Each week, Consequence’s Songs of the Week column places a highlight on high quality new tunes from the final seven days and analyzes notable releases. Discover our new favorites and extra on our Prime Songs playlist, and for different nice songs from rising artists, try our New Sounds playlist. This week, Kendrick Lamar takes intention at everybody on “wacced out murals.”
Undecided if y’all have heard, however Kendrick Lamar has a brand new album out. It’s referred to as GNX and it arrived this morning with out warning. Isn’t that one thing? Who may have seen that coming? Not Father John Misty, that’s for positive…
For those who’re something like us, you raced to stream the document as quickly as you heard the information. You discovered that cool-ass image of Lamar leaning on his automobile in seconds flat and hit play on observe one, “wacced out murals.” Then, after about half a minute of admiring the insane manufacturing and Deyra Barrera’s introductory vocals, you got here to a realization: Oh shit, Ok.Dot’s pissed. Like, actually fucking pissed.
We should always have recognized that may be the case. He spent many of the yr taking out his anger by way of his beef with Drake, subsequently (and maybe unintentionally) reaching the uncommon feat of fostering a second of Twenty first-century monoculture. Whether or not he was addressing Aubrey’s relations immediately or getting baseball stadiums to vibe out to a diss observe the place he unambiguously calls Drake a pedophile, Lamar wasn’t precisely coming via with happy-go-lucky tunes.
So, how does he kick off what’s going to simply go down as probably the most talked about albums of 2024? By making one level clear — fuck everybody. “All this speak is bitch-made, that’s on my Lord/ I’ll kill ’em all earlier than I let ’em kill my pleasure,” he raps in his first verse. “It was fuck that n****, however now it’s plural/ Fuck everyone, that’s on my physique.”
Overtop a hard-hitting, surprisingly minimal (at the very least when in comparison with the compositions discovered on his earlier initiatives) beat, Lamar lays out each what’s received him so amped up and what he’s going to do about it. And it’s not simply Drake within the middle of his crosshairs, as he hits J. Cole for stirring up the meat within the first place, slams Snoop Canine for posting Drake’s AI-enhanced diss observe “Taylor Made Freestyle,” and addresses Lil Wayne’s response to Lamar securing the 2025 Tremendous Bowl Halftime Present. Like he mentioned, “now it’s plural.”
It’s a fiery, intensely confrontational method to begin GNX, one which primes the listener for the remainder of the fiery, intensely confrontational tracks. As a result of in case you thought “wacced out murals” was merely Lamar getting it out of his system, boy are you in for a beating…
— Jonah Krueger
Editorial Coordinator