J. Cole’s ‘The Fall-Off’ Is Lifted and Hindered By Its Ambition

Middle age is kinda trash sometimes. It creeps up on you slowly. Then it pounces. Suddenly, you start questioning past decisions. The passions that once ignited you barely light a spark. Dreams of adolescence and early adulthood give way to a steady replay of what once was. The sandglass of life no longer seems top-heavy.

J. Cole turned 41 last month, but he’s been publicly wrestling with this complicated transitional phase for several years now. And he found a creative outlet for it in The Fall-Off, which Cole has described as nearly a decade in the making, intended to be his last. Cole tries to handle that finality by stuffing the album with overlapping artistic impulses: It’s a salute to his North Carolina hometown, a tribute to the tunes that raised him, a document of his personal evolution, and a farewell tour, all at once. The undertaking yields genuinely enjoyable moments, but also leaves the project feeling restless and overextended.

Like a man confronting a life in transition, Cole spends much of The Fall-Off, an album he explicitly aimed to be his best, retracing his steps. He splits the album into two halves, reflecting his perspectives at ages 29 and 39, mirroring the periods when he released his star-making 2014 Forest Hills Drive and issued The Apology™ to Kendrick Lamar. The pressure to deliver has only grown following his controversial diss retraction. At his best, he succeeds. 

J. Cole’s wordplay and flow are elite on The Fall-Off, perhaps no more so than on “39 Intro,” where he leaves Earth with a blistering bravado-packed verse: “My tongue can set fire to some / Inspire the young / Or put a hickey on the titty of the prettiest bitch.” There’s a lot to love on here. “The Fall-Off Is Inevitable,” which impeccably tells his life story reverse chronologically, is the kind of challenge few MCs would dare attempt. (Nas’ “Rewind” is an obvious inspiration.) He returns to old haunts on the Future and TEMS-featured “Bunce Road Blues,” reminiscing on virgin shame, again, over The Alchemist’s hypnotic xylophone loop. 

The first side is the most narratively captivating. Cole channels vintage Slim Shady’s flow on “Who TF Iz U,” as he details the juvenile trauma of seeing a man shot for stealing from a drug dealer. On “Legacy,” an undeniable earworm, Cole performs some of the strongest harmonizing of his career while resurfacing the playboy tendencies of his younger days. The section concludes with a cinematic three-song arc that follows Cole as he pursues an old crush while dodging stick-up kids. The action across these tracks (sequenced from “Drum n Bass” to “Bombs in the Ville/Hit the Gas”) feels sluggish, but the musicality is adventurous, particularly on “The Let Out”: There are soft rock flourishes, spoken word, electric guitar, and a chant made for after-hours shenanigans.

While The Fall-Off’s first half is more concerned with the glory and ghosts of the past, the second leans on the music of Cole’s youth to feel alive. It’s comfort food elevated by the deepest stable of producers he’s ever assembled on one project, including T-Minus, Vinylz, Jake One, and, of course, Cole himself. “The Villest” collides OutKast and Mobb Deep classics in a single track, with Erykah Badu adding background vocals. Cole counters previous infidelities on “Life Sentence,” a tender, DMX-interpolating ode to (faithful) marriage that curiously likens wedlock to doing hard time. His fluctuating passion for hip-hop is more complicated, though. Cole details it earnestly on “I Love Her Again,” an impressive continuation of Common’s “I Used to Love H.E.R.” that similarly personifies the genre as a love interest and slyly addresses the “big three” implosion: “When it comes to love, jealousy will often creep / That type of games is why two of my homies start to beef.”

Perhaps Cole stares too long in the rearview on the Morray-assisted “What If,” a piece of fan fiction that imagines Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. burying the hatchet before their feud turned deadly. The execution is impressive — Cole is a devoted student of the game, nailing each rapper’s cadence with precision — but invoking two of hip-hop’s untouchable G.O.A.T.s, seemingly as a proxy for his own public apology, ultimately cheapens the gesture.

The Fall-Off is thematically rooted in home, and there are certainly anthems here that instill local pride. “Old Dog” is a thumper bolstered by Carolina icon Petey Pablo, while “Two Six” is all energy and bravado, capturing the Ville’s rowdy reputation despite sounding like a Drake leftover. While Cole often defaults to one-size-fits-all punchlines — violence, criminality, and a general lack of opportunity — when describing his old stomping grounds, he adds depth with “Safety,” an homage to Nas’ “One Love” built from friends’ voicemails. Over a sunny horn sample lifted from Queen Latifah’s “U.N.I.T.Y.,” Cole shares loved ones’ stories that feel vividly human. It’s some of his best pen work in a catalog stuffed with narratives. But that impact collapses in the final verse, when a recently deceased queer friend and his associates are labeled as “fruity types, dick-in-the-booty types.” The shift into expository narration is awkward — Cole, the message recipient, already understands this person’s sexuality—and the line lands as homophobic before the speaker attempts to show growth and tolerance a few bars later. For all of the finesse in Cole’s writing instrument, his language around sexuality and identity is an area that needs more sharpening.

The mishaps tend to be the result of doing a bit too much—going wide but not focused enough. Some more restraint, whether conceptually or in The Fall-Off’s 101-minute runtime, would help round the edges and live up to all of the years of anticipation.