For the Night (ft. Lil Baby & DaBaby)

Released two weeks after Pop Smoke was killed at twenty, this record carries a weight it was never designed to hold. The production, credited to CashMoneyAP with a beat that leans away from the UK drill Pop Smoke made his name on toward something warmer — a bright Caribbean-tinged guitar figure over sliding 808s — gives the track an unexpected buoyancy. Against that, Pop Smoke's voice is the point: an impossibly deep, gravelled Brooklyn baritone that sounds a decade older than he was, delivering lines about wanting company only until sunrise with a matter-of-factness that lands as both swagger and emptiness. Lil Baby brings his high, wiry Atlanta cadence and DaBaby his percussive bark, and the three registers stacked together make the record feel like a room full of people. The lyric refuses romance entirely, which is what makes the posthumous listening complicated — it's a song about temporary things by someone who didn't get more time. It became the biggest track from *Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon*, a fixture of that summer, and functions now as a memorial nobody intended. Best late in a night out, in a car full of friends, before anyone acknowledges it's ending.