14 DAY TRIAL // Kanye West has had a very busy couple of years: in between coming out with a brand new album (“Yeezus”) last year and going on tour to promote it, he also pursued interests outside music, mostly fashion and marketing, got married, and started a family.
To add one more to that impressive list, Kanye has also been working on a new studio release, which is believed to arrive in stores later this year. According to Malik Yusef, who worked with him on “Yeezus,” the new album will be entirely different and will hopefully cement Kanye’s status as one of the most prolific and versatile hip hop artists of the moment.
Kanye has been recording all over the world
Like with “Yeezus,” for this new album too, Kanye has been recording on the road. At this point, he’s in no position to settle down in just one place and record upwards of 20-30 tracks, because he doesn’t have the time to do so.
So he does it on the go: it is a well known fact that Kanye likes to work whenever inspiration hits, which means he made sure to equip both his current LA and his Parisian homes with a studio. For the rest of the time, he turns to his friends and longtime associates for help.
Yusef is one of them, so he’s perhaps the best able to say what Kanye’s album will sound like. Yusef doesn’t go into specifics, but he does make it crystal clear: we’re to expect something entirely different from the material included on “Yeezus.”
“It's like a pair of Timberlands; like how Timberlands are not quite leather and not quite suede,” Yusef says in a new interview cited by AceShowbiz. “It's not the smooth, slick Chicago music sound we have right now and it's not the ruggedness of just ‘hip-hop hip-hop hip-hop.’ We're still working like a mother[expletive]er. We've been all around the world [recording].”
Yusef says Kanye has about 20 finished songs already, but he’s not even close to done yet. He wants a bigger selection from which to choose the tracks that will make it on the album, but luckily, the entire creative process has been easier than with his previous material.
“We fought over ‘Yeezus’ every day, there was no friendly disagreements. It was definitely a war. It's ‘I don't give a [expletive], Malik. It's a Kanye album, not a Malik Yusef album.’ Kanye's kicked me off the label eight times,” Yusef reveals.
Kanye West’s “Yeezus” was a smashing hit
“Yeezus,” regardless of the controversy around the title (which is a pun for Yeezy, Kanye’s stage name, and Jesus) and the bad media attention the rapper got for his romance to reality television maven Kim Kardashian, now his wife, proved a smashing hit.
It came to prove that Kanye, for all his annoying on-stage rants and ego the size of a skyscraper, had reason to feel this good about himself, because not few were the voices to label him a “genius” for the work he’d put in for the album and the accomplishments made possible with it.
If his next endeavor is even half as good as this one, then we should probably expect more rants and more “I am a god”-type of comments.