Album Review: Coke Wave 3.5: Narcos by French Montana & Max B
The Coke Wave reunion arrives with all the mythology intact and almost none of the hunger that made the originals matter.
Max B has been gone for almost sixteen years, locked up at Northern State while hip-hop kept moving. In that time, French Montana went from mixtape grinder to major-label fixture, and the “wavy” sound they pioneered became a template that a dozen rappers have worn down to nothing. You would think a tape like Coke Wave 3.5 would have something to prove, some urgency born from Max finally touching studio air again as a free man. But across twenty-two tracks, what you mostly get is two rappers leaning on a brand name and filling time.
The writing here is thin in ways that matter. On “MAWA,” French raps, “Every bitch know the slogan, tell ‘em, ‘Fuck you and pay me’” and you can feel the whole tape recapitulating itself early. The album keeps circling back to the same handful of assertions—we’re rich, we run New York, they hate us, the wave is eternal—without putting any real picture behind the talk. On “Metro Wave,” Max says We run New York, but I fuck with the south, which tells you nothing except that geography exists. On “Effortless,” French claims, “That bag I get it up and switch it up like Cassius Clay,” but he never shows you the moment, never gives you a scene worth remembering. The comparisons are empty. The brags are generic. If you took the names off these verses, you couldn’t identify who was rapping or what year you were in.
This becomes a tape where you hear how much money exists without ever learning how it was made or what it cost. French tells you he paid semesters and turned dream girls to my new extras and flew back from Saudi, countin’ money up for ten days, and none of it sticks because there’s no texture, no consequence, no moment where the stakes feel real. Max does the same thing. “Twenty thousand in my jeans,” he raps on “Narcos.” I got the motion in New York. She’s a eater, boss dog, kick your feet up. They’re not observations, memories, or even particularly good brags. The tape is full of lines that announce success without showing the work.
The skits make it worse. “Skit, Pt. 1” opens with a fake news broadcast: “Dick riding is at an all-time high! Broke boys are on the rise! Pieces are not hitting and the plugs have the same work!” It’s supposed to be funny. “Skit, Pt. 2” is the real embarrassment, though. Here, a narrator declares, “They weren’t just narcos, they were earthquakes. No tsunamis and goes on to claim El Chapo ain’t got nothing on Don Snow and Mantega. Pablo Escobar looked up to them. El Mayo, Griselda Blanco. None of them bigger than the Coke Wave!” Invoking actual cartel figures—people responsible for extraordinary violence, corruption, and death—as hype men for your rap brand is lazy at best and offensive at worst. You’re supposed to believe the claim because it’s delivered with a straight face, and that’s the whole trick.
The sex talk is relentless and tedious. “Pop the Half” has French rapping: “She popped a half, got her titties shown/That bitch bad, with no panties on,” which is about as imaginative as a rest-stop bathroom scrawl. “Tease Me” adds “Her pussy leak, she Porto Rican, just for the weekend,” as though ethnic fetishization counts as detail. “Ever Since U Left Me” gives you the “All I need is one night, you gon’ have to splurge on it/All I need is one night, whoop in the purse,” which pairs transactional sex with what sounds like a threat. The tape indulges women as interchangeable props and calls it swagger. It reads as the default mode of rappers who have nothing else to say.
What’s frustrating is that Max B still has his voice. The melodic sense is there. When he sings on “Be All You Can Be,” admitting “I thrive being a husband, I strive to be productive,” you hear something close to honesty, a man trying to figure out life after prison. When he raps about “God gave me the strength to keep living” on the same song, you believe him because it sounds like something he needed to say. But those moments drown in the midtempo wave production and the endless luxury placeholders. The beats mostly blend together (sure, Metro Boomin, Murda Beatz, Harry Fraud may deliver some goodies) and after an hour, the tape feels like one long song interrupted occasionally by skits.
French Montana sounds exactly like French Montana has always sounded, which means smooth and forgettable. He can ride a beat. He cannot write a memorable bar. His verses on “Bulletproof Maybach” and “The Race” slip by without leaving anything behind. The Chinx appearance is the tape’s most emotionally loaded moment, and it barely registers because it’s buried in generic surroundings. Hearing his voice again should mean something. But when he enters on “Nigga Like Me” singing, “She never met a nigga like me,” you realize the verse wasn’t written for this tape, and the fit is awkward because it was already placed on Max B’s Public Domain 7 mixtape. It’s tribute by placement, not by design. French on the other hand, raps, “Gave ‘em that Coke Wave, that Public Domain/Foreigns on the highway, started out with no lane,” and it’s fine, it’s competent, and it’s immediately gone from your memory. The song around it doesn’t rise to meet the weight of his absence.
For a tape called Narcos, there’s almost no crime storytelling. Nobody moves product. Nobody dodges police. Nobody loses anything. The word “narcos” appears in the title track and the skits and the ad-libs, but it never becomes a narrative. It’s a Netflix reference dressed up as street mythology. The original Coke Wave tapes worked because Max and French sounded like they had something at stake, like the music was tied to a real moment in their lives. This one sounds like a contractual obligation fulfilled (despite not being released by a major) with the minimum effort required.
Subpar (★★☆☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Heaven,” “Be All You Can Be”