Last night (September 6), Drake confirmed that his upcoming eighth studio album For All The Dogs is set to release on September 22, about three months after he first announced the project. Simultaneously, Lil Yachty put out a new episode of his A Safe Place Podcast, where he shared anecdotes and tidbits about the creation of Drake’s impending LP.
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Becoming close with the Toronto rapper after they collaborated for the first time on “Oprah’s Bank Account” with DaBaby in 2020, produced by Earl On The Beat, Yachty would go on to play a huge role in helping craft Her Loss, Drake’s Fall 2022 album with 21 Savage. However, since they have now been spending a lot of time together, Yachty got to be one of the first people to hear For All The Dogs, and he wasn’t in love with it upon first listening.
“It sounds current, you know? It sounds very current,” Yachty told A Safe Place co-host Mitch Gone Mad. “It’s interesting, it’s coming together a lot better than I thought when I—I just had a talk with him a couple days ago in Vancouver and I was a little worried, ’cause I have a lot of the songs, I don’t have all of ’em, I have a lot of ’em though. And I was just like, ‘Man, I just don’t know if it’s — how are you gon’ put this together? Because it’s like, it’s a lot of great songs but they don’t really — in my brain I was like, they didn’t really sound together.”
But, after sharing his doubts with Drake and having a conversation with him about it, Yachty said he was convinced that For All The Dogs could turn out great.
“And then we had a talk about it and he explained to me his thought process about it,” Yachty continued. “And we drove somewhere, we drove to that video shoot which was like an hour away, and we listened to it, and it makes sense now.”
Soon after Drake first told his fans For All The Dogs was on the way, he shared that it would see the return of “the old Drake,” which is likely in reference to a more lovestruck, melancholic, R&B approach. Yachty said that he played a hand in this, but that Drake won’t fully commit to a return to this sound.
“He explained to me how it’s hard for him to make music about things he isn’t dealing with, or he isn’t experiencing,” he said. “Everything is real, everything is pulled from something. So maybe he hasn’t been in love in a while, to make deep love music, or whatever the case may be. I think it’s all real experiences for him, so what it is, is just what he’s going through in the time… But [For All the Dogs] is super good. I’m excited. It’s tight. I probably gave y’all too much. I probably told y’all too much, ’cause he says nothing, you know? But I’m sure he won’t mind.”
Adding to the excitement of the record, which is now Drake’s fourth full-length project in the 2020s decade, Yachty asserted how much effort and vigor his friend put into the recordings for the project. However, coupled with this, Drake will also be touching on some provocative topics, according to the Atlanta rapper.
“It has the most, I would say like the most ‘performance’ album he’ll have, as far as like energy,” Yachty told Mitch. “I think some of the best Drake verses that I ever heard are on this album… Some of the verses I’m just like, ‘Bruh, what’s wrong with you?’ You know what I’m saying? People gonna have a lot to say about some of his topics on this album. And I don’t think he does it on purpose, I think it’s just him — I will say he deals with some controversial things.”
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