Othony Godtano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of this new future in Metro Boomen Project. We Still Don't Trust You.

Super producer, songwriter, metroboomen, and of course, rapper and singer, Future. If you know these guys, which you should at this point, you are very much aware of the fact that this is their second full-length album to drop this year, the sequel to the record We Don't Trust You that dropped what, not even a month ago, which has proven to be one of the most eventful rap releases of the year, not just because of the understandably polarizing disses that landed on the record. Most notably, Kendrick's verse on "Like That," which threw shots at J. Cole and Drake. But also the album featured a lot of chill, druggy, hypnotic trap bangers with lush elevated production that showcased just how much creative chemistry, Future and Metro have together. It was a solid album that left me wanting more, which is why I think a sequel here was in order.

But if We Don't Trust You, the first one, had any major prevailing flaw to it, it was that quite a few tracks on the the record were underwhelming, maybe a bit too low-key. On some level, it felt like Future and Metro weren't even fully tapping into their abilities as hit makers, which left me wondering if they were going a little easy on us in the first round. Going even harder the next time around might make absolute sense, considering the tensions that Future and Metro inflamed with the first record.

But this album actually sees the guys pulling back, believe it or not, into an even more low-key and docile a set of tracks that attempt to showcase their softer, more sensual, more dramatic sides, which for sure is a part of Metro's and Future's creative repertoires, respectively. Metro has flirt with doing tracks that have a pop or RnB flair in the past. And Future fans, for whatever reason, love hearing him go full Future Vandross mode on projects like Hendrix, even though generally by RnB standards, Future is an awful singer.

And yet, here we are with a full album of this stuff that has a weird structure to it. Because before I get into the core album itself, disk one of it, there is a second disk to this thing that features tracks that actually are a lot more hard-hitting and aggressive. And a lot of these cuts are great, actually more exciting than pretty much everything that is on disk one. And tagging it onto the end feels like a concession some sort.

Like, 'Hey, sorry for delivering such a limp attempt at something softer this time around. We'll give you more of what you actually want on the tail end here, with more Drake shots included to generate headlines and make us look even more desperate to get a response out of him.' So, even if the second disk on this thing does have some bops, these are songs that should have been swapped out into the first album, pull out the boring cuts, put these in, elevate it, make it a better project overall. But instead, what we have now is a pretty decent first album than a totally awful second one with a bunch of extras on the end that make you wonder how it all went wrong.

Listening to this record, it is clear that Metro definitely wanted to take things in more of an RnB direction this time around with some '80s style pads and synthesizers here and there. But if that's what he wanted to do, I just wish he called on an artist or a singer to collaborate with him that actually would have have fit in that style and done it justice, like Ty Dolla Sign, who was featured on this album at one point, or like The Weekend, who appears here four times.

Asking Future to take the lead on a record like this is like trying to saw through steel with a butter knife when what you really need is a blow torch, which is made apparent right from the beginning of this record on the intro track, which is like this dreamy '80s synth oddesey, with some little annoying laser bits, and Abel (The Weekend), of course, is in the mix, sounding more essential to the track than Future does, whose vocal parts are mostly just repetitious, hanging in the background, not really doing much other than just reiterating the title of the album.

The following cut, "Drink n Dance," also has some massive '80s vibes to it, but with also some R&B passages to match that are quite dreamy. It's here Future essentially shows us just how short he's going to be falling vocally throughout the of the record. And even the production takes a nose dive on the song "This Sunday," where the groove of the track is just either nonexistent or mangled between all the starting and stopping kicks and the stuttering high hats. Not to mention the song ends out of nowhere and has a random group chorus a bit at one point. It's just a mess.

The next real highlight on the record is actually the next Weekend feature, a couple of tracks later, where he throws a few shots out, presumably at Drake as he sings his heart out about not having signed his life away. Many assume that he's referencing at one point having had the opportunity to sign to Drake's OVO label, and he didn't. And while this is one of the more solid tracks on the record, as I said, I feel like Metro is starting to paint himself into a corner production-wise because this super basic RnB trap fusion on the rhythm side and then putting some muffled cords or guitar lines or vocal samples on top of that, it's not exactly the most compelling sound or vibe.

From here in the tracklist, we have more mid, more mid after that, then the song "Right 4 You," which has one of Future's worst vocal performances. 'I want to be right for you.' I just feel like the production on every level is a huge mismatch. The between the relentless high hats, the 808s snares, the African drum hits, the epic synthesizer arpeggios, too. It just feels like a cheaper, crummier version of something you might hear off of Kanye's 808s and Heartbreak.

As if the record wasn't already enough of a massive disappointment up until this point. Metro and Future just twist the knife in even further on the last leg, with Future getting even worse on the lyrical front, surprisingly, with this odd dynamic referencing how this person he's into that he misses can fuck this other guy as much as she wants while she thinks of him. It's obsessive, it's weird, it's awkward. It's exactly the thing that I know if Drake put it on a record, he would get murdered for it. But because it's Future and he's the pinnacle of toxic masculinity, he somehow gets a pass.

The song "Overload" somehow brings things even further down vocally with more awful singing from Future. He seems to lack self-awareness lyrically still saying, 'I might say I love you, but I definitely don't trust you,' which at that point, who's being more fake? You or the other person? You're both being fake.

I will give the album this, "Beat It" and "Always Be My Fault" are two of the best songs this record has to offer. Even if there are some goofy vocal passages here and there where Future is seemingly digging down vocally into this Michael Jackson-esque growl that makes him sound like he's fucking Corey Feldman. But look, as good as these tracks are, they were absolutely, positively not worth everything I had to sit through to get to this point. So praising them seems pointless. "One Big Family" is another on the record. Hearing future rap and sing about this odd polyamorous situation that he's in, it feels like a worse version of watching one of those stupid TLC morman shows.

Then the closing track, "Red Leather," featuring J. Cole, is the definition of tedious, which is a shame because I do think there are genuinely good lyrical and musical aspects to the very simple and skeletal build the song brings to the table. There's just not enough variation or lyrical content to the track to justify a seven-minute run time, even with J. Cole on the back-end. And his inclusion just makes me wonder, why? Why is he even here?

I mean, looking at it on the surface, you could interpret this as like, okay, maybe Future and Metro don't really have an issue with J. Cole, considering there were shots thrown at him by Kendrick unlike that on the last record. They're rebuilding a bridge here in a sense. But that's not even really being addressed on J. Cole's verse. For the most he's just feeding into the narratives around love and lust that Future is dabbling in. But his own way of writing around this makes it feel like he wants to have his cake and eat it, too. He doesn't really know what direction to go in. Does he fully embrace lust and desire and chasing pussy, or is he like a one-woman guy? It seems like he wants the latter, but simultaneously, he talks about how flirting with and bagging bad bitches gives him power, how he thinks he can just slide into Ruby Rose's DMs and get her, too, which, considering how much he embarrassed himself apologizing to Kendrick, backing down off of the beef that he retorted to.

I don't know, man, just the tone of his performance here, and his bars just reads as weird, 'Oh, shucks, Pluto has so many girlfriends. I'm doing it the wrong way.' Like, even if those bars unlike that weren't coming out of Future's mouth or Metro's mouth, they did in part facilitate one of the most embarrassing moments of your career in recent years. Because while I don't think Cole needs to operate in the world with this tough guy attitude where he's confrontational toward everybody, I don't think it would be invalid for Cole to say, 'Hey, with your last record, you created this hell on earth situation for me that I had to deal with. I don't want to be on your next fucking album.'

But instead, he's here just being like, 'Oh, man, I'm not cool at Future. Everything's cool.' But whatever. What the hell ever. For an album this bad, I suppose you can end it however you want as long as it ends. Outside of a couple of pretty good songs and a handful of decent cuts, this record was painfully underwhelming and mid.

One of the most disappointing groupings of tracks, Metro or Future, have put their hands on and absolutely, positively not holding a candle to the original We Don't Trust You. That is for sure. Which is why I'm feeling a strong two to a light three on this one.

Anthony Fantano, Future Metro Booming, Forever.