In the 2003 remake of the British heist thriller The Italian Job, Edward Norton plays a villain who triumphs in a discernibly boring way. After he’s stolen all his friends’ gold, Norton isn’t creative enough to know what to do with it. So he and his heist crew steal their wish lists, too: an extravagant stereo, an Aston Martin Vanquish, a gaudy mansion—just all this stuff that he knows other people want. The Toronto rapper-producer Navraj Goraya is a bit like that, too. Nav has jacked his favorite artists’ shopping lists and thinks that reciting the purchases back to you might build some character. But no matter how many pairs of Gucci shoes Nav buys or pints of lean he cascades, he still sounds like a tryhard wannabe.
Nav didn’t steal anyone’s thunder, though, as much as he’s manufactured his own. In 2015, he co-produced Drake’s Meek Mill diss “Back to Back”; last year, he conspicuously featured on Travis Scott’s “biebs in the trap.” After signing to the Weeknd’s XO label earlier this year, Nav has spent the last several months reasoning that he might be his own star. He has a SoundCloud track record and a handful of co-signs to back him up, but there’s nothing yet in his music that can justify Nav’s potential spot in a prolonged spotlight.
He has halfway apologized for his first album, tweeting about the shabbiness of his cheap microphone. He also promises that he’s done saying the N-word in his music, a blunder worth unpacking considering the Punjabi-Canadian is spearheading a rare representation in hip-hop—a lonely trailblazer who deserves no forgiveness for extending the racism in an endearment that doesn’t belong to him. (Nav recently offered an interviewer an “I’m sorry people were offended” type statement that lacked any semblance of critical self-awareness, but he has stayed true to his word.)
All of this casts Perfect Timing, his full-length collaboration with of-the-moment Atlanta producer Metro Boomin, as Nav’s mainstream crossover. The record might have cost him more in-studio time and stretched his network, but it’s no less hollow and ugly than Nav’s previous music. If anything, now that he can live up to his narcissistic materialism, Perfect Timing confirms that Nav is as empty as he ever was, lyrically especially.
Nav’s delivery—a thin-singing rap style that never strays from a couple of basic, oscillating melodies—does little to appease his shallowness. “Smoke a lot, got a permanent cough/Popping them pills again/Used to think you was my dog, now you are not my friend,” he drones on “Hit.” That last line is the type that consumes Nav throughout Perfect Timing. Now that he’s rich, he’s bent on proving it to it everyone and corralling the doubters. Instead of the triumphant revenge he’s aiming for, Nav sounds smarmy and petty. And when he’s trying to sound smugly cool, he just ends up corny. “You say you’ve got a party, I might pop up there/You a cub, your main bitch fuck me like I’m Papa Bear,” he raps on “Minute” before getting embarrassingly upstaged by a pattering Offset.
That’s not the first or last time a guest steals Nav’s show. Gucci Mane and Belly each show up on their own tracks, punching quick verses that spice up a dead party. Even 21 Savage, the quietly sinister Atlanta emcee who has charted his own rise alongside Metro Boomin and usually sucks the air out of a room, overshadows Nav with an extended whisper on “Both Sides.” The beats—brooding, soft-synthed trap—would be in familiar and more capable hands if the guests were alone with them, but they aren’t enough of a saving grace.
If anything, the precious industry commodity of Metro Boomin’s production—all of it here featuring contributions from Nav himself—has a simplicity that begs for and rewards easy showmanship. Nav doesn’t have that, and instead wastes the spread by dousing it in the same unenthusiastic flow for just under an hour. It’s not just that he doesn’t have anything to say, it’s that he sounds so bored, tallying up the trophies of someone else’s fantasies. No matter how many diamonds or women adorn him, he postures like a lifeless mannequin, and you can tell he’s straining to perfect the pose.
