Drake had a change of heart.
On Thursday, the OVO rapper returned to Instagram to announce the third installment of his Scary Hours series, which doubles as a deluxe edition of For All the Dogs and features a new J. Cole collab.
While 2018's initial Scary Hours EP and 2021's follow-up were comprised of two and three songs, respectively, the 6 God came with six new tracks this time: "Red Button," "Stories About My Brother," "The Shoe Fits," "Wick Man," "Evil Ways" (alongside his soon-to-be tour-mate Cole, marking their second link-up in six weeks), and "You Broke My Heart."
The drop is officially titled For All the Dogs Scary Hours Edition. For producers, he tapped The Alchemist, Lil Yachty, Boi-1da, Ovrkast, Vinylz, and Conductor Williams, among others. See the full list of production and writing credits here.
The effort—which brings FATD up to a whopping one hour and 48 minutes—arrives just weeks after the 37-year-old told fans he intended to take a break from the recording studio following Oct. 6's album drop so he could focus on his physical health.
“[I’m] probably not going to make music for a little bit,” he said during an episode of his Table for One SiriusXM show. “I’mma be real with you. I need to focus on my health, first and foremost…I’ve been having the craziest problems with my stomach for years. I need to get right, I have a lot of other things I would love to focus on so I’m going to lock the door on the studio for a little bit. I don’t know what a little bit is. Maybe a year or something. Maybe a little bit longer.”
Thankfully for fans, “little bit” was less than two months, as Drizzy swiftly returned to the studio to record Scary Hours 3. He shared the info with a cinematic trailer filmed at Roy Thomson Hall in his hometown of Toronto.
The visual begins with Drake arriving at the near-empty venue and taking a seat before the Toronto Symphony Orchestra starts to play the overture from Verdi’s "La Forza del Destino." The camera then cuts to a music hall usher who is holding a program that reads “Scary Hours III,” which Drake executive produced alongside NBA star Kevin Durant and his go-to music engineer Noel Cadastre.
Drake narrates the entire visual, shedding more light on his decision to drop another project just weeks after he delivered his eighth studio album, For All the Dogs, which predictably shot to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart.
“I feel no need to appease anybody,” he began. “I feel so confident about the body of work that I just dropped, I know I could go disappear for, whatever, six months, a year, two years—even though I’m not really into the super lengthy disappearances for the sake of mystery. But, you know, ultimately, it’s coming to me in a way that I haven’t experienced maybe since, like, If You’re Reading This [It’s Too Late], where I feel like I’m on drugs."
He continued, “I feel like I’m in that mental state without doing anything. I did those songs in the last five days. I didn’t have one bar written down for those songs on the night that For All the Dogs dropped. It’s not like I’m picking up from some unfinished shit. You know, this is just happening on its own. And who am I to fight it?”
You can stream For All the Dogs Scary Hours Edition now on Spotify and Apple Music.
On Wednesday, Drake dropped the easter egg-laden video for “First Person Shooter,” a J. Cole-assisted track from For All My Dogs. He and Cole are now preparing to hit the road for the It’s All a Blur Tour: Big as the What? It's set to kick off on Jan. 18 in Denver. The trek will include stops in New Orleans, Nashville, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, before wrapping up on March 27 in Birmingham, Alabama.O
