kendrick lamars untitled unmastered review

It might not quite be correct to suggest that he is imitating the styles of recent albums, since many of the songs are dated long before IYRTITL was released, but it does indicate that Lamar has been developing along with the rest of the industry.Īs always in Lamar’s music, it is easy to get lost in his expansive sound, neglecting his equally profound lyrical content. Sections of “Untitled 02” and “Untitled 07” carry the unmistakable feel of last year’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, sifted through a K-Dot filter. Simultaneously, many of those same tracks borrow from the styles of other major rappers, notably Drake, a former collaborator of Lamar’s. ” Many of the songs on the album would feel perfectly comfortable on an A Tribe Called Quest album, and several moments feel as though they might be directly sampled from a John Coltrane record. His sound has also grown more uniformly dark in comparison to Kendrick’s last project, a clear move away from optimistic songs like last year’s single, “i. Sonically, the album finds Lamar diving ever deeper into his signature fusion of jazz, funk, and hip-hop, as well as playing with the styles of his contemporaries. Regardless, Lamar’s world of fans was surely ecstatic upon finding out about untitled unmastered. It may be that Lamar doesn’t want us to know exactly what to make of the album, given its surprise release and eccentric character. In a time when Kanye is still editing his last album a month after its release and Chance the Rapper continues to produce wildly popular music independent of a label, it doesn’t matter what package the music comes in. So is it an album? A mixtape? Maybe it doesn’t matter. untitled unmastered is, however, much more unified on the whole than a simple collection of random tracks and, like Lamar’s other projects, it seems to develop a theme and message during its half-hour-long runtime. Cole’s Truly Yours EP or Kanye’s G.O.O.D. At first, it would seem to simply be a release of scrapped tracks that didn’t make it onto his stellar last project, To Pimp A Butterfly, or a compendium of non-album cuts in the vein of J. Each song is labeled “untitled” and unnumbered, with a date attached. It’s hard to know what to expect from Kendrick Lamar’s surprise new album, untitled unmastered.

Kendrick lamars untitled unmastered review