Regular readers will have read our report on Kendrick’s Grammy Success & performance a couple of weeks ago.
The eagled eyed amongst you will have noted a comment alongside the “new verses” that we “believed [it] to be from a track set to leak as part of a surprise project not yet announced.”
Well today that project has properly surprised the world with Kendrick Lamar releasing set of 8 tracks under the title “untitled unmastered.” which not only features that record from the Grammys – see “untitled 05 l 09.21.2014” – but also snippets he’s discretely performed on shows like The Colbert Report and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.
Those trawling social media may have suspected that something was in the works earlier this week with an Instagram post on Wednesday from Anthony Tiffith — the CEO of Top Dawg Entertainment.
The project is available now via Apple Music, iTunes, Spotify, Tidal, and Google Play Music. Give it a listen below and read on;
Listening to “untitled unmastered.” and noting the dates assigned to each untitled record you can see the release is firmly to showcase the created process behind “To Pimp a Butterflty” as well as to ensure fans are held over while Kendrick spends 2016 building a new album. However there is more to it than that, as Punch told Billboard yesterday;
“To me, it just means freedom, [Kendrick’s] first album [good kid, m.a.a.d. city] doesn’t sound anything like the second album [TPAB], so it opened him up to where he can do anything he wants. There are no bounds to what he can do creatively. Most artists have a certain lane they have to stay in but for him to put out songs [from To Pimp a Butterfly sessions] along with stuff that he performed on the late night shows, it just shows you that he can do whatever he wants.”
Punch really goes further to explain “untitled unmastered” is actually more of a concious statement that K.Dot and TDE are breaking the mould of what people expect and what the industry has often demanded;
“As far as Untitled, Me and Kendrick always talked about doing a sort of Black Album, like how Prince did back in the day, there was no album cover, no song titles, no anything — just tracks he threw out. Everything that we do is deliberate so if you hear something that says Unmastered, we absolutely did that on purpose, there’s more than one meaning behind that. We’re definitely trying to break chains musically and socially, the whole thing to me just represents breaking the chains, whatever those chains might be, whatever chains society puts on you. We’re trying to break those and be free.”
Demos from To Pimp A Butterfly. In Raw Form. Unfinished. Untitled. Unmastered. https://t.co/YlAszcK4e4
— Kendrick Lamar (@kendricklamar) March 4, 2016
Once again Kendrick and TDE have shown they can do what they want, when they want, how the want…and long may it continue!
