Mixtape Review: Birthday Blizzard ‘26 by J. Cole
This is the Cole you want more of.
As the forgotten middle child among today’s top three, J. Cole has spent years building toward this supposedly earth-shattering album, which is The Fall-Off. He’s postponed it, dropped all kinds of material in between, but the man seems convinced he’s clutching nothing less than a nuclear warhead.
The problem is that Cole has stumbled over his own big mouth before. The massive hype around KOD materialized into a medium-okay album with a dumb gimmick. Can he finally translate his horsepower to the asphalt this time, after years in a career where he’s been repeatedly described as “Nas without Illmatic“? This preliminary EP, currently available on his website for the equivalent of 87 cents, certainly ramps up the anticipation.
Birthday Blizzard ‘26 will probably prove absolutely inconsequential in the broader sweep of rap history. We get four tracks. But I want to document this here because it shows me the direction I’ve longed to see Cole pursue. He’s a “Nas without Illmatic,” sure, but he’s also demonstrably at his best when the stakes are lowest. He can release boring music about how much he loves almond milk on an album, only to turn around weeks later and spit decade-defining verses on Benny The Butcher’s tracks.
The opener “Bronx Zoo Freestyle” finally unveils a Cole willing to go completely berserk on a cut bearing his name as lead artist. “Just when you thought your boy was dead,” he attacks, whipping himself into absolute ecstasy over a flip of the name-shall-not-be-named 1997 track “Victory.” Vocally, we’ve rarely heard the guy this agitated and manic, but that’s the voltage such a pompous beat demands. For an artist who usually pushes composure and sagacity to the front on his albums, this kind of feral excitement deserves more frequent display.
A surprisingly unified mood emerges despite the brief runtime. DJ Clue and the presentation help, obviously, but you can picture Cole snowbound in New York, losing his mind, as though one birthday night in the blizzard were his personal The Shining. When he rides the legendary LOX instrumental “Money, Power, Respect” on the closer “99 Build,” you get the boom-bap oldhead charge you’ve somehow missed all along (minus the ICE bars). With “if hip-hop is back, then J.I.D. should be platinum,” he drops the kind of shoutout bar that once crowned Common and Killer Mike, even though he interpolated Kendrick Lamar’s lines on “Hood Politics.”
Birthday Blizzard ‘26 distills exactly why people believe in Cole so ferociously. The man is fantastic here. Formally, he should be completely ready to meet every expectation and deliver a classic. But I harbor one small, nasty theory about what separates this tape from his standard solo material. He’s not rapping over his own production. This gritty, monumental New York instrumentation from boom-bap’s final commercial era, when the sound still carried gangster-rap swagger and mainstream muscle, suits him beautifully. These are selections he hasn’t made before. Just as his voice has typically stayed restrained, his self-made beats have remained insufferably chill and tasteful. I hope The Fall Off absorbed the right lessons from this mini-mixtape, because this is the Cole everyone wants to witness.
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