Hear a new Kendrick Lamar and Vince Staples track in the new Black Panther trailer

Last night, Marvel released the new trailer for Black Panther, showing off a bunch of appealing new stuff from Ryan Coogler’s upcoming flick: painterly African vistas punctuated by spaceships, Forest Whitaker doing the groan-talk thing, a lot of high-flying action, and so on. But the clip also doubles as our second peek into its soundtrack, which is being “curated and produced” by Kendrick Lamar and Top Dawg Entertainment majordomo Anthony Tiffith. It’s rare enough for a performer to hitch their star to a movie’s soundtrack—although the results can be as transformative as Daft Punk doing Tron: Legacy, Aimee Mann scoring Magnolia, or Curtis Mayfield breathing life into Superfly—but it’s even more rare for an artist of Lamar’s popularity and clout to take one on.

The first single was, perhaps, a little treacly, but the cut premiered in the new trailer features Lamar and the also-great Vince Staples slotting much more neatly into this sort of big-budget Hans Zimmer rap thing. Realistically, the resulting soundtrack won’t exactly be Superfly, but it’ll probably have a bunch of verses from really great rappers on it, and hey, who knows, maybe they’ll find a way to get an unreleased Isaiah Rashad track on there. Neither Lamar nor TDE are really known for phoning things in.

 
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