It’s not farfetched to say that The Fall-Off, the seventh studio album of the North Carolina native artist J. Cole, has been the most anticipated album of the current decade. Originally teased on the final track of his 2018 album, KOD, and later detailed more in an Instagram post in December of 2020, The Fall-Off was meant to be the finale to a roadmap Cole had created for his career following the releases of Revenge of The Dreamers III, which had released a year prior, and The Off-Season, his album that would come out a few months later. He would go on to reference this every few months on other songs, and after his annual festival, Dreamville Festival, was announced to be ending in April of 2025, it was assumed by many fans that this album would be releasing sometime soon, and this past Friday it finally did. Boasting twenty-four tracks and nearly two hours, The Fall-Off is split into two distinct records, detailing his mindset on his life during different periods of his life in a similar location. This structural choice allows Cole to revisit the same emotional landmarks from vastly different stages of his life, emphasizing how time reshapes priorities without erasing their importance. 

Disc 29 shows J. Cole at the age of twenty-nine returning to his hometown in Fayetteville, North Carolina, ten years after he moved to New York to pursue his dream of making music. In his description of this disc, Cole says that on this trip, he “found himself at a crossroads with the three loves of his life; his woman, his craft, and his city.” Cole hits his love for Fayetteville hard on the first three tracks of the album, “29 Intro” is an interpolation of James Taylors’ 1968 track “Carolina in my Mind”, “Two Six” references the area code 026 of Fayetteville, and “Safety” is from the perspective of a friend calling Cole to come back home for the funeral of an old friend. “Two Six” in particular highlights the mindset that J. Cole had about the hip-hop industry and his own art in the late 2010s, lamenting that the new generation of artists are more interested in the money and fame that come with it. Cole would end up coming to terms with the fact that the industry was changing around him and that instead of bash these up-and-coming artists for not acting like the old guard of hip-hop did, he should support them and try to teach them the lessons that he’s learned on his journey. He shared this opinion on his 2019 track “Middle Child” and continues to do it on this album on “Drum n Bass.” He goes on to close out this first half of The Fall-Off with the tracks “The Let Out” and “Lonely at the Top.” The first is one of the best tracks of the whole project, describing the moment the party ends where everyone rushes to leave and tries to make it home safe, a metaphor for his own career and intentions with this album, to get out before he gets hurt.

By the time he goes back to his home another ten years later, now thirty-nine years old, J. Cole had risen to the peak of the hip-hop industry and is able to look at the same people and places with an entirely different set of eyes. Heavily focusing on his personal relationships, and the ways that his career changed them, Disc 39 is much more weary, trading the strive for continued success for a desire to return to normalcy and those he once knew. Where Disc 29 is fueled by the questions of what comes next, Disc 39 feels like the quiet aftermath of having those questions answered.

The first track in this album, “Intro 39,” describes this feeling of isolation at the top from the perspective of an astronaut finally landing on mars, a feat that will be one of man’s greatest, only to wish to be back with the one he loves. On “I Love Her Again” Cole documents his relationship with a woman that had been going on since he was a teen, how the infatuation for her grew until he looked back one day and realized that she wasn’t the person that he once loved. As he begins to feel resentment towards this person he understands that he has changed as well, and that he wasn’t the same person as when they met either, reconciling with the fact that his relationship with her, a metaphor for hip-hop, would never be the same as it used to and he needed to become fine with that. Cole closes out this album on the track “Ocean Waves,” a spiritual homecoming for him, making the decision to step away from the life he had been living and head home to the person and the home that he loves.

Overall, this album is phenomenal. The decision to split this album into two discs was a smart move not only for storytelling sake, but also to explore a lot of different sounds that keep the listener actively engaged throughout. Disc 29 is filled with high-energy tracks like “Two Six” and “WHO TF IZ U” that are going to dominate playlists and parties for years, while Disc 39 is so introspective and dense that it deserves at least a dozen listens to fully get everything it has to offer. In the announcement for The Fall-Off, Cole said that the goal was to create his best work, to do on his last what he couldn’t on his first, and I think he was successful in that.