Brent Faiyaz and Drake team up for ‘Wasting Time’
(Credit: The Come Up Show)

New Music

Brent Faiyaz and Drake team up for 'Wasting Time'

The pride of Columbia, Maryland, Brent Faiyaz has returned with a new collaboration with Drake and production team the Neptunes for the supremely chill and string-heavy ‘Wasting Time’.

Faiyaz is very quickly establishing himself as the go-to voice for soulful heartbreak and/or relaxed seduction. He plays into the latter persona here, crooning out lines that positions him as a very patient man: “If you’re gonna waste your time/Then waste your time with me/You can have all the space/More than you need/It’s no pressure, girl.”

If Faiyaz is the calm and pristine lake that radiates domestic tranquillity, Drake is the shit-kicking bored teenager whose parents on a house on the said lake and is throwing stones just to watch the ripples. Every great team-up is about dynamics, and Drake’s dynamic here is to be the jilted and cynical and extremely horny yin to Faiyaz’s restrained and chaste yang. He’s not Prince Charming, he’s Purple Rain-era Prince longing for lust, not love.

Of course, it’s not a Drake verse unless he’s both trying incredibly hard to appear hard while also being a goofy and gregarious rapper who makes references to The Queen’s Gambit. You choose your ideal version of Drake here: is it the nostalgic one who references his old Acura and his Aaliyah records? Is it the sad sack who’s “fluent in passive aggression” as a “pessimist gold medalist”? Or is it the gross and paranoid one who flushes condoms down the toilet so that people don’t steal his sperm? Is that a real problem for Drake? All I know is that I don’t want to think about it.

The contrast between the touching earnestness of Faiyaz and the somewhat aggro nature of Drake serves the track well, even if Drake ends up stealing Faiyaz’s thunder by the end. Faiyaz is on a roll since last year’s Fuck the World, which still holds up as a complex document of love, loss, and doubt. ‘Wasting Time’ is a stop between albums, it seems, but it’s a stop worth pausing to check out.

Listen to ‘Wasting Time’ down below.