Some time this March, a SWAT team descended on a home in a wooded, well-to-do North Carolina suburb. According to the producer Elite, helicopters vultured overhead as armed officers broke down the front door and raided the house, presumably acting on a tip from a neighbor who believed the occupants were manufacturing or selling drugs. There was no one home; masked and bulletproof-vested men kept pouring inside. Instead of a grow-op, officers found a basement littered with recording equipment, the bones of a creative hideout that had filled the community with little more than some errant blunt smoke.
The house was J. Cole’s. It wasn’t the native North Carolinian’s only property holding: he’d previously purchased his childhood home, at 2014 Forest Hills Drive in Fayetteville, with plans to turn it into a rent-free safe haven for single mothers. On his last solo effort—which was named after the Fayetteville house—he rapped about his adolescent fantasies of white picket fences surrounded by trees, by quiet. The SWAT experience, recounted on “Neighbors,” the best song from Cole’s fourth album, 4 Your Eyez Only, is a grim perversion of those dreams, and it anchors a record that wrestles with the fragility of life and the importance of family ties.
For long stretches, Eyez is a rumination on death. Cole frequently invokes other points of view, including that of his late friend James McMillan, Jr., who was killed at 22. The album is peppered with references to his murder, and a testimony from a young girl in Fayetteville, which appears at two points on “Ville Mentality,” echoes the reality faced by McMillan’s own daughter. Cole is himself a new father (“She’s Mine, Pt. 2” is about his wife and newborn child), and the title track, which closes the album with a missive for those young girls, is anchored by his personal anxieties, making for some of Cole’s most affecting writing to date.
He also comes to life on “Immortal,” which sounds as if someone played Cole an unheard 2Pac song from the Makaveli sessions and then dared him to recreate it from memory. The song’s narrator feeds baggies through a burglar bar, watches Bic lighters wave under spoons, wakes up early to hit the Bowflex. It’s details like that last one that set “Immortal” apart from so much of Cole’s early work: you can see the speaker bathed in the artificial light of 3 a.m. infomercials, figuring he needs to put some weight on. He equivocates—“crime pays like a part-time job” is the sort of evocative, economical phrase that has eluded Cole so often in the past. And when he rattles off rhetorical questions (“Have you ever seen a nigga that was Black on the moon?/Have you ever seen your brother go to prison as you cry?/Have you ever seen a motherfucking ribbon in the sky?”) he’s working in a long tradition of rappers and writers knocking a grave present against against its opposite. To that end, at the song’s most defiant moment, Cole nods to his real life: “If they want a nigga, they gon’ have to send a SWAT team.”
At its lowest points, 4 Your Eyez Only rehashes Cole’s worst tendencies. “No Role Modelz,” a breakout hit from 2014 Forest Hills Drive, tried to cast crass, regressive ideas about women as a moral struggle; “Deja Vu” is its mopey inverse, where Cole shouts over the music in a club to ask “Who in their right mind letting you out the house alone?/Tell me, is your house a home?” The song also lapses into some of the album’s laziest writing, like “On a scale from 1 to 10, that girl’s a hundred.” It’s like “Marvin’s Room” for guys who brought their high school letter jackets to college. (It’s worth noting that while “Deja Vu” and Bryson Tiller’s massive “Exchange” share a sample and, at points, have similar drum programming, producer Vinylz claims that he and Boi-1da produced “Deja Vu” before its beat was stolen and repurposed for the Tiller version.)
Speaking of production, that’s the one area where Eyez falls far behind Forest Hills Drive. After “Deja Vu,” the album slips into a three-song lull of pale, ornate music—unfortunate because the songs grapple with the early death of parents, Cole’s love for his wife, and McMillan’s death, respectively. “Ville Mentality” in particular plays like an interlude, and it might in fact be better served with just its hook and the aforementioned words from a young woman. Eyez sorely misses the type of serrated edge given to Forest Hills Drive by tracks like “03’ Adolescence,” “G.O.M.D.,” or “Fire Squad.” For this record, Cole leans more heavily on his singing voice than ever before—a welcome change at points, but it pushes the middle section of Eyez onto the sleepier side of the ledger.
Aside from the moments when he taps into something greater (“Immortal,” “Neighbors,” “4 Your Eyez Only”), Cole’s most marked improvement comes by sanding down the more grating parts of his style. There is less moralistic grandstanding, and no lines about bodily functions or leftover Italian food. In their place are references to airbrushed RIP shirts and private prison shareholders. That said, a dutiful focus on the album’s central storyline means there aren’t big swings or long tangents in any direction, and aside from that trio of great tracks, Cole seldom sounds like he’s leaving it all out on the field.
But Eyez often feels like a natural extension from the more overtly political tone of Cole’s public comments since his trip to Ferguson in August of 2014. This isn’t a protest record in the acute sense, but it’s unavoidably the product of the types of oppression that beckon SWAT teams into suburban homes on nothing but hearsay. In that vein, the most quietly radical decision Cole makes here is following “Neighbors” with a song called “Foldin’ Clothes,” where he and his wife shirk the outside world for Netflix and almond milk. That domestic stillness—stillness that might be interrupted at any moment by helicopters or an evening news report—is fragile, and that fragility is its own devastating statement.