Rap is a game of streaks, and few in history compare to what Future did in 2015. After years as a somewhat slept-on, eccentric talent from Atlanta, he released what was supposed to be his breakout album, 2014’s Honest. It was a big, guest-filled coming-out party—look, it’s Drake! it’s Andre 3000!—that was met with a polite but unenthusiastic critical and commercial reception. Compounding that, shortly afterward he split up with his fiancée, the R&B singer Ciara, reportedly because he cheated on her while she was pregnant with his son, and then he spent a hellish 56-night stretch stuck in Dubai while his longtime DJ Esco was held up in jail. In the process, they lost Esco’s laptop, containing years of their creative work together.
And so, starting at the end of 2014 and continuing through 2015, from the midst of this string of failure and loss, Future went on a legendary run of blackout emceeing over pitch-black, nihilistic music. A trio of EPs (“Beast Mode,” “Monster,” and “56 Nights”) detailed a Caligulan orgy of hedonistic pleasure, capturing that swirling moment when a lingering, spiritually abrasive comedown unexpectedly crashes into another night up, again and again, for weeks on end. One high always seems to be fading as another takes its place on these albums, and in the middle sits Future, utterly alone, out of his mind, and trying to fuck his way out with as many combinations of women as he can. He capped the year off with Dirty Sprite 2—which, if anything, details his own descent with an even more unsparing eye—which he followed with the smash hit collaborative album with Drake, What A Time To Be Alive. Since that stretch, Future has released lots of albums and mixtapes, including two full albums this month. Many of these releases operate in a similar mold as his legendary 2015 stretch, but none have done so with quite the same level of incandescent, depraved inspiration.
At least, that’s the way the story goes. Talk to Future fans, and you’ll find a lot more variety in opinion. Plenty of people still swear by 2014’s cleaned-up and in love Honest, and others hold up the spacey pop of Pluto. For my part, I totally reject the notion that his 2016 albums EVOL and Purple Reign or this year’s Future and HENDRXX represent some sort of holding pattern or step back; it’s some of his best, weirdest, and most exploratory work. The tawdry details of his personal life pop up again and again in the music itself, but it’s also easy to read too much into it. The music is unconscionably rich even without that soap opera. The flood of 2015 is interesting more as a turning point than some sort of apex.
Anyway, paring all of those hours of music down to a single 60-minute primer is an exercise in futility. Future has at least four distinct eras—early mixtapes, major label success, the explosion of 2015, and then post-2015—and Future himself claims to have three different musical personas (Super Future, Future Hendrix, and Fire Marshall Future, none of which really matter for our purposes). Rather than attempt to present a comprehensive narrative, which would underserve all of them, I opted to put together an hour of tracks that I really like, and which I think show some of the most interesting through-lines of his career thus far. A different line could easily be cut through his several dozen hours of work, perhaps highlighting his hook-making ability, or curating a punishing gauntlet of window-rattling bangers, or tracing his soap opera heartbreak in greater detail. I went instead for mood. It’s dark. Welcome to hell.
1. “Photo Copied” (2016)
Let’s start right in the shit: a mid-album cut off 2016’s overlooked EVOL. This is the ambient temperature of Future: slithering hi-hats, a minor-key synthesizer line, and Future slowly riding the beat into weird little detours. It’s venomous, seething stuff. The hook (”Yeah I’m on savage time”) feels connected almost corporeally to the verses—any emcee could’ve done something with a beat like this, but Future seems to meld with it on a spiritual level, pulling something out of it that it didn’t even know it had. This sense of tastefulness is his singular talent, and even deep on a so-called “lesser” album, it’s on full display.
2. “The Percocet & Stripper Joint” (2015)
Original drafts of this playlist featured a half dozen or more Dirty Sprite 2 tracks; it’s an almost upsettingly rich record, still revealing new fascinating pockets a couple years after its release. I’ve always loved the low-key hook here—“I just tried acid for the first time / I feel good”—and the phased Dungeon Family brass, which is more intentional than it may seem. He grew up hanging around the Organized Noize studio, where all of the great OutKast and Goodie Mob records were made, and his name itself came from that crew: He was intended to be “the future” of their scene. When they fell from prominence in the late-’00s, he forged his own path, working the mixtape circuit alongside fellow Atlanta upstarts like Gucci Mane and Young Thug. But Future’s origins as an ATlien are always audible in his production choices, ambition, and deep sensitivity.
3. “Lay Up” (2015)
“Beast Mode” was one of the three explosive EPs from early 2015, this one produced entirely with Atlanta trap mainstay Zaytoven. It’s the type of beat you could imagine, say, OJ Da Juiceman turning into a moody little thing, but Future’s long-playing “layup” metaphor transforms it into something else entirely, an almost menacing display of easy opulence.
4. “2pac” (2014)
It’s easy to think of hyper-prolific emcees as just jotting off track after track in the studio, but I always remember an anecdote from an Honest-era Future profile in Rolling Stone in which he details spending 20 hours or so a day in the studio, largely because he hates being outside. One portion describes Future working on a single track:
He pops in and out of the studio, passing the blunt to Esco, building the song, line by line, without having written anything down. Bars start out as strings of improvised gibberish in his unmistakable melody—think Paul McCartney yielding “Yesterday” from “scrambled eggs.” Future sings to the track until they emerge as words. “I told ’em I ain’t the average rapper / They don’t understand.” The anguish in his voice is palpable. His line, “You can’t imagine what I’ve been through, I’m just living my life” is too many syllables. He changes it to “I’m sharing my life.” Words that had peppered our conversation—“finessing,” “O.G.”—start to appear. “I do nothing but let the track talk,” he explains later. “I let it talk to me.” It’s easy to see how this can go for 20 hours.