Kendrick Lamar Drops New Album

Revealing two major surprises simultaneously, his highly awaited new album cover, which also includes the first public image of his new kid!!! On May 12, Kendrick published the album cover art, which features him wearing a crown of thorns while cradling a child, with a woman carrying a baby in the backdrop. Renell Medrano created the cover artwork. The cover artwork for “Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers” was revealed by K. Dot, which would have been plenty to make fans excited, but he also included a family bonus.

“I’ve been goin’ through something,” rapper Kendrick Lamar says after the first 25 seconds of the album’s opener, “Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers.” It’s difficult not to trust him towards the end of the CD. Ghostface Killah, Kodak Black, and Summer Walker are guests on the 18-track album. On “Mr. Morale,” Pharrell Williams is listed as a producer.

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Fans have been waiting, wondering, and praying for Kendrick Lamar to release an album for years. When midnight strikes on the east coast, it’s rare for an artist to have social media exploding with excitement. But Lamar had folks up all night, laughing, crying, and studying every passing bar on his latest album, which he, or Oklama, rapped. In terms of the album’s content, Lamar is extremely introspective (as he usually is) on canceling culture, family, Black relationships, sexuality, and the perils of celebrity. And why he has been out of the public eye for the previous five years after releasing his Pulitzer Prize-winning album Damn. in 2017.

Mr. Morale sees Kendrick as more musically daring than he has ever been in his critically praised career, even if those are all issues he previously addressed in his earlier work. The two discs of “Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers” are mirror images of one other, as Lamar teases in the last track, “Mirror.” The album’s titular songs, interludes, the dysfunction of “We Cry Together” with the normalcy of “Crown,” and the exuberant “N95” and the hushed “Mother I Sober” are all indistinguishable from the album’s core. In the first half, Lamar wallows in harmful addictions before vulnerably confronting his tragedy in the second.