We know what a new Future album means at this point. Too much dissociated sex. Trust issues. Insecurities that turn into mind games with the same women he’s hoping will save him from himself. Rapper soap opera stuff. Numbing all that pain by going on The Lost Weekend-style binges of booze and drugs. The Real Me is a little different, though—not because all 22 tracks don’t contain the same anxieties that have been haunting his acidic ATL soul music since Honest, but because it’s just as much about living up to the reputation of being Future: the blurred lines between his true identity and his artist persona, and how fucking crazy it makes him feel that he can barely tell the difference. It’s a meta look at the long-term effects of more than a decade as a massively popular rapper whose popularity is based on digging into the darkest parts of himself.
Admittedly, Future spiraling over the ways mega-fame and money have permanently changed him isn’t nearly as fascinating or endearing as Future spiraling over getting his heart broken—à la his Monster era in the mid 2010s—but hey, at least it feels real. “Life get crazy when you get everything you thought you needed,” he sings like a zombie on the washed-out “Cast a Spell,” before muttering something about ketamine and how the latest fling he met during his nonstop travels saved him. Midway through “Radio,” which has this airy bounce that reminds me of the tender moments on 2017’s Hndrxx, he grapples with the pressures of not messing up what he’s got going on because so many people depend on him. André 3000 pops into “No Misery” sounding like Zordon for a monologue about what the experience of listening to Future is like: “We all on edge watching it,” he says. That’s probably a trip for Future, knowing that people gravitate to the sensation of listening to him come apart at the seams. In his warped verses he lives up to that expectation, wailing about girls purposely tracking him down when he’s hammered to try to get pregnant.
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What’s off-putting in Future’s search for The Real Me is how often his frustrations turn into resentment toward the women around him. Plenty of women in Future songs feel like side characters in his mission to claw his way back from rock bottom, but here they’re more like faceless props passing in and out of his life until he discards them for showing any sort of personality. He’s never been a feminist, but his best stuff is complicated by real yearning for love and affection, telling stories based on relationships that he can’t stop torpedoing. “I don’t wanna let you down, I don’t wanna let you down,” he chanted on 2017’s “Solo,” knowing he probably will. The Real Me’s lack of emotional intimacy, its lack of regret, just makes it seem like he hates these girls, especially since there’s hardly any specificity about anything other than their graphic sex.
