I sometimes wonder if Future has come to regret DS2. Released in July of 2015, the album capped off a year of meteoric ascendance for the man born Nayvadius Wilburn, a monument to the rare feat of capturing commercial and critical success in equal measure. Mixtape by mixtape, Future had erased the public’s memory of Honest, a worthwhile but ultimately panned pop-oriented effort, and replaced it with a new image - a star fallen from grace, ruled by the will of an unchecked id. Here and there, he punctuated the revelry of fucking up commas with a starkly introspective about-face, almost as if he had suddenly connected the dots between action and consequence, accidentally sobered up just enough for self-assessment. In doing so, he stumbled into a narrative that would elevate his celebrity to entirely new heights in a matter of months. From the runaway success of Codeine Crazy onwards, brand new segments of listeners were fully subscribed to Future’s Shakespearean tragedy; so much so, in fact, that by DS2 there was little room left for other frames of interpretation. With HNDRXX, though, the very engine of his breakthrough comes home to roost: is Future trapped by the sound that made him a star?

The high points of HNDRXX fully realize what we hoped a young Astronaut Kid might grow up to be. Future has always had the voice and melodic sensibility to make songs that no one else could, and the album’s best tracks would stand out on any of his previous releases. Unfortunately, these revelations (Testify, Use Me, Lookin Exotic) are hidden among a tracklist loaded down with failed experiments, the cast-off byproducts of hip-hop’s radio dominance intersecting with the more transient sounds of the moment. Future’s originality has been consumed by his own ubiquity; his multi-year run atop a very specific lane has launched an army of Future 2.0s, adopting and sometimes advancing his sound into the far corners of the music world. Unlike the Pluto era (the artistic checkpoint most frequently and wistfully reminisced upon by Future fans), new ground for Future personally is no longer necessarily novel territory for listeners. Variously, you can hear the vocal manipulations of Blonde or 22, A Million (Use Me, Comin Out Strong) or production recalling Drake (Neva Missa Lost) or Ciara (Fresh Air) with the closeness of a type beat. Far from a return to form, this feels much more like creative compromise, a switch-up without consequence to sounds as safe as Future’s comfortable post-Ciara sonic palette.

HNDRXX’s new direction recalls The Percocet & Stripper Joint, a curious non-sequitur tacked onto DS2 as a bonus track. Much as HNDRXX does in light of the previous week’s (!) FUTURE, it functioned as a respite by way of juxtaposition, a moment of relaxation even if the high couldn’t last forever. Why, fans wondered as the DS2 sound wore out its welcome on subsequent releases, couldn’t we have more of that? The answer is now clear: somehow, somewhere, Future has lost his ability to deliver an album’s worth of pop anthems. For every sublime Use Me moment, other tracks plod along in stasis before abruptly ending without fanfare (Solo, New Illuminati). The simplest explanation is that Future built the image to which he purports to return on bombastic, joyous records, a style plainly at odds with the emotional weight that has become part and parcel of the latter-day Future’s image. Should he want to examine the collateral damage that his lifestyle has wrought, it’s tonally nonsensical to do so on a track more in the lineage of I Won than, say, 56 Nights. This emotional dissonance highlights conviction as the silent partner of joy - You Deserve It worked because Future himself believed it. But now, the listener is asked to resolve deep emotional turmoil against backing tracks more suitable for summertime radio rotation.

Consequently, the listener cannot help but grow skeptical of 2017 Future’s conviction in his lyrics. Certainly emotional depth yields conflict, but an honest assessment requires questioning whether Sorry, the end-of-album confessional, can function as a salve against the monster that the rest of the album presents. At the very least, it’s heavy-handed: perhaps sixteen tracks’ worth of material shouldn’t necessitate a seven-minute apology to follow them. It’s no coincidence that it’s in the stylistic vein of Codeine Crazy, at this point practically a template for Future’s emotional works which tend to take priority in critical evaluation. The execution is too considered, the checklist of emotional cues apparent enough to undermine the track’s theoretical honesty. In turn, the entire framework of the album is brought into question. It’s not strictly necessary for music to be born of lived experience, but Future’s work in particular loses its luster if de-personalized. Ultimately, Future commits aesthetically to a new sound but brings style and substance into conflict too often for HNDRXX to be truly successful. Grinding out progress in an established sound or doing something entirely new would both be noble pursuits, but this sort of half-step falls flat. Sorry it had to be this way.