When we last saw Loe Shimmy, he was wearing an extravagantly priced War Machine suit alongside Drake as Iron Man in the music video for “I’m Spent.” It was a ridiculous sort of victory lap, capping off a breakout run culminating in a string of sold-out dates behind his summertime album Pretty Girlz Run The World. Considering that Shimmy was back in the studio mere days after his Drake feature dropped, I should have known bigger things were coming — but I wouldn’t have guessed at anything like “Ya Hit.”
Future’s latest single enlists Loe Shimmy alongside Drake and Travis Scott for a gnarly bruiser, all enormous distorted synths and thumping 808s. Lyrically, it’s straight contempt and disdain, for rappers with unimpressive label advances and the myriad women who might find their gifted Hermes or G-Wagon repatriated after acting out. But “Ya Hit” doesn’t feel (too) bitter, softened as it is by a quasi-playful streak. Travis shouts out GTA VI; Sexyy Red ad-libs over Drake’s verse for seemingly no reason.
In fact, on one level, “Ya Hit” feels almost anachronistic: near the end of the 2010s and the beginning of the 2020s, major label rap albums by Future, Drake, Young Thug, and more routinely featured posse cuts starring some reconfiguration of the usual suspects (Lil Baby, Gunna, etc), to the point it became a bit of a running meme. Those group cuts slowly fell out of favor over the years, probably over simple economics: splitting streams multiple ways only makes sense if the song is an absolute powerhouse, and repeated exposure made fans less excited by “Bubbly” than they were by “D4L.”
The headline-maker is of course the reunion of Travis Scott and Drake, who last worked together on “Meltdown” off UTOPIA and have seemingly been at odds since — during the Kendrick Lamar beef, Scott encouraged Future and Metro Boomin to play “Like That,” the Kendrick collab that really set things off,” on stage at Rolling Loud. So fans were more than a little surprised to see Drake and Travis palling around Houston over the past weekend, including at Kanye West’s record-breaking stadium show.
Similar to Drake and Future’s last collab “Ran To Atlanta” featuring Molly Santana, “Ya Hit” doesn’t merely signal a detente, but a return to business as usual for hip-hop’s A-listers. Under a more cynical lens, you could interpret these re-alliances as a desperate bid for relevancy, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. Tired “hiphop is dead” narratives had been circling for at least a couple years before Billboard cut YouTube streams from chart calculations, but that decision certainly hasn’t helped matters. And if your primary lens for your music’s success is how highly it charts, the idea of linking forces to try and break through the glass ceiling probably does seem appealing.
Beyond that chart-jockeying, “Ya Hit” continues a 2026 hip-hop trend exemplified by Drake’s triple albums earlier this year: rap’s biggest stars are looking for novel inspiration, and finding it in the genre’s hottest rising stars. The big dogs reconnecting isn’t just a throwback — it could be a path forward.
