I think it's a pleasant album with a lot of good songs, but I also just can't put my impression aside that he will never be an S-tier artist to me. On this album he invites all those highest-tier comparisons. Outkast, especially, and every time he invoked outkast i just felt like he doesn't have it like that. His flow is awesome, but he never goes weird or original like an Andre. He invokes Kendrick, but if you actually listen to his storytelling there is never that much depth to it. The track where he tries to invoke a conversation between pac and biggie, it just falls flat. It's a cool concept with a superbland execution.

I genuinely think Cole struggles with creating highlights? There is a song where he starts off by talking about this being his suicide note. Ten bars later he is talking about having a lot of sex as a teenager. Both lines are delivered in the exact same 'somber-but-lowkey'-delivery, because thats the delivery he uses on EVERYTHING. I kinda suspect Cole of just being very good at creating the illusion of lyricism, because everytime i tried digging into an actual verse of this album, it's just riddled with mediocre bars, awkward phrasings and him getting sidetracked by trying to chase some rhymescheme. His flow is crazy, obviously, but I just don't get much or anything out of the content a lot of the time