UPDATED: Kendrick Lamar releases surprise album
According to a listing on Spotify, Kendrick Lamar might be about to release a new album, stylized untitled unmastered., through the streaming service. (Apparently, he hasn’t heard that you’re supposed to do that sort of thing on Tidal now.) The listing for the album—a potential follow-up to last year’s critical opus To Pimp A Butterfly—went up today, with Pitchfork reporting that it’ll be released tomorrow, according to information taken from Spotify’s mobile app.
Although they can’t hear the music yet, subscribers to the streaming service can already see the album’s art and eight-song-long tracklist, showing off some new innovations in the field of filling people’s music libraries with songs that are a pain in the ass to sort. As alluded to in the title, each song in the set is labeled “untitled,” along with a number and a specific date. Lamar has said in the past that he has a ton of unreleased material from the production of Butterfly (and has deployed a number of unreleased songs on his recent talk show and award show appearances), so it’s possible this is his way of clearing it all out. (Or, it’s some sort of bizarre, album-art-supported clerical error, and some poor Spotify intern is about to get kicked to the curb for the mistake.)
untitled unmastered. track list:
01 untitled 01 08.19.2014
02 untitled 02 06.23.2014
03 untitled 03 05.28.2013
04 untitled 04 08.14.2014
05 untitled 05 09.21.2014
06 untitled 06 06.30.2014
07 untitled 07 2014 – 2016
08 untitled 08 09.06.2014
UPDATE: And now untitled unmastered. is available, not just on Spotify, but also on iTunes and Tidal. As expected, the album contains tracks Lamar previously debuted on The Tonight Show and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Also, at least one of the songs apparently features a beat contributed by Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz’ five-year-old son Egypt, so that’s pretty weird.