From trap to dancehall to house to grime to so much else, there’s a treasure chest of influences and inspirations at play here, with “play” being the operative word. It’s cutting-edge music warmed and softened by pop accessibility: Unlike some of the fussier avant-gardism of recent-period Kanye West (who takes a guest appearance on the airy, dreamy “Glow”), More Life feels like music that exists to be enjoyed first and foremost. The production on More Life is customarily exquisite, handled by a raft of up-and-coming OVO producers and occasionally by Drake’s longtime right-hand man, Noah “40” Shebib. Two of More Life’s highest points arrive courtesy of Young Thug, who contributes a showstopping verse on “Sacrifices,” (“You come with beef, I eat the beat”), then takes another feature on the glorious “Ice Melts,” the album’s penultimate track and a song that feels destined to rule the spring, and perhaps the summer as well. Many of the project’s best moments come via other people, such as Quavo’s turn on “Portland,” Jorja Smith’s surreal digitized hook on “Jorja Interlude,” and the sampled specter of Jennifer Lopez’s “ If You Had My Love” on “Teenage Fever,” a sly and blessedly fleeting allusion to Drake’s personal life. “4422” is given over to R&B crooner Sampha while “Skepta Interlude” is a showcase for the British grime rapper Skepta. More Life feels like Drake taking a well-deserved and perhaps overdue vacation from Drake, or at least from “Drake.” Its cover boasts a photo of Drake’s father and is credited to “October Firm,” and there are several tracks on which the 6 God’s presence barely registers. All this can obscure the fact that, as Stereogum’s Tom Breihan has argued, Drake has the best ear for talent in music, and his greatest asset as an artist is his flair for putting equally (or sometimes even more) talented people in dialogue with each other. Drake is an extraordinarily talented musician with an Achilles’ heel for navel-gazing, a tiresome but lucrative tendency that’s allowed him to become the voice of a generation that enjoys living in public almost as much as complaining about living in public.

One of the reasons More Life succeeds so well is that it’s the first full-length work Drake’s made that seems to recognize that Drake, himself, isn’t all that interesting. It follows in the footsteps of Beyoncé, Rihanna, Kanye, and Chance in its conceptual challenge to the album-as-form, but it also feels like a conceptual challenge to something like Drake-as-form. More Life is compulsively cosmopolitan and collaborative, a pan-Commonwealth rap album that folds Toronto into East London into Kingston into Johannesburg into who knows where else, stops over in Atlanta, and then drops the whole thing onto the internet.

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