Longtime fans of Drakeo the Ruler know that the Los Angeles MC doesn’t need much to create an album. He made his breakthrough project, 2017’s Cold Devil, over the course of 10 days following an 11-month jail stint stemming from a gun charge. The acclaimed Thank You for Using GTL mixtape was recorded entirely over the phone—by way of the tape’s namesake collect-call service—while Drakeo was held at LA’s Men’s Central Jail. Just a month after being released from that same jail sentence, Drakeo delivered We Know the Truth. The synergy of The Truth Hurts, which arrived some two months after We Know the Truth, should come as little surprise to those who know how the MC works.
The unflinching menace of Drakeo projects past is fully intact across The Truth Hurts, the Ruler confessing that he’s in “war mode” as soon as “Intro,” threatening—among more conventional methods of attack—to pull his enemies’ teeth out with pliers. On “10” he tells us, “I grab Jenny from the block, we finna slow dance/This nina kiss a n***a when it’s time to romance.” Drakeo’s unique sense of humor is ever-present and immediately recognizable here in the form of song titles like “It’s Sum Shit on Me,” “Engineer Scared” (as in “we got the engineer scared”), and “Pow Right in the Kisser,” where every bar is punctuated by that refrain. For beats, he’s tapped the handful of producers defining the sound of contemporary Los Angeles street rap (RonRonTheProducer, Thank You Fizzle, LowTheGreat), along with names like Wheezy, Bankroll Got It, and Duse Beatz. By the time Drake pops up for “Talk to Me,” the voice we’ve heard the most outside of Drakeo’s is that of fallen comrade Ketchy the Great, showing us that as his star rises ever higher, his priority remains the brothers who didn’t make it far enough to experience the acclaim.