Drake For All the Dogs Review: A Clownish Tribute to Chauvinism

Drake assured fans that For All the Dogs would mark the return of the “old Drake.” But the MC who explored his emotions with uncommon sensitivity on Take Care and Nothing Was the Same is nowhere to be found on his eighth studio album. Unless by the “old Drake” he meant the 12-year-old Drake, as For All the Dogs registers less as a sign of artistic growth than the idea of what a teenage boy considers cool: empty flexes about wealth and status, acting like a hardass, and, of course, ceaseless misogyny under the guise of being “one of the boys.” If anything, the album reassures listeners that Drake, no matter how hard he vows to change, is more or less stuck in his ways.

From trying to one-up his friends’ sexual proclivities, as he does with glee on the forgettable “What Would Pluto Do,” to claiming that he’s going to shoot someone atop a Fisher-Price-grade trap beat on “Daylight,” For All the Dogs isn’t so much a thematically cohesive body of work as it is a bloated collection of hardly thought-out ideas that amount to a one big pity party. “Asked me if I coulda treated you better, but no,” he asks himself on the album’s sweeping opener “Virginia Beach,” and he rushes to that answer before he can even seriously consider the quandary before him. Thinking twice is reserved solely for wimps, apparently.

While depiction doesn’t equal endorsement, and Drake is certainly leaning into the fuckboi character he fully embraced sometime around 2016’s Views, that this and his last three albums are heavily defined by their constant degrading of the opposite sex is further proof that, at best, he’s suffering from creative stagnation. Or worse, it’s a legitimately repulsive worldview, one where an ordinary act like blocking someone on social media is seen as a sign of mental illness, which Drake asserts on “Polar Opposites.” Which is rich coming from a guy who gets emo over a lover breaking a “pinky promise” about their vacation plans on “Bahamas Promises.”

It’s telling that the only time on For All the Dogs that Drake allows any sort of rebuttal to this type of clownish chauvinism, which comes in the form of a welcomed SZA spot on the otherwise stodgy “Slime You Out,” he stills gives himself the last word on the matter. But as the album’s title suggests, these are just the typical stunts one pulls while being a “dog,” a recurring in-joke that comes in the form of barking hounds, a lot of canine puns (“I know you a cat, but can your pussy do the dog?” goes one corny groaner), half-baked skits involving the fictitious “BARK Radio,” and Teezo Touchdown showing up to, yes, howl away like a mutt.

Perhaps Drake’s aggressive posturing is due to the company he’s decided to keep here. Unlike 2021’s Certified Lover Boy, the extensive who’s-who list of which solidified Drake’s already clearly apparent ascendance within hip-hop, For All the Dogs deploys largely younger talents who mostly steal the spotlight. This could be due to how strenuously Drake chases trends throughout the album, trying his hand at watered-down rage music (“Fear of Heights”) and poorly rapping in Spanglish (“Gently”), but he finds himself woefully out of his element.

Sexyy Red, one of the few guests who actually sounds like she’s having a good time, livens up “Rich Baby Daddy” with one of her typically in-your-face raunchy choruses, and the inclusion of the always magnetic Chief Keef, even when regulated to a 20-second hook on “All the Parties,” is a highlight. Elsewhere, Lil Yachty delivers a few fairly outrageous one-liners and serves as a solid counterpoint to Drake’s self-serious seething on “Another Late Night.”

There’s perhaps a sturdy-enough album lurking somewhere beneath For All the Dogs’s padding, which includes two fruitless interludes and an especially heavy-eyed midsection that commences with the tired “Drew a Picasso” and wraps up with “8AM in Charlotte,” another chipmunk-soul cut. As usual for Drake, the album is immaculately produced and deploys a few fun bait-and-switch beats, like starting off with an ambient new-jazz intro, as “IDGAF” does, before smash-cutting into guest Yeat’s vocal warbling—the equivalent of a jump scare in a horror movie. But for the most part, For All the Dogs lives up to its title. In short: woof.