Nav didn’t like his first album, either. He claims he’s learned now, that he’s self-aware—in the trailer for his new album, he announced with a straight face that he’d made a “vision board.” There are hints of this fledgling growth throughout Good Intentions. Adjusting for expectations, this is his best album yet, one in which he makes half-hearted stabs at “maturity” and occasionally tries to be in on the joke.
There’s still plenty of standard Nav fare. “Turks,” the lead single, is a stale, neon attempt at a Wheezy banger. “No Debate” is diet trap music anchored in plodding 808s. Throughout, it’s unclear whether Nav is trying to be funny or if his flexes are just too odd and specific to land. He clarifies that he rummages through his fridge for lean, not Sunny D. He invites a woman to quarantine with him, clad in all designer. “I’m part of the money-making committee,” he announces on “My Business,” a clunky boast that highlights his tendency to write garbled work-arounds of generic rap tropes. Nav repeats the same ideas over and over again—he likes drugs, he doesn’t trust women, look at all his money.
When he lurches towards something like maturity, it’s a reprieve from both our boredom and his. This mostly takes the form of limp apologies, confessions that wither by the time he reaches the chorus. “I act the way you see on purpose,” he admits on “She Hurtin,” a quasi-love song where Nav transparently uses a new girlfriend to make an ex jealous. He moans about having “too many options” for lovers on the forgettable “Did You Wrong.” He proves incapable of discussing women without talking about what he can buy them, or, horrifyingly, how he wants to procreate (“If I come inside, she got a king inside her belly,” he warbles, not 30 seconds into the album). The lens is equally narrow when he turns it on himself; in “Brown Boy,” a song weird enough to almost be interesting, he sings about himself from the perspective of a third-person observer, whining about the size of his rings and how his music “feels like drugs.” (He pulled the same trick on 2017’s “Did You See Nav,” and he released another song called “Brown Boy” in 2014.)
The apex of his flexing is that he’s friends with Young Thug, who pops up on the album twice and easily overshadows him. The most fun moments on the album are the ones where Nav gets out of the way. On “My Business,” he’s content to mumble occasionally in the background while Future gallops over the beat for a full minute. Lil Uzi Vert salvages “Status” with a vibrant verse that distracts from Nav rhyming “caught caught caught” with “rocks rocks rocks.” It’s genuinely shocking when the late Pop Smoke appears, his gravelly voice slower and softer than we’ve heard before; Nav wastes the opportunity by rhyming about wearing mink to go ice skating.
Travis Scott appears only briefly, and his AutoTune-slathered influence seems to have waned. Instead, Nav tries to imitate his executive producer and label owner The Weeknd, reducing Abel Tesfaye’s haunted gloom to generic darkness. “Saint Laurentt,” whose extra “t”s seems intended to avoid confusion with the better Wale song, is a corroded, moody heartbreak track, with pitched-down vocals to convey the emotion Nav’s voice can’t carry. He references addiction throughout the album, but uses the glut of pills and bottles more to create an aesthetic than to consider their implications. “When I get depressed, no one can help me,” he squeaks on “Overdose.” “Sometimes I hope I overdose.” It’s a disturbing admission, one that seems to crystalize the sulking despondency that fueled his earlier music, but Nav doesn’t go deeper.
The record ends on “Proud of Me?” a diatribe presumably aimed at people who comment on his social media posts. “I just want to fulfill my dreams,” he chirps, achingly earnest. For a 30-year-old rapper who only recently stopped complaining about his teachers, any semblance of self-actualization seems like growth. But intentions alone aren’t always enough.
