Kendrick Lamar Releases New Album Mr. Morale & The Huge Steppers: Pay attention

In the end, Kendrick Lamar has launched his new album Mr. Morale & The Huge Steppers, his ultimate album for High Dawg Leisure. Lamar formally introduced the file final month with a hyperlink to his Oklama web site, which revealed the LP title and launch date. Hearken to Kendrick Lamar’s new album Mr. Morale & The Huge Steppers under. (Pitchfork earns a fee from purchases made by way of affiliate hyperlinks on our web site.)

Lamar has been teasing his “ultimate TDE album” since August of final yr, when he launched his mysterious Oklama web site and launched an allusive assertion on his subsequent physique of labor. “I really feel pleasure to have been part of such a cultural imprint after 17 years,” he wrote of High Dawg Leisure. Mr. Morale & The Huge Steppers follows his Pulitzer Prize–successful 2017 full-length Rattling.

Earlier this month, Lamar posted one other hyperlink to his Oklama web site, this time resulting in a black folder containing a web page referred to as “grasp.” Upon that web page was {a photograph} of a hand holding each a ebook with Lamar’s title and “Mr. Morale & The Huge Steppers” on the duvet. Two CDs have been held on high of the ebook—one with “Morale” and the opposite with “Steppers,” every marked as a grasp copy.

Lower than per week earlier than the discharge of the brand new LP, Lamar dropped “The Coronary heart Half 5,” his first track as a lead artist since 2018 and the newest in his long-running “The Coronary heart” singles sequence. Traditionally, Lamar has shared these tracks as a prelude to a much bigger venture. “Half 5” arrived with a music video directed by Dave Free and Lamar, through which the rapper’s face morphs into deepfakes of OJ Simpson, Will Smith, Jussie Smollett, Kobe Bryant, Kanye West, and Nipsey Hussle. The visible opened with this quote attributed to Oklama: “I’m. All of us.”

Lamar has since revealed the album paintings for Mr. Morale & The Huge Steppers: a somber picture shot by Renell Medrano. Within the intimate bed room scene, Lamar wears a crown of thorns whereas carrying a baby whose gaze pierces the digicam. Within the background, a lady sits on an unmade mattress holding a child. Lamar, who has a gun conspicuously tucked into his pants, stares out of the window, as if on the alert for threats.

Within the years since he launched Rattling., Lamar has appeared on songs by Busta Rhymes, Terrace Martin, Sir, and Anderson .Paak. He helmed Black Panther: The Album, the soundtrack to Ryan Coogler’s Marvel blockbuster, and launched the Grammy-nominated “All of the Stars” with SZA. In March 2020, Lamar and Dave Free launched pgLang, a “multi-lingual, at service firm” that creates multimedia content material for high-end manufacturers.