The dizzying, Swizz Beatz–assisted "untitled 07 | 2014 - 2016" fades into a tinny, demo-quality ad-lib of the guitar refrain from three tracks prior. The songs overflow with studio chatter and open spaces, though they never veer toward amateurish. They're like placeholders on a homemade cassette tape. The track titles are just numbers and dates.
Kendrick lamar untitled unmastered free full#
But here, unfinishedness is the point it's full of sketches of what would become Butterfly. Though its origins are a hodgepodge-track titles indicate that the material dates back as far as May 2013-it's been crowned a cohesive album by sheer force of collective will combined with the thrill of surprise: When's the last time the Internet got this excited about a demos compilation? Like Kanye West's recent Life of Pablo, untitled unmastered has the feel of a work-in-progress. Untitled unmastered is all of these things and more. Club shrewdly labels it "a bonus disc that improbably holds up as an essential album in its own right." Wikipedia-a de facto authority in these matters-designates it a "compilation album." Pitchfork, in a glowing review, notes that it's "neither album nor mixtape (or even EP or LP)" but instead "extended coda." Rolling Stone designates it a "set of odds and ends," while Exclaim settles for "a brilliant mini-album." The A.V. untitled unmastered is similarly heady but far easier to take in one sitting: At 34 minutes, it's the length of an EP or a punk-era LP, but about half the length of a Lamar album proper.
That album was almost unanimously heralded among the year's best albums, so a surprise encore feels more than welcome. "I got a chamber of material from the album that I was in love where sample clearances or something as simple as a deadline kept it off the album," Lamar revealed earlier in the year. It's a set of demos and asides associated with last year's sprawling To Pimp a Butterfly. Untitled unmastered seized the Internet by surprise on Friday with its minimalist cover art and free-jazzy grooves, but it is not an album of new material. This shouldn't be surprising, because it's Kendrick, but it's strange, considering this is a bunch of leftovers. Kendrick Lamar's untitled unmastered is better and more daring than most of the hip-hop albums that have been released this year.
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