Take Care is released

Why it matters

Take Care came out November 15, 2011, on Young Money/Cash Money/Republic. It is Drake's second studio album, sixteen months after Thank Me Later. Noah "40" Shebib executive-produced and built the bulk of the beats. The album sold 631,000 copies in its first week and won the 2013 Best Rap Album Grammy. What Take Care does is consolidate the slow-tempo, atmospheric, half-sung, half-rapped Drake-and-40 sound into a fully realized 80-minute statement. "Headlines," "Make Me Proud" with Nicki Minaj, "The Motto" with Lil Wayne, "HYFR" with Wayne, "Marvin's Room," "Take Care" with Rihanna. The album is structurally a breakup record, processing the end of an unnamed relationship across most of its 17 tracks. "Marvin's Room" in particular (the drunken late-night voicemail-as-song) became one of the most-influential mood pieces of the early 2010s. The whole emo-rap, sad-boy-trap, 2010s vulnerable-rapper register that you hear on records by The Weeknd, PartyNextDoor, Bryson Tiller, Post Malone, Roddy Ricch, and most of the Drake-adjacent OVO ecosystem comes out of this album. You can put it on for almost any after-midnight situation. The album was made for them.