French Montana - MC4

Exactly halfway through MC4, “Lockjaw” hits, and you start to think of French Montana as a rap star. Kodak Black, the preternaturally talented teenager from South Florida, does lots of the heavy lifting, but the song is too potent to simply be the product of good A&R work, or lucky proximity. In just over a decade of work, French has gone from hanger-on to something more vital and far more interesting; on this February’s superb Wave Gods, he reimagined the world at large as an extension of his knottiest late-‘00s mixtapes. It had all the stunt casting you’d expect from a rapper of French’s social stature, but it was a genre experiment. MC4 was supposed to be the capital-A album to solidify him as a mainstream force.

Instead, an August release date came and went, the record pushed back for “sample clearance issues” that were later unmasked as low pre-order numbers. All this despite a Drake-assisted single (“No Shopping”), a cameo on Fat Joe and Remy Ma’s colossal “All the Way Up,” and despite “Lockjaw” entering the stratosphere. Three months later, it surfaced on the internet with little ceremony and even less promotion.

Where are all the French Montana fans? There’s a chance that the anemic promo run kept MC4 from cutting through the election-year din, that French Montana album cuts never make it to the right years. But his debut album, 2013’s Excuse My French, flopped painfully despite an eye-popping guest lineup and a genuine hit. It also wasn’t his best showing: it had little of the woozy imagination he’d shown in the half-decade prior, and he hadn’t yet learned how to translate those interesting threads to a bigger stage.

MC4 falls short of Wave Gods, but is a leaps-and-bounds improvement over Excuse My French. That it doesn’t appear to be the commercial breakthrough he needs is not the problem, per se—the thing that hampers the record at points is the impulse to shoot for a middle and shore up the base. The Miguel-assisted “Xplicit” crosses itself up from the jump, trying to marry a sleepy sex jam to something more Gothic and getting lost on the way. “Play Yaself” is closer to French’s wheelhouse, but the vocals and his writing are more or less anonymous. And even with best intentions, “Check Come” ends up less experimental than it is malformed.

But the highs are a joy. “Brick Road” catches French in not one, but two of his best roles: somber-but-still-witty formalist on the front half, Autotune-guzzling serpent on the hook and on the back end. “2 Times” is an update on the Coke Wave DNA; “I’m Heated” is a bizarre and nearly-brilliant blend of Gotham rap styles from the Giuliani and Dinkins eras. “No Shopping” is an obvious hit that holds onto a bit of menace. “Have Mercy” enlists Jadakiss, Styles P, and Beanie Sigel for a preposterously fun posse cut that—thankfully—sounds distinctly like a French song. When MC4 succeeds, it does so like a bulk of his best work: with minor keys and big beats that let some air seep into the crevices.

MC4 does struggle to develop an atmosphere of its own; “Lockjaw” and the Kanye- and Nas-featuring “Figure It Out,” both holdovers from Wave Gods, are two of the three strongest songs. So maybe the (mostly arbitrary) “mixtape” distinction will serve the record well, allowing it to live as a loose collection of component parts. It’s not going to build the sort of fervent fan bases that his collaborators enjoy, but it should remind his core audience of why he’s been able to survive a couple of sea changes in rap.

And then there’s “Max & Chinx / Paid For.” The first half of the nine-minute, two-part closer is interspersed by phone calls from Max B and by a prayer that French shares with Max’s mother. French raps about Max’s son, about praying for mercy from God and from circuit court judges, about the 75-year-sentence that hung over Max’s head for years of incarceration. Max’s verse on the second half, “Paid For,” was one of the last he recorded before reporting to serve his sentence; Max’s engineer played it for French for the first time just last year. It’s followed by a turn from Chinx, who was murdered in 2015. French invokes Stack Bundles’s name—another fallen friend. He raps about depression, about bouts of insomnia and impromptu mosque visits. If the sorrow is tempered by anything, it’s Max’s voice:

“You're blessed, you know I'm saying? And all you gotta do when you feel like that: Look at my situation. You know I'm saying? Think of my situation, n*gga.”