His album Pluto 3D blurs the line between club bangers and heart-crushing, hyperemotional confessionals.
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Future’s Pluto 3D is one of the year’s best rap albums, which is kind of a weird thing to say since he barely raps on it. But that’s the thing: He doesn’t have to. The album is the logical continuation of Future’s appearance on YG’s “Racks”, so it’s full of Auto-Tuned hooks and pop-oriented spins on Atlanta’s Bricksquad sound. But Pluto builds artistically on the sound as well. Future’s no longer comparable to T-Pain, the gold-and-sequin-covered elephant in the room when it comes to Auto-Tune. He’s still making radio-oriented rap, but throughout, it has a melancholy, almost tragic undertone. Even at his most boisterous, Future veers closer to Kanye’s sad robot 808s and Heartbreak territory. But that’s not exactly right either. Because, for all its sci-fi futurism, Pluto doesn’t have the cold and clinical aesthetic detachment of Kanye. You can picture Kanye in the lab, turning himself into the saddest sad robot when he made 808s. In Future’s case, he’s more like a sorry scientist attempting to build the perfect party bot.
Future crafts raucous anthems about money, cash, and hoes that sound as earnest and pained as Michael Bolton’s ballads. His ballads, as it were, are frenetic and propulsive. There’s a song on the album called “You Deserve It,” which I had to listen to about five or six times to figure out whether the titular “deserve” was an admonition or braggadocio. (It’s the latter.) The emotional plumb line on Pluto 3D is as screwed and wavy as Future’s Auto-Tuned voice. It’s as if Future’s goal was to destroy your expectations for what sort of messaging and feeling you can draw out of rap tropes. The centerpiece love songs — “Astronaut Chick,” “Neva End,” “Turn on the Lights” — go as hard as the bangers, and the bangers reach a Bacchic frenzy that culminates in the sort of emotional climax you’d normally associate with the sublime.
The album’s production provides much of its emotional thrust. Future has an impeccable ear for beats, tapping some great Atlanta production talent like Sonny Digital, Will A Fool, and the estimable Mike Will. Every song sounds like it’s coated in stardust, but they never simper. The album has a hard, ratchet backbone that’s responsible for its propulsion.