Nav Demons Protected by Angels Review: Combative but Passionless

Nav’s fourth studio album, Demons Protected by Angels, opens with the Canadian rapper in distress. “Why don’t they accept me?/They just keep on rejectin’ me and it startin’ to break me down,” he auto-croons over a series of supple piano arpeggios that ripple through the album’s introductory track with a sense of restlessness. The insecurities continue to accumulate—traitorous allies plotting his downfall, ex-lovers ruining his good name—building to a fatalist proclamation: “I ain’t scared to die, I’m scared to live too long.”

While a tad overdramatic, this brief moment of emotional candor is one of the few on Demons Protected by Angels where Nav seems willing to display some degree of vulnerability—or, at the very least, exhibit an emotional response to outside criticism besides cool indifference or callous apathy. He boasts an entitled demeanor across the album’s 19 tracks, rapping with a massive chip on his shoulder. Yet, his bark is usually far worse than his bite, resulting in a lot of aggressive bluster with little follow-through.

Nav does a lot of tough-talking over Wheezy’s trademark brass horns on “Weirdo,” taunting a slew of unidentified “favorite rappers” by calling them excessively eye-blinking “weirdos” but refuses to get specific and name any actual names. The same type of empty provocation peppers “Never Sleep,” where Nav threatens to steal a producer’s beat unless they remove their tag from the final product (the very first thing you hear on the track is, unsurprisingly, Tay Keith’s producer tag). The bouncy “Demons in My Cup,” with its jangly, blocky trap synths, does little to lighten the dour mood: Nav forewarns retaliation against his always-anonymous enemies, though, in this case, they seem unlikely to be the instigators.

When he’s not acting tough, Nav aims for personal vindication by justifying his past behavior. On the ponderous “Loaded,” he’s cognizant enough to recognize that he’s made “some permanent decisions off of temporary emotions,” but the self-reflection ends there; he seems content to simply acknowledge his mistakes and move on. The rapper further defends his callow character on the R&B-flavored “Wrong Decisions,” claiming he’s a natural product of his environment: “Growin’ up in my hood, I ain’t get time to mature.” While he may have something of a point, he doesn’t develop the idea much beyond using it as a cheap concession.

Nav struggles to stick out from his contemporaries, and when he’s paired with one of them, that problem is exacerbated. On the high-speed “Dead Shot,” Lil Uzi Vert delivers a breathless triplet-flow verse that crackles with personality; Nav, on the other hand, with his monotonous machinelike flow, can barely keep up. Gunna’s sticky vocal melodies dominate the majority of “Playa,” rendering Nav’s contributions null by comparison. By the time he finally shows up on the aforementioned “Never Sleep”—which kicks off with Travis Scott before smoothly transitioning to Lil Baby—you wonder why Nav is even there in the first place.

The album closes with “Ball in Peace,” a tribute dedicated to Nav’s late friend DJ jayxxclusive3, who died earlier this year. The track should find Nav at his most raw and unzipped, where he’s finally able to shed his tough-guy persona and demonstrate some real growth, but he defines their friendship in such vague terms that there’s no lived-in pathos to be found within the reminisces. As far as homages go, they don’t get much more passionless than this, a sentiment which easily doubles as a fitting assessment of Demons Protected by Angels as a whole.