Album Review: sum breakup songs by Dru Kelly & Stix
A marriage that ran ten years ends in songs about Percocets, purple crayons, and a broken-ass Altima. Dru Kelly’s breakup writing is messy on purpose and honest by reflex.
The best friend calling in on the phone is something seen quite frequently in rap music. Most often, it is performed as a skit, quickly forgotten once over. Here, on sum breakup songs, the friend making the call is Stix, who produced all the beats (and dropped their third project this year), and the friend being checked in on is one of the most consistent rappers, Dru Kelly.
In Jeff County, where he claims to have been raised, Kelly finds himself sleepy in a bar on “take my lungs” and asks the bartender where his girl went. In the most crowded construction Stix builds him, the soulful sample framework, with Dom Mooney as the featured MC. The sentiment is clear about the drinking: “I think the liquor’s been drowning out the pain/Shit ain’t better than a drink.” The more startling admission is in the verse: “I’m only twenty-five, statistically speaking/I won’t get over this heartbreak ‘til I’m twenty-nine.” He has even run the numbers on his own heartbreak. He no longer wants a woman to take his breath away, but wants one to take his lungs out of his chest, and on “bridge” he finds himself in a broken-ass Altima wondering why the hell he even had a wife at twenty-five years old. On “shorty” he wants the exact opposite, mid-verse alimony talks, bipolar thoughts switching every week, until he offers her the one sweet thing he has left, blasphemy: “I don’t believe in God/But you a god to me, shawty.” He promises to take a dive off the cliff for her and swears that no other woman will ever take his pride, all inside the same hook.
On “i’m doing alright, it’s about time,” he manages to get beneath his own addiction: “Not my fault that I’m scared of sobriety/I grew up popping pills with variety.” A Tito’s and lime keeps him together at work, and the muscle relaxers come from complaining about a hurting back. Stix holds back the drums through soft chords and a small vocal space, then lets the track fully develop and “all right” begins to sound somewhat true. Nothing about “drank kicked in” is that composed. It is all waiting for the relief: “I’m just waiting for the drank to kick in/I’m just waiting for the pain to get lost.” In the verse, he turns on an ex who called him insecure for a year because of some pictures with attractive girls, hoping this bitch burns, and then hopes that this bitch learns. His writing gets awkward when the anger sets in; a line about feeling like Billy on William leads nowhere, and an Erica Kirk name drop should have stayed in the booth. His best bar is also the shortest one: “Lost years of my youth in a pigpen.”
He calls her every name he can think of on “omg wtf” and cannot even finish with clean lyrics, cutting himself off at “I mean, I’m just trying, bitch,” the only one of all those aimed at himself. Earlier in the same song, between coke jokes and chiropractor sex talk, he acknowledges how bad it all sounds: “Way they moving/Shit feel like a cry out for help/I can’t help/‘Cause dawg, I’m cryin’ as well.” Kiran The Nomad matches the agitation with speech-style verse and the coolest logic on the song, sacrifice of your queen as a chess move. The problem is that Kelly lets contempt for one woman spill over into contempt for women altogether, and the songs get progressively worse each time. The spoken rant on “nosey” about how he hates contentious women is pitched as a joke only he would find funny and is tacked to the end of the song, which until that point was about wanting his mama and a face he won’t blame for the trauma. “MINNEAPOLIS” barely counts as a song at all, 808 style floor under Stockholm jokes, vasectomy line, Winston Churchill and Urkel puns, and pussy, money, ass, and titties for a hook.
Stix continues talking. He introduces himself as Kelly’s best friend and producer on “i’ll have yk paint you,” calling in after the news, and then he returns to explain, at great length, that when Kelly threatens “I pay YK my name to go paint your bitch,” he doesn’t mean that nobody is talking about his own hobby. Kelly, midway through the song, has moved past negotiations: “I already stamped/Don’t need a stamp of approval from you.” He has decided that love is a scam and scratches his ex out of all the pictures with a purple crayon, an odd detail that could not have come up by chance. The pep talk on “i’m grown” goes farther, an entire monologue declaring that Kelly is one of the coldest rappers and should never mention divorce again. Kelly answers with the meanest hook and the clearest line in one breath: “An alcoholic who happens to lack the shit to solve it.” Stix uses the same tight framework with the same hand on the boards and on Kelly’s shoulder.
Ykmyname swears that “I am not McLovin” on “peachy,” then walks through selling weed to his older cousin and dropping out of school, the loosest verse written by any guest. Kelly’s own lyrics on “peachy” are digging even deeper memories, of watching addicts shoot up until their veins wore out, of a doggy who took two Perc 30s and is brain dead, but cool now, lucky by his account. Dom Mooney carries the heaviest guest performance on “thousand years,” scarred skin and wire, sleeping in the snow, ounces on the scale on his shoulders, while Kelly sings the quiet part of every divorce: “You might’ve loved me/I just think I might’ve loved you more.” On “will i ever be loved,” Stix strips everything down to deep bass, sparse drums, and a dark loop, while Kelly asks the titular question and admits the only regret he keeps—the marriage: “You were my love for ten years/How the fuck we even get here?” He compares the entire act to an avalanche coming off a broken man and asks if she can love the leftovers.
Kelly takes the most detached look at the damage on “a giver,” resigned pocket of rounded bass and steady kick and snare, where letting go feels the same as taking Lexapro and the man who was paying a mortgage is now renting again. “You think you know what you got ‘til it’s gone,” he sings, and the rest of the clichés stay on household scale: sleeping alone feels weird, wishing to go back home, the resolution to focus on the kids. The pun he made the song on is actually a question, “Know you a giver/Then what gives?”, and he answers it almost inadvertently: “Thought without you I couldn’t live/Oh, look at me live.” In one verse he writes his own ending and then watches himself outlive it.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “take my lungs,” “peachy,” “a giver”