Here’s the recipe for a good Coke Wave mixtape: First, add one French Montana, but make sure he’s spitting with the hunger of a Bronx hustler ready to bet every last wad of cash in his jeans on a rap battle. Then, carefully fold in Harlemite Max B and add a healthy dash of Grand Cru Remy Martin. While he’ll surely heat up with bars indebted to the styles of Biggie, Jay-Z, and Tupac, that extra dash of sauce will have him singing melodies like he’s giving a drunken Motown audition in another lifetime. Finally, marinate their sleazy bars and catchy hooks in beats that transform 20th-century classics—the kind heard at retirement home parties—into headknocking bangers. Soon, you’ll have Max B pouring his heart into a melodic street rap ballad that channels the soul of a ’60s Marlena Shaw record, while Frenchy cooly raps about moving bricks over a Dark Side of the Moon flip.
All this propelled the deliriously fun and hard-nosed duo to the crest of New York rap in the late 2000s, before the wave crashed with Max B’s incarceration in 2009. Coke Wave 3.5: Narcos, the second album Max B has released since he walked free in November, reignites the infectious dynamic between Max and French but doesn’t surf on legacy. It captures what made one of New York hip-hop’s greatest link-ups so captivating, but also calls into question why they would break away from the distinct “wavy” strain of rap they claimed in the first place.
The duo’s chemistry shines on standouts like “Whippin That Wave,” where they flow effortlessly (and shamelessly) over DJ Clue’s 1998 “Queensfinest” instrumental for Nas with the same confidence shown on Coke Wave 2’s “Wave Thang”—a harder take on Dre and Snoop’s classic for Uptown dudes with four Pelle Pelle jackets in their closets. But when they attempt to flex over a sample of KC & the Sunshine Band’s disco classic “That’s The Way (I Like It)” on “Ever Since U Left Me,” they lose sync with one another and rap aimlessly on a beat that sounds like cliché fashion catwalk music.
French Montana has long approached hip-hop like an A&R hunting for the next hit; it’s a skill he honed years before he scored a chart-topping Afrobeats-inspired single largely carried by Swae Lee’s vocals. But back in the aughts, when he was inserting himself into his own Cocaine City DVDs, he knew how to hold his ground beside a killer freestyle by Uptown rapper Al-Doe or raw footage of Dipset getting jumped at Rucker Park. On this tape French finds himself back in that DVD-mixtape era pocket on “Heaven,” but he loses it on “Make America Wavy Again (MAWA),” where he attempts to engineer a tri-state nightclub banger that fizzles faster than a $500 bottle of Champagne. And while a Murda Beatz trap beat may have worked for French and Drake a decade ago on their hit “No Shopping,” it leaves his brother Max stumbling on “The Race.”