Though a like-titled album was intended for a 2016 release on Atlantic, this was issued through an arrangement with Thirty Tigers, outside the major-label system. The scope of sounds and guests suggest that it was at least made within it, as it's no shoestring-budget commercial departure. Longtime studio associates Soundtrakk and Simon Sayz are among the producers, as are some established veterans, such as Streetrunner, and comparatively new collaborators. By embracing the detuned bass and dope boy cool of state-of-the-art trap, Lupe Fiasco delivers his most subversive album yet.
Lupe Fiasco’s new album introduces itself with a shocking display of force: “Dopamine Lit (Intro)” is two minutes and 49 seconds of foghorn bass, fiery bars, and a half-joking, half-drunken chorus that includes a Billboard flip-off, a Lord of the Rings reference, and some self-consciously nonsensical trap grunts, for good measure. The song especially feels like a pleasant surprise attack when held against the eternally put-upon rapper’s consistently inconsistent delivery over the last few years. DROGAS Light may not surpass his auspicious debut, 2006’s Food & Liquor, but it is easily the least scattered statement he’s made in about a decade.
Not coincidentally, it is also the first album he is releasing independently after concluding his long and unhappy relationship with Atlantic Records. So rather than turning in a collection of songs that are easily sorted into column A (safer, radio-playable, label-approved) and column B (self-indulgent and somewhat superior), Lupe goes hard at a coherent sound on every single track, most pointedly on the album’s stellar first half. But coherence is not the only or most important difference here. There’s also an unexpected sonic strategy that finds Lupe unleashing a relentless assault of huge 808s, bomb-tick snares, and constantly chopped’n’popping vocal samples; he’s simultaneously trying on sounds of the moment while retaining his contrarian viewpoint on modern trap trends.
Unchained from major-label groupthink, Lupe doesn’t go completely left with a set of stiflingly dense art-raps. Instead, many of these tracks seem purpose-built to compete with Rae Sremmurd and Migos for sheer bumpability, while lyrically running laps around them. The trap-heavy production is a major asset; 808s and psychedelic ambience provide Lupe with a vehicle for his worldview, which is critical of the genre’s gangster tropes. “You seen the movie/They killed the n***ga/Why you still wanna be like Scarface?” he raps on “NGL.”
| A1 | Dopamine Lit (Intro) | 2:49 |
| A2 | NGL | 4:03 |
| A3 | Promise | 4:32 |
| A4 | Made In The USA | 3:30 |
| B1 | Jump | 4:34 |
| B2 | City Of The Year | 3:52 |
| B3 | High (Interlude) | 3:58 |
| C1 | Tranquillo | 5:10 |
| C2 | Kill | 7:10 |
| C3 | Law | 5:26 |
| D1 | Pick Up The Phone | 4:39 |
| D2 | It's Not Design | 3:50 |
| D3 | Wild Child | 3:28 |
| D4 | More Than My Heart | 3:56 |
