The follow-up to 2020's WUNNA, DS4Ever occupies the same grey area as Chief Keef's Bang 3 and Lil Baby's Harder Than Ever, being both Gunna's third studio album and the fourth instalment in his formative Drip Season (DS) series of mixtapes. While its predecessor honed the spacey "Skybox" soundscapes of the rapper's late-2010s output, DS4 pulls back to the more generalized approach of his earlier work. This time, the drums come with a little more punch, with rhythms urged forward by frantic beeps and whomping 808s. It can't help but feel a little like a step back. That's not to say there's not plenty to enjoy here. The relentlessly flowing "South to West" is tinged with a horizon-gazing importance, opening track "Private Island" catches a sleek melodic pocket, and the Young Pluto back-to-back of "Too Easy" is like a "2.0" of Future's already-excellent "Riding Strikers." A weirdly comedic angle appears in some of Gunna's writing here and makes for a refreshing surprise, given the rapper's distant, money-driven persona. "Pushin P" -- which has already done the rounds on the meme circuit -- sees Gunna and Thugger rattle through the "P" section of the dictionary to deliver one of the year's most bizarrely entertaining anthems.
Unfortunately, the rest of this project feels like Gunna on autopilot. Clumsy, half-thought-out choruses on "Alotta Cake" and "Poochie Gown" do a disservice to the tracks' slick verses, "Thought I Was Playing" is a dry imitation of Gucci and Shiesty's "Like 34 and 8," and "Idk That Bitch" feels utterly inoffensive. While there are some obvious outliers -- the Metal Gear-like "Poochie Gown," the crunchy "Mop" -- much of DS4's production falls too far into cliché, be that the tedious guitar-trap of "So Far Ahead > Empire" and "Flooded" or the bland chord progression of "Life of Sin" and "Die Alone." And no matter how hard Drake tries, there's no saving the garish '90s sex-skit revival of "P Power." After tunnelling into a very specific avenue for WUNNA, DS4 loses focus, instead spreading the rapper thin across a much wider smattering of styles. The resulting project feels noncommittal: DS4 is caught between the woozy, floating sounds of WUNNA and an older, heavier-hitting sound, yet nails neither.