K-Dot. Ku Fung Kenny. King Kendrick. Whatever you want to call him, Kendrick Lamar is back.
Lamar, who rarely posts on social media, quote-tweeted out a new link to his Oklama site. It was in response to a tweet that read, “Kendrick Lamar is officially retired.”
On the site, the Compton rapper disclosed the title of his new album and the release date in a press release that read, “The following statement was released today by oklama, through his company pgLang at 11:00am PT in Los Angeles, CA.”
Lamar’s fifth studio album will be titled Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers and has a release date of May 13, 2022.
This album will follow Lamar’s Grammy and Pultizer-winning 2017 album Damn. While since that time Lamar has not released any new solo work, he curated the Black Panther soundtrack in 2018, headlined Coachella, and also got nominated for an Oscar in 2019.
Since 2017, he’s also been featured on music from Sir, Raphael Saadiq, 2 Chainz, Busta Rhymes and most notably his cousin, Baby Keem, with whom he won a Grammy for their banger of a song, “Family Ties.”
In March 2020, Lamar and his business partner Dave Free launched a mysterious new company called pgLang, something they describe as “a new multilingual, at a service company.”
Earlier this year in January, it was also announced that Lamar was tapped to produce a new film under his pgLang Company production banner for Paramount Pictures. Produced in tandem with South Park creatives Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the untitled live-action comedy is set to explore “the past and present coming to a head when a young Black man, who is interning as a slave re-enactor at a living history museum, discovers that his white girlfriend’s ancestors once owned his.”
Lamar has been gone for nearly 5 years so as one would imagine, social media (and myself) is hype with the news of a new album for the To Pimp a Butterfly rapper.