Son Raw took a shot of henny now he’s going brazy brazy.
It was a scorching hot day in July of 2015, and I was assembling an IKEA couch in my newly leased, dingy basement apartment. I was alone, for the first time in my life, since my former DJing partner and prospective roommate bailed on me while unexpectedly doubling my rent and hurtling my 31-year-old ass towards something resembling “real” adulthood. There were no Gucci flipflops in sight, but somehow, the glitz of having a dedicated space to call my own mirrored the mix of ostentatious wealth and crippling paranoia that peppered what would come to be known as Future’s 2015 masterpiece, DS2, the crown jewel in one of rap’s all time greatest run of projects.
While the first phase of Pluto’s career seemed determined to rip up trap’s rulebook and reassemble it like a geeked up William Burroughs cut up, Future’s style felt infinitely pliable and adaptable, club music for 21st century space stations full of bad bitches and moonrocks. Then came Honest, the dreaded sophomore album that saw Future attempt a high brow crossover that never landed. The boom bap traditionalists smelled blood in the water. They now had proof that this autotuned crooner was nothing but a flash in the pan. Meanwhile, the competition in Atlanta saw a wide-open lane for the taking as they prophesied Future’s falloff. For every shade of doubt cast on Future’s career circa 2014, he resolved to kill the pop crossover. All of Future’s creativity, all of the hooks, the bars, and the outpouring of emotion, would be channeled through real trap shit.
The rap internet called it “the run”: a shockingly creative year of output beginning a few nights before Halloween 2014 with Monster and closing with a kinda-aiight Drake collab 11 months later. Clawing himself out of Honest’s commercial grave, Future turned to the 808 Mafia collective, whose most present figures Metro Boomin and Southside were quietly revolutionizing Atlanta’s sound. From 2009 to 2012, trap alternated between Lex Luger style bombast to candy-coated strip club futurism. Metro and South did neither: their synths were filtered and atmospheric, becoming some of the moodiest music in mainstream rap since boom bap’s ’90s peak. Through carefully programmed plugins and obsessively pitched hi-hat rolls, they peeled back trap’s surface–the stuff Miley Cyrus was biting–to reveal the drug abuse, poverty, murder, and sleepless nights that had originally inspired the sound in the first place.
Endlessly debated, every project in the run has its devotees and to this day, some fans argue that DS2 isn’t even Future’s best drop that year. Monster was more visceral, less a resurrection than trap’s undead king refusing to lay in his grave. Early 2015’s Beast Mode, a sonic outlier produced entirely by Gucci Mane associate Zaytoven, proved this new Future wasn’t limited in his sounds of choice. Then comes 56 Nights, home to the greatest song Future will ever write in “March Madness,” a delirious, melodic stream of consciousness where frustration over police killings, sexual desire, drug addiction and wealth accumulation merge into a flow state of firing neurons and dying synapses.
I wouldn’t begrudge anyone for choosing these mixtapes over DS2, a large part of the run’s excitement came from not knowing what Future would drop next, but being assured that it would add a new dimension to his sound. And still, 10 years ago when the flurry of tapes came down, there was no doubt in my mind that Future was building up to something, and that something was DS2. If the run was a deconstruction and reengineering of Future’s music, then DS2 was the record where everything coalesced.
A lot of this comes down to subtraction. What happens to those bombastic synths when the MDMA stops working? What if Lex Luger’s haunted house circus trap was actually scary? What happens when Atlanta’s most sensitive feels abandoned and jilted by Ciara? DS2 offered a dozen and a half answers, all of them thrilling, all at the extremes of popular music. “I Serve The Base” sounds like a malfunctioning robot, and serves (heh) a dual purpose as a D-boy anthem and a mission statement for ruthless aggression era Future. “Where Ya At” almost convinced us Drake could sound hard. “Groupies” is one of those weird Tom Waits drinking songs about marauding sailors on the prowl as channeled through distorted 808s. Every track is either a high-octane anthem soundtracking a fractured mind peaking on multiple substances or a moody counterpoint for when said substances fail and the grimness of reality creeps in.
And still, DS2’s undertow is deceptively seductive, stuffed to the brim with effortless hooks and intricate production shutting down any nonsense regarding trap’s validity as “serious” hip-hop. It’s also not something that could be recreated at will, the result of an impossible schedule, an unsustainable drug regiment and the well of strength that a true artist draws on when their back is against the wall. It may be cliché to state that great art can’t be made by committee or with a formula, but Future’s greatest work emerging from his most fraught era emotionally proves what would otherwise be an empty adage. When every pill sounds like a death sentence waiting to happen, and every threesome an opportunity for treachery, you gotta capture the moment. This runaway momentum was aided by crisp engineering and an attention to sonic detail often overlooked in trap’s rush to put product out on the street, as confirmed in an interview with Future’s engineer, Seth Firkins.
By October 2015, “the run” was over and we’d hit peak Future. What A Time To Be Alive with Drake felt reductive in scope, the work of two men whose imperial phases were running them ragged, even if “Jumpan” still slaps. For Future, there was still great music ahead–twin releases Future and HNDRXX remain notable highlights–but whereas his music once hailed infinite possibilities, the end of the run signalled an end to the constant artistic mutation.
Ten years later, DS2 still feels like the rapper’s final form, creative magma solidifying into Mount Olympus. That’s probably for the best: we’ve lost too many artists, rappers in particular, to drug abuse in recent years, and I wouldn’t ask anyone to inhabit the headspace necessary to birth a DS2 simply for my own enjoyment. But man, what an album: a decade later, it still hits just as hard as the day I heard it while assembling that damn couch in the basement, no matter how many lesser emcees have tried cribbing from its mix of sensuality and rage since, and no matter if my living situation has drastically improved.
The run belongs to a very particular zeitgeist, born of the waning days of the MP3 when music was shared via dodgy download links ganked from DatPiff and streaming algorithms held little dominion over popular tastes. The EDM boom’s initial bombast was ebbing as the first millennials exited their 20s but trap hadn’t yet played out its welcome as the default sound of American chart music, and it still retained crucial links to actual drug dealing culture. Above all, this was the fading of the Obama era and definitively pre-Trump: well-heeled music journalists didn’t yet need to hedge their bets when endorsing artists whose music could be (mis)read as toxic or hostile to progress–they could just like this shit full stop.
Contrast this state of affairs to our present day: Playboi Carti’s long shadow is proof there’s still life in Atlanta trap, but the vibes are off. Pop punk melodies and cadences have infiltrated the trap and diluted the sauce, tastemakers are “concerned” rather than enthusiastic, and everything about the music, from sales to ambition feels reduced in scope. Peak Future would have never been creatively outmatched and/or outshined by a bunch of 2 bit dorks in cowboy hats, impotent prestige acts or main pop girls–they’d be too busy trying to reverse engineer his swag. You can’t convince me that today’s internet-addled plugg and rage music is anywhere near as relevant as trap was when DS2 hit, not when its reach remains diffuse and its ambitions indistinct.
As for Future himself, the man lives a remarkably unremarkable life these days. While the run was the particular result of cascading crash outs–personal, musical, pharmaceutical–his subsequent career has settled into the arc of a beloved legacy act, complete with corny pop culture namedrops and albums that are mostly good but still can’t quite recapture the magic. It’s frankly a relief given we’ve lost Takeoff to violence, nearly lost Thug to a bogus case. And for all of the man’s alleged toxicity, it seems to be contained to wax (knocking on wood here).
I won’t pretend like 2024’s trio of releases came anywhere near the level of 2015’s output, but in a just world, “Lost My Dog” would have hit a billion streams. In any case, Future’s middle age consistency and any subsequent victory laps are well deserved: the man went to the edge of hell and returned with fire from the Gods across a year’s worth of music. Us mortals can only dream of experiencing such excess and living to tell the tale.
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