden features trick worked
“No features” was trending on Twitter after Cole shared a tracklist and fans assumed he was attempting to go platinum with no features again. Not so fast. Once we got a chance to hear it, surprise guests popped up all over the album. The first voice you hear on The Off-Season is Cam’ron’s on “95 South.” Then North Carolina newcomer Morray showed up on “My Life,” alongside 21 Savage. Later, Lil Baby made an appearance. Bas, too. 6lack even pitched in some uncredited vocals. Hidden guest features is far from a new trick (we’ve seen everyone from Travis Scott to Tyler, the Creator do it in recent years) but it always makes for a fun first listen—especially for an artist like Cole who doesn’t often include outside voices on his own projects. One of my favorite moments on this whole album is when Lil Baby comes out of nowhere on “Pride Is the Devil,” matching Cole’s flow in a way no one expected. That surprise factor would have been lost if his name was on the tracklist. —Eric Skelton
Cole’s gamble to work with a lot of producers paid off
When I saw the sheer amount of producers in the credits Cole shared yesterday, the first thing I thought about was hearing that Jay-Z’s original plan for The Black Album was to collaborate with a different producer on every song. I thought maybe Cole would try an “off-season drills” type of concept where every beat would have a different style, which would be cool, but make for an oblong listen.
I was dead wrong, though. The Off-Season sounds cohesive. Instead of the bevy of producers pulling the project in different directions, they all pushed their expertise into one gumbo pot, providing the kind of sound that should be studied by every lyricist looking to straddle the line between traditionalism and mass appeal. The 808s melded nicely with the soul samples, and there were some dusty-ish drums here and there, but everything was mixed in a way that felt polished.
Cole’s beat selections show that the 808s he explored on KOD were no fluke, and that the crooning and flows he delved into on his post-2017 features (and on ROTD3) are here to stay. His projects have famously been insular in the past, but it seems all the collaborating he’s been doing has inspired new sonic and vocal approaches, which is cool to hear. He’s one of the artists who has the budget and goodwill with fans to be able to work with a bunch of producers, mixing and matching elements of different aesthetics. It’s good to see him branch out. It still sometimes feels odd to see Cole in the midst of playlists with trap rappers, but then you press play and it fits. —Andre Gee
The project is true to ideas he discussed in the roll-out
J. Cole wasn’t selling us a dream when he said the The Off-Season title “represents the many hours and months and years it took to get to top form.” He delivered a body of work that feels like one of the best displays of his raw skills. He checked off a lot of boxes on this album: he tried out myriad flows, incorporated melody in the midst of the bars, told stories, was assonant, and had some slick one-liners. He sounded invigorated throughout, reaffirming that he shook himself out of the creative funk he spoke about in his SLAM interview and in the Applying Pressure documentary. —Andre Gee
He successfully pays homage to classic rap moments
It’s as if, in the midst of the 2010s generational wars, hoards of younger producers and rappers had a giant group chat and decided “we gonna show these OGs that we were listening” by resampling some of their favorite moments in rap history. It already feels like many 2000s classics have been touched, and Cole kept that trend going on The Off-Season. “95 South” sampled Bobby Byrd’s “I’m Not to Blame,” a powerful loop that was previously touched on Jay-Z’s classic “U Don’t Know.” And if the sample wasn’t enough, he got Cam’ron to apply his natural Harlem showmanship to the track. Elsewhere, Cole got Morray to vocalize the classic hook from Pharoahe Monch’s “The Life” on “My Life.” We know Cole is a student of rap history, so it was cool to see him bring back some classic moments. I also appreciate that he didn’t evoke nostalgia as a lazy stunt. He went in on “95 South,” and he and 21 Savage showed out on “My Life.” —Andre Gee
Lil Baby can go toe to toe with anyone right now
Let’s talk about Lil Baby’s verse on “Pride Is the Devil.” We’ve been saying things like, “Wow, Lil Baby is on a hot streak right now,” so many times over the past year that it’s beginning to lose meaning. But it really is worth repeating. This. Man. Is. Fucking. Unstoppable. Right. Now. A couple weeks ago, we heard him deliver an MVP performance on DJ Khaled’s album. And before that, he arguably outshined Drake on his own song with “Wants and Needs.” So, if for some reason you still weren’t convinced Baby could hang with a spitter like Cole, he just proved otherwise on “Pride is the Devil.” Like an anchor leg in a relay sprint, Baby matched the flow Cole served up on the bridge and cut through a lyrically dexterous verse of his own, rapping about his ballooning riches and lingering hardships. At one point, he poses the question: “Will I be destroyed?” Not if you keep writing verses like this, Lil Baby. He can hang with the best of them. —Eric Skelton
It has mixtape energy
By now, we’ve grown accustomed to hearing concept albums from J. Cole, but The Off-Season has mixtape energy. Bringing in a sampling of outside voices and producers, he doesn’t stick to just one sound or topic. Throughout the project, he tries out different flows and rhyme schemes, putting an emphasis on bars over hooks as he explores new territory. As he explained in his new documentary and SLAM interview, he wanted to treat this project like an offseason workout, and it’s refreshing to hear him focus on rapping extremely well at various speeds, without trying to force it all into a conceptual package. As a result, he sounds more loose and creative than we’ve heard him on other releases. In lesser hands, an approach like this could have led to an unfocused project full of throwaways, but Cole pulls it off. —Eric Skelton
The Puff Daddy fight rumors were true
On “Let Go My Hand,” J. Cole confirms his long-rumored fight with Diddy from August 2013. On the track, he raps, “My last scrap was with Puff Daddy, who would’ve thought it?/ I bought that nigga album in seventh grade and played it so much/ You would’ve thought my favorite rapper was Puff.” According to reports at the time, J. Cole and Puff were both attending a VMAs after-party at Dream Downtown in New York City. Puff was allegedly arguing with Kendrick Lamar over his “King of New York” claim on “Control,” which dropped the previous week. Sources claim a visibly drunk Puff attempted to pour a drink on Kendrick, and Cole intervened, which led to a brief physical altercation between Cole and Puff’s crew. Cole was eventually thrown out of the party. Of course, all of these reports were discredited by Dreamville’s Ibrahim Hamad, who later tweeted, “Yeah, that’s def not what happened.” While the facts may not be straight, Cole makes it clear that a fight really did go down that night after all. —Jessica McKinney
Morray’s breakout run hits new highs
Morray grabbed some attention late last year thanks to his hit single “Quicksand,” but it looks like 2021 is turning out to be the year that he fully comes into the spotlight. In April, he dropped his mixtape Street Sermons, which charted in the top 50 of the Billboard 200. And now, he’s found a spot on J. Cole’s album. The fellow North Carolina rapper appears on Cole’s single “My Life,” where he lays down soulful vocals about pain and strife. Morray is the perfect feature for the record, as most of his own music centers around similar themes. The collab arrives a year after Cole showed love on Instagram, and Morray later revealed to Complex that the two would FaceTime to discuss rap and their mutual hometown of Fayetteville, North Carolina. This is a big moment for Morray, whose career is reaching new heights each day. —Jessica McKinney
Some lines like “If you broke and clownin' a millionaire, the joke is on you" reflect a lack of political awareness
Back when Cole wrote “Rich Niggaz,” he was an ascendant rap star conscientise of the phoniness and exploitative nature of the upper class. But now he’s rich and has repeated their reductive rhetoric. First there was, “100 mil and I’m still on the grind,” on “100 Mil,” which the world would be better off seeing as an admission of greed instead of ambition. (Who needs that much money when too many people have nothing?) Then, in the midst of chastising haters on “Applying Pressure,” he rhymed, “If you broke and clownin’ a millionaire, the joke is on you,” a lazy line suggesting that poverty is a personal flaw instead of an engineered consequence of an inequitable system that allows him to hoard a hundred million dollars. He was lucky enough to come up out of poverty, but so many more millions of people won’t be able to.
If he would’ve aired an observation about armchair critics who clown people with the courage to try things they fear doing, it would’ve been fair. But he could’ve just gotten at them for being haters, not for being poor. I thought he’d know better. But in hindsight, “Rich NIggaz” didn’t have any acknowledgement of the systemic nature of poverty, just his individual gripe that he hated rich niggas “cause I ain’t never had a lot dammit.” Now he’s got more than enough, and it seems he switched up. On “Snow On Tha Bluff,” he admitted, “Just maybe, in my pursuit to make life so much better for me and my babies, I done betrayed the very same people that look at me like I’m some kind of a hero.” He’s admitted guilt that his riches came at the expense of his social agency, and instead of examining how to resolve his feelings, he lashed out at the working class people who funded his lifestyle.
Being poor doesn’t preclude anyone from being able to clown him for whatever “Snow On Tha Bluff” was, or his penchant for cringy rhymes like the Cosby bar from his recent LA Leakers freestyle. No matter how much he tries to market himself as an everyman, he’s still a member of the 1%, which rightfully puts him in the crosshairs of oppressed people. On “Rich Niggaz,” he rhymed, “Listen here I got a bigger fear / Of one day that I become you.” I got bad news for you Cole… —Andre Gee
On first listen, it’s one of the year’s best albums (so far) and one of Cole’s better projects
Let’s be honest. It hasn’t been the greatest year for major rap releases so far. The prevailing thought is that most A-listers have been holding on to their albums until the world is fully open again, and we’re going to see an explosion of great music in the second half of 2021. So, to say the least, Cole wasn’t facing the heaviest competition when it came to the “best album of the year so far” conversation before he dropped The Off-Season. Still, he delivered an undeniably great project that is an easy contender for best album of the year so far (and it will likely remain a top contender for those honors as the year winds down). As T-Minus promised in a Complex interview earlier this week, Cole delivers some of the best raps of his career on The Off-Season, and it will likely rank among the strongest projects of his career. (Stay tuned for our definitive ranking of all his albums on complex.com in the coming weeks.) Listening to The Off-Season, it strikes you how Cole has only improved over the years. The raps are tighter, and he’s figured out how to deliver it all in a way that’s more musically compelling than ever. If this was just an off-season workout, it’s scary to think what he has in store for The Fall Off. —Eric Skelton