A Year of Lil Wayne: On Lil Wayne and Lloyd's New Song and Also Forest Sex

Day 81: "Holding" – Lloyd feat. Lil Wayne, TRU EP , 2016

Kyle: Today we get to a question that has been on everyone's minds lately: What has Lloyd been up to? The answer, it turns out, is that he released a new EP today. It is—look, honestly, how can we even begin to address the music without bringing up this cover? Is Lloyd wandering through the forest on an ayahuasca trip here? Did he just fuck under a waterfall? Is he about to fuck under a waterfall? Is he always about to fuck under a waterfall, or is this just a special occasion? Did he walk into the forest naked or did he take his clothes off because he was so inspired by nature? Certain mysteries are perhaps best left unsolved.

Anyway, Lloyd and Wayne have a long and fruitful history together, and now they are back in the game! Lloyd is in an interesting place, artistically speaking, because he has always thrived at making really solid R&B that just barely flirts with the edges of what might go beyond generic, and now the genre has become something of the creative vanguard of all of music (look at our year-end list! Four of the top five albums are R&B, and the fifth could make a case that it is as well). So how do you adapt to that climate? In this case the answer is just knock tried and true sounds out of the park, plus throw in a well-placed piece of screwed down vocals at the end. Also, get Lil Wayne for a few bars of Auto-Tuned crooning about love. Wayne's verse isn't going to win over any new fans—it's probably his weakest feature of the year—but it gets the job done. His best line is probably the closer: "she said I'm like that pistol / you gon' need me feed me squeeze me." But more to the point: Here's a solid, radio-friendly R&B single with Lil Wayne on it, and who can say no to that? Also, look at Lloyd's other press shot:

Lawrence: History proves that I should like this song. The Lloyd x Lil Wayne tandem fueled my high school attempts at romance, and, for that, neither of these two can do much wrong when on a song together. There was a day in eleventh grade when I first heard Lloyd's "With You" with Wayne and I made it my objective to learn all the words before I left school so I tucked my iPod nano into my hoodie pocket and consciously zipped the hoodie up with the earphone cords inside so my teacher wouldn't know that I was catching a constant vibe instead of listening to them ramble about a circumference. That song alone prohibits me from disliking anything these two make together

With that said, "Holding" would have to be my least favorite collaboration between Lloyd and Wayne. Lloyd never disappoints with his vocals, but it's hard to stay engaged when, like you said, so much contemporary R&B takes on the challenge of unexpected experimentation in sound. The song doesn't feel much different and isn't much of an evolution of their strongest collaborations ("With You," "Girl Around the World"). Wayne appears for a short time and says very little to retain. Still, the history of those previous link ups affords the two the occasional dud.

Photo by Ben Styles, courtesy of Lloyd

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