Welcome to Sleeper Hit Support Group, a column diving into the song currently occupying the bottom spot of the Billboard Hot 100.

In a pop landscape that asks more questions that it answers, I'm setting out to answer three questions about each of these songs: how it got here, if the song is good, and where it's going. In this 100th spot we'll find unlikely ascents, falls from grace, and resurgences of hits from bygone eras.

After evading the inevitable for nearly two months, today, we're talking about Drake, and the final HABIBTI song standing on the chart, "I'm Spent."

How did it get here?

I'm grateful to have been awarded the gift of a couple months' hindsight when discussing Drake's triple-album bomb. The week ICEMAN, MAID OF HONOUR and HABIBTI impacted the charts, every single song from all three albums made its way on, and I didn't really know what to make of it at the time. Some critics pegged the move as a Trumpian flooding of the zone. Others theorized it was a ploy to burn through his UMG contract amid his ongoing lawsuit against the corporation. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

Drake being able to retain his commercial success after being called a pedophile by a gleeful Kendrick Lamar during the 2025 SuperBowl halftime show is living proof that anyone with enough money to cushion them will never face legitimate, material consequences for their actions. His incel acolyte fans will never turn on him, and too many people's livelihood depend on his continued success. OVO, Drake's label and apparel brand, has somewhere in the ballpark of 200-300 employees. He, by most accounts, is still "too big to fail." But money can't silence Drake's critics, and they may have been the loudest and most voracious during this triple-album's rollout and release.

HABIBTI in particular has become the worst rated album of the year (avg. rating of 46/100 on Album Of The Year) by an already poptimist-heavy landscape of critics. In contrast to its companion albums, HABIBTI is chalk full of downtempo, loverboy R&B – think Take Care but with all of the charm sucked out of it. Similarly to its companion albums, it's thoroughly boring at best and actively pathetic at worst. Drake – who does have a nice singing voice – slathers every vocal take in effects, eliminating the impassioned vocal performances people fell in love with him for during his artistic peak. The project feels aimless and half-baked as he fails to use any of his collaborators effectively, "I'm Spent" included.

But who is Loe Shimmy, and why is he on this track?

Loe Shimmy, born Shamar Williams Cox is a 27 year-old rapper from Pompano Beach in south Florida, a seaside exurb 40 minutes north of Miami that Kodak Black also calls home. The two would later collaborate on the track "Get Away" from Kodak's 2023 album Pistolz & Pearlz.

Shimmy started putting music out on Soundcloud during the pandemic, independently releasing two EPs, Zombieland and World War Z in 2020. He would continue that Z/zombie theming with his first two albums, 2021's Zuper PowerZ and 2022's Z End. These records were pretty typical Soundcloud faire, with minimalistic trap beats and languid, drowsy flows. Sonically, Shimmy is a direct descendant of Future with his warbly delivery and by-the-book trap production.

Z End track "tina" earned Shimmy a co-sign from Drake, who posted a screenshot of the music video to his Instagram story. Every top comment on the video indicates that Drake sent them.

His career since that boost has been a relatively slow climb upwards. Shimmy's first entry into the Hot 100 was the Brent Faiyaz remix of his song "For Me," which slotted in for one week at #78. The remix was tacked onto the end of his final independent album, Nardy World, which is named after and dedicated to Shimmy's late brother.

Last year, Shimmy signed to gamma, a private equity-backed distribution company founded by former Apple Music executive Larry Jackson. The company, founded in 2023, seemed to be inspired by the popularization of private equity catalog sales, but has since cast a wider net to include marketing for Steph Curry (as an entity, I guess?) and Beats by Dre. There's a good amount of fishy activity going on with gamma that I won't get into for the sake of brevity, but you can read more about it here.

Under gamma, Shimmy put out his most recent album Rockstar Junkie, and the immediate jump in production value is impossible to ignore. The different album covers alone show the investment that was made into turning Loe Shimmy into a "serious artist."

Just a week before the release of Rockstar Junkie, Loe Shimmy was named as a member of 2025's XXL freshman class. The weight of that honor has definitely diminished over the past decade, but it provides significant exposure regardless.

Rockstar Junkie, an album tackling the substance abuse in Shimmy's own life and its rampant prevalence in his community, saw him landing features with stars like Quavo and Don Toliver. The latter awarded Shimmy his second Hot 100 entry, which rattled around the bottom of the chart this past winter.

Now, we see Loe Shimmy among the most recent recipients of the storied "Drake Stimulus Package" (a Loe Shimmy Drake Stimmy if you will), but Shimmy was tasked with most of the heavy lifting. Here's how he recalls "I'm Spent" coming together.

"[Drake] told me to send him a couple of songs; I sent him four songs. That was probably a year ago. And he just now started working on that project a couple months ago.

When I was in Africa, he had FaceTimed me: 'I need you to dadadada,' you feel me? He helped orchestrate the whole song, that n***a a real genius, you feel me? Switched the beat up – he a real wizard.

It was a song I already had been sent to him. And I thought he forgot about it, but hell no. He gotdamn remembered, he kept his word for sure."

Drake is no stranger to ghostwriters and taking songs from featured artists, so this retelling of events comes at no surprise. But with all that said...

Is the song any good?

I don't understand how Drake puts out a verse like this and doesn't feel any kind of shame. I could say that about nearly any of his releases this decade, but his naked insecurities are no longer sympathetic – they're just plain pathetic.

"I'm Spent" sees Drake tackling the insecurity that this girl will leave him if the money runs out. It is probably a very real and deep seated insecurity he holds, but those emotions aren't addressed in any sort of insightful or interesting way – we just get Drake asking if the girl would "just go missin' like milk carton" and bars where he fits in the names of The Simpsons like he's playing Scattergories.

"Homer diamonds sittin' on my broken heart
Swear I blew your head up, I should call you Marge
Spit it in your mouth 'cause you like that shit harsh
Made me want a lease a yacht in St. Barts"

The only remotely compelling part of this song is Loe Shimmy's sing-songy intro with its lush celesta synth preset. Drake promptly sucks the life out of "I'm Spent" the second he hops on the track. It feels like your weird uncle butting in on a conversation on Thanksgiving. To have that kind of vacuous presence on your own album is really astonishing.

Where is it going?

I could've levied this same criticism against Drake half a decade ago, but it's clearer than ever post-beef that current day Drake is a musician that feeds into men's worst impulses and intuitions. The misplaced insecurity, the petty one-sided grudges he holds against anyone that doesn't bend to his every will, the shitposty wordplay – it's all gotten so played out in his 2020s output that I have a hard time believing Drake has any gas left in the tank.

He was already demonstrably asleep at the wheel when he put out the embarrassing kowtow to TikTok that was "Toosie Slide" in 2020. If anything, the beef with Kendrick lit a fire under him that made ICEMAN something worth paying attention to. It made people invested in what he had to say in a way that would not have been the case otherwise.

HABIBTI, though, is just a void. It's nothing. It evokes nothing. If Drake himself sounds wholly uninvested on his own album, why should anyone else give it the time of day? "I'm Spent" holding on the chart for as long as it has is truly an anomaly to me. If anything, it may be a testament to a rise for Loe Shimmy.

It honestly may be to Loe Shimmy's advantage to continue being a Future clone. Future himself just put out a new record, and it was received exceptionally poorly. If he is able to fill a void that the real Future can no longer fill himself, there may very well be a path for him to carry the torch. But is buddying up with Drake the way to do that? All signs point to no.