Lamar’s new LP has arrived a week ahead of schedule.
Kendrick Lamar has released his highly anticipated sophomore major label album To Pimp A Butterfly. The album is available to purchase on iTunes now, a week earlier than the anticipated date of March 23.
TDE boss Anthony Tiffith tweeted a sarcastic thanks to parent label Interscope for “fucking up our release”, suggesting that the early drop wasn’t planned by the Top Dawg team.
I WOULD LIKE 2 PERSONALLY THANK @Interscope FOR FUCKING UP OUR RELEASE… SOMEBODY GOTS 2 PAY 4 THIS MISTAKE !!!! #TOP
— dangeroo kipawaa TDE (@dangerookipawaa) March 16, 2015
Update, 16.00 GMT: The album has now been set back to pre-order on iTunes, but is still (for now) streaming on Spotify.
Update, 17.45 GMT: The album is back on iTunes.
Stream the whole album below. We’ve had a look through the liner notes and discovered a few interesting nuggets. As well as previously revealed guests like Snoop Dogg, Bilal and Anna Wise, the album features Pharrell doing backing vocals on ‘Alright’, Dr Dre contributing a voicemail to ‘Wesley’s Theory’ and Pete Rock adding vocals and scratching to ‘Complexion’.
There are surprisingly few samples on the album, but ‘Hood Politics’ makes use of ‘All For Myself’ by Sufjan Stevens while ‘Momma’ contains bits of ‘Wishful Thinkin’ by Sly & The Family Stone. Bassist Thundercat and pianist Robert Glasper appear all over the album, while Brainfeeder signee Kamasi Washington takes care of the string arrangments, showing the strength of the jazz influence running throughout. ‘Music Man’ also features parts from journalist Mats Nileskar’s 1994 interview with Tupac Shakur.
The liner notes also include a message in Braille which reads, weirdly, “A Kendrick by letter blank Lamar”. Or is that “A blank letter by Kendrick Lamar”?
