By Ben Rossi – Staff Reporter

After almost three years of hype and anticipation, J. Cole returned with his sixth studio album, “The Off-Season.”  Leading up to this LP, J.Cole has had one of the best runs of his career with his Lewis Street EP in July of 2020, the single “i n t e r l u d e,” and his mind-blowing LA Leakers freestyle, which has gone viral in the past few days.  With all of this coming together, many people wondered whether J. Cole would be able to create his magnum opus.

Things open up with the triumphant “9 5 s o u t h,” and for an intro, it really can’t get much better. On the second song, “a m a r i,” Cole taps into his melodic side to create a more mainstream song. This isn’t exactly Cole’s strong spot and hardcore fans may get frustrated as Cole sacrifices his rhyme schemes to focus more on vocal patterns.  Fortunately the album picks right back up with the song “my. l i f e,” which had surprise features from singer Morray, and rapper 21 Savage.  

After settling the energy built up through the first five tracks, the tone was very clearly going to shift and the track “1 0 0 . m i l,” does just that. This is definitely my least favorite track mainly because of the muddied up voice mixed with horribly used autotune. Thankfully, the track “ p r i d e . i s . t h e . d e v i l,” brings the album right back on track with a surprise feature from Lil Baby, who outperforms J. Cole in his own song. The album finishes very average with scattered uses of autotune fitting terribly with J. Coles style definitely hurts the album’s overall rating. For example, on the final track “h u n g e r . o n . h i l l . s i d e”, the instrumental as well as the structure of the song are amazing but are plagued by J. Cole buttering up his voice with auto tune.

“The Off-Season” was not the masterpiece that many hyped it up to be however that does not mean it is all bad. The album had amazing production, great atmosphere, and some of Cole’s best songs ever. Overall, while the album may not have lived up to the hype it is still a fun and enjoyable album.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars