Drake’s sixth studio album is enjoyable to listen to, yet it is laborious. It becomes an overlong and very familiar trip into Drake’s mind, heart, and life. Melancholic and frequently sharp. With this in mind, it’s fascinating that the Toronto rapper defines his new album Certified Lover Boy as “a mixture of toxic masculinity and acceptance of reality,” adding without sarcasm that the result is “inevitably painful.”

The rapper revealed the news on Instagram, where he shared artwork featuring 12 pregnant lady emojis wearing various colored shirts, all designed by British artist Damien Hurst, according to his Instagram tag. Some fans believe the image is the actual Certified Lover Boy album cover, while others believe it’s merely a playful teaser, because nothing says “lover boy” like 12 baby mothers.

The record, which was released in the early hours of Friday morning, was supposed to be released in January 2021, but it was put back nine months when Drake tore his ACL. This delay offered the ideal setting for the reported rivalry between Drake and Kanye West, whose long-awaited and divisive album Donda was released less than a week before Certified Lover Boy on August 29.

The Drake of Certified Lover Boy is uncertain and even exhausted due to his ability to be everything at once. Drake is still figuring out how to balance fame, intimacy, ambition, and insecurity, and he’s still figuring out who to trust—always it’s trust with Drake—but there’s a malaise that runs through his sixth album.

After the album’s rapid and billboard-heavy marketing, the album’s laborious atmosphere comes as a small surprise. While Kanye West took a month and a half to release Donda, darkening the project with each preview, Drake announced and released his album in a week and played coy, eventually sharing no singles and allowing Tidal’s chief content officer to serve as hype man, a role that included confirming the album artwork, world-famous con artist Damien Hirst’s immaculate conceit.

The cover is puerile and weird, as if he wanted to achieve an iconographic low point before his fame faded, a wink that he can cause seismic social tremors with just an iOS keyboard. In this sense, the Hirst cover indicated a lightheartedness and even self-effacing humor absent from the record. On Certified Lover Boy, Drake appears to be imprisoned in the empire he’s built and the narrator-character he’s developed at times.

And seriousness is OK since Drake’s albums are always long—Certified Lover Boy is 15 seconds shorter than the deluxe edition of Take Care from 2011—and immersion in his solipsism is anticipated, if not demanded. You’re supposed to feel something when Drake feels it, but on Certified Lover Boy, he’s feeling everything, never committing to one mood.

Certified Lover Boy begins with a confusing, pitched-up sample of the McCartney-Lennon-penned “Michelle.” It’s a very loud loop, with Drake’s “Champagne Poetry” lyrics dueling with a disembodied voice. It’s almost amazing in its incomprehensibility. Certified Lover Boy, on the other hand, falls short of demonstrating any thematic or emotional progression since Drake’s debut mix tape over 15 years ago. Drake has always been a master of narrative management, curating his image with everything from social media to personal conflict in his life.