Much of the intrigue surrounding Future’s debut album Pluto fixated on the voice: raw and emotive, possessed of both a forlorn R&B Lothario’s despondency and the gruff yawp of a drug-runner celebrating a sold out batch, and shellacked in a thick, forbidding coat of Auto-Tune and reverb. Coupled with a penchant for interstellar iconography, the vocal modification frequently attracted science fiction descriptors, portraits of the artist as a moody machine. But Pluto’s most gripping cuts (“Turn on the Lights”, “You Deserve It”) took flight by scaling back the mods to focus on the unnerving frailty of a singer unafraid to skim around and across the break in his voice. Even in moments where Pluto’s vocals were heavily processed, the most captivating quality was the humanity poking through. So let’s set aside this robot business.
Pluto’s greatest success was opening new avenues in Future’s songwriting. At the time, his calling card was the trap house shouter: 2011–12 mixtape highlights “Tony Montana”, “Magic”, and “Same Damn Time” delivered dopeboy truisms via battering ram. Pluto collected those cuts for good measure, but otherwise it dispensed with the tough guy shit, reintroducing Future as a lovelorn hook man. As with Kanye’s 808s & Heartbreak, the transition from rapping to singing was smoothed out by a T-painian dollop of purposefully overdriven pitch correcting tech and confessional emotionalism. The gambit worked, but the album was a touch too reliant on its crutches in retrospect. After a protracted streak of hijacking Top 40 smashes like “U.O.E.N.O.” and “Bugatti”, spitballing weirdness out on mixtapes, and farming his more saccharine ideas out to pure singers from Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus to Rihanna and his fiance Ciara, Future finally returns with his second proper full-length, Honest.
Future’s got a notably greater command of his instrument two years on from Pluto, and to that end, much of the Auto-Tune and reverb that occasionally gave the first album’s vocals the distance of a radio transmission have been scrubbed. The training wheels are off. Fight songs like “My Momma” and “Covered N Money” draw their intensity from the quirky sound of a voice giving out screaming the titular choruses, a trick perfected on the searing pre-album street single “SH!T”. Flubbed notes are left in for character rather than squeegeed out by computers, but there’s less of those than ever because writing for and performing alongside other singers has worked wonders for Future’s range. The rousing upper register chorus for “Blood, Sweat, Tears” and the slick falsetto hook on “Honest” wouldn’t have worked with his voice before. “Never Satisfied” refuses to let Drake do the heavy lifting as Future confidently soars past the Toronto MC’s introspective vocalizing in between choruses. And where guests were once employed to secure a measure of credibility, now they hover in Future’s orbit: Drake gets faded out mid-chorus on the two-minute “Never Satisfied”, and even when Kanye parks the Kardashian roadshow in back of “I Won”, he sticks to the script.
Honest relinquishes Pluto’s romantic tendencies as well, retaining a personal bent without resorting to pining for affection to achieve it. In a recent interview with Pitchfork, Future said flatly, “There are no love songs on this album,” although mid-album stunners “I Won” and “I Be U” teem with pride and excitement about meeting the mate he yearned for on “Turn Out the Lights”. Otherwise, Honest prefers to buck expectations by sneering through the slow jams. Deep cut “Special” is all somber strummed guitars and taunts for an ex who couldn’t handle the fame. (“You ain’t even tryin’ to be special.”) The title track uses a sedate piano-filled production from DJ Spinz and Metro Boomin to coolly revel in newfound wealth and status in a wan, sad deadpan. (“I’m a rock star for life, I’m just being honest.”) Honest is consistently moneyed and aspirational in all the places you might’ve previously expected sap.
Future’s eagerness to escape his old tics and methods also means moving away from trap. There’s still room for grisly, gothic stompers from a murderer’s row of 808 architects from Nard & B to Sonny Digital and 808 Mafia, but Honest’s production is expansive. “Look Ahead” outfits a sample of Amadou and Mariam’s Santigold-assisted “Dougou Badia” with kicks, claps, and guitars for a powerhouse opening argument for Future’s growth. Fresh off a year of platinum hits, frequent collaborator Mike WiLL Made It has gotten weird: he approximates Noah “40” Shebib’s pulsating bass and muted drums on “Never Satisfied” and affixes rattling low end to the gritty, almost atonal synths of “Move That Dope” like a Southern rap Trent Reznor. The album closes with “Blood, Sweat, Tears”, a sermon about the fruits of perseverance delivered over martial drums and wrenching strings specifically designed, it would seem, to blow the lid off arenas.
The searching stream of mixtapes and loosies that followed Pluto appeared to many to signify a struggle to maintain footing in an industry notorious for feeding on Atlanta rap sensations and casting them aside once the hits dry up. But Honest surges with the self-assurance of an artist finally coming into his own. The bruisers are icepick sharp, the ballads restlessly toy with convention, and Future’s heightened ease with both makes Pluto look like a transitional album in retrospect, the dress rehearsal for this, the actual takeover.
