The Last Hope

Featuring Kardinal Offishall, Andreena Mill

"The Last Hope," featuring Kardinal Offishall and Andreena Mill, frames the music career in high-stakes, all-or-nothing terms — this is the shot, there is not another. It reads as an intensified version of Comeback Season's dominant ambition-and-pressure theme, a young artist dramatizing the bet he is making on himself, with Kardinal Offishall — then Toronto's most established rap export — lending a co-sign that mattered locally. Produced by Rich Kidd, it stays tense and determined. The do-or-die language partly outruns the actual situation of an unsigned rapper with time still on his side, but that self-dramatizing instinct is exactly what makes it recognizably Drake. As a deep cut it is a thesis track for the tape's emotional core.