Pitchfork.com
Drake committed to Views From the 6 world-building early on, across multiple platforms. His perpetually forthcoming fourth studio album has become more of an ongoing perspective than a prospective project, expanding into brand propaganda for the OVO boss’s alternate Toronto in its extended lifespan.
Views was first announced in August 2014, an era that now seems so distant in the context of Drake news. There was a “retail mixtape,” an Apple Music deal, ghostwriting allegations, several diss songs, a second “retail mixtape” with Future, “Hotline Bling” mania, Adele mania derailing “Hotline Bling” mania and keeping Drake from his first No. 1 song, and finally, Drake getting a No. 1 as Rihanna’s lapdog.
It’s been hard to keep track of every tease, every track, every tweet that’s happened between then and now, especially since it has evolved from an album rollout into a full-fledged belief system of Drake-isms. And so, this is a comprehensive Views From the 6 timeline, documenting all of the little moments that led us to the album’s release later this week. (Note: We originally published this timeline in March and have since updated it to reflect all changes up to April 26, 2016.)
2014
06-01-14: Drake hints that his new album will arrive the following spring on new songs “0 to 100 / The Catch Up”: “We already have Spring 2015 poppin’ / PND droppin’ … not to mention, me droppin’.”
07-15-14: Billboard reveals Drake’s fourth studio album will be called Views From the 6. “The 6” is apparently a nickname for Toronto, coined by rapper Jimmy Johnson.
08-06-14: Drake explains the album title after some confusion surrounding Rihanna at OVO Fest.
08-24-14: A track titled “Views From the 6” leaks, with lyrics seemingly about Rihanna.
10-25-14: Drake releases three new songs, “How Bout Now,” “Heat of the Moment,” and “6 God,”which — one would have assumed at the time — were linked to Views. However, two of the songs, “How Bout Now” and “6 God,” end up on If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. The third, “Heat of the Moment,” is still unaccounted for.
2015
01-27-15: Canadian rapper and OVO affiliate P. Reign claims he’s heard a Drake mixtape.
02-12-15: Drake postpones all things Views From the 6 in favor of an online surprise release for said mixtape, If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. The mixtape continues Drake’s ongoing Toronto rebrand with songs like “6 God,” “6 Man,” and “You & the 6,” plus the “Know Yourself” tagline, “I was running through the 6 with my woes.” All serve as free Views advertising.
04-16-15: In a profile for the (now defunct) fashion blog Four Pins, Drake reveals that he only has two songs finished for Views that he likes: “a collaboration with Beyoncé that he recorded a while ago” and “a song that he expects to inspire a paradigm shift.”
05-21-15: A song with Beyoncé, “Can I,” (perhaps the one teased above) leaks online.
07-25-15: Drake releases “Charged Up” on his OVO Sound Radio show in response to Meek Mill’s ghostwriting allegations. The show also premieres “Hotline Bling,” then tagged “Cha Cha” Remix.
7-29-15: Drake follows with “Back to Back,” his second diss in five days, which acknowledges the beef as a digression from Views, closing: “I just took a break from Views, now it’s back to that.”
09-20-15: OVO Sound Radio premieres Drake’s collaboration with Future, What A Time to Be Alive.
09-24-15: In his FADER cover story, Drake says that longtime producer Noah “40” Shebib has been as hands-on with Views as he was for projects like So Far Gone and Take Care: “We’ve grown a lot over the years. He used to be the guy who would track me in hotel rooms at 4 am. And now he is not that guy – I have another guy who does that ... If I want to make the album I want to make, I have to go find him. I have to go sit with him, and we have to really put in effort.” They decamped to — but of course — the 6, where the sounds of the city were said in this piece to have inspired them.
09-25-15: In a complementary profile of OVO co-founders Oliver El-Khatib and Noah “40” Shebib, El-Khatib tells FADER that Views will be a return to their formula: “We’re just really getting back to basics and not giving ourselves any sense of deadline. Just letting it happen naturally. That’s how we’ve always done it. When it’s done, it’s done. If we love it, we love it.”
10-03-15: “Can I,” featuring Beyoncé, is released in full with some minor changes. No word on placement.
10-11-15: According to Spin, during his headlining set at Austin City Limits, Drake announces that he intends to “spend the rest of 2015 in the studio finishing the recording of his even longer-awaited upcoming LP Views From the 6.”
11-04-15: A “the 6 is watching” billboard goes up in Toronto.
11-11-15: An unauthorized trailer for Views makes the rounds on Twitter, fueling rumors that the album may now be released in January.
11-19-15: Drake teases an unreleased song on Vine, which may be a preview of Views.
11-23-15: In an interview with Vulture, Timbaland implies he might be on the album:
Are you on Drake’s Views From the 6?
I could be.
That sounds like a yes to me?
I don’t know, who knows. [Laughs.] Ask him, he might tell you.
This would at the very least suggest he’s recently recorded music with Drake.
12-09-15: Drake posts a photo of himself in the studio with PARTYNEXTDOOR, which could produce music on the album. (It could also merely be a shot of the session that spawned the recently released PARTYNEXTDOOR song “Come and See Me.”)
12-31-15: Drake announces that Views From the 6 will be out “very soon” at a New Year’s Eve party in Miami, further feeding speculation that it will drop in January.