This past Friday night (March 4) Kendrick Lamar released new music entitled Untitled, Unmastered at midnight. The release came as a complete surprise to those closest to him, especially one of his producers, Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner, who was a close collaborator on To Pimp a Butterfly. In a new interview, Bruner talks the release and how it came as a shock to everyone.
When asked how long the project had been in the making, Bruner said to Billboard, "I didn’t realize until recently -- they kind of hid it from everybody. Every now and again, I’ll go to the studio -- I feel like Kendrick’s always just working. He’s always in the process of coming across something. He just kind of puts things out as he feels."
On To Pimp a Butterfly and Untitled, Unmastered Thundercat said, “Overall, he mixed it up a bit, that’s the best way to describe it. The old, and a bit of the new. It still feels very much like To Pimp a Butterfly but there’s still a bit of the newer Kendrick in there too, what’s happened since the album.”
He further said, “I don’t know the full scope of what he did -- there was definitely a lot of music there already, too. I just know that the best thing ever was walking into that one session and realizing that he was going to put out new music -- that just excited me a bit.”
Bruner won a Grammy for his contributions on To Pimp a Butterfly, released in 2015, in addition to the awards that the album won. The song “These Walls” from the album had Bruner, Anna Wise and Bilal on it and garnered a Best Rap/Sung collaboration at the Grammys.
Untitled, Unmastered consisted of eight songs with unclear titles, mostly “untitled” with a series of dates attached. Most of the tracks appear to have been created back in 2013 and 2014 around the time that he began working on his To Pimp a Butterfly album. Some of the songs on the album also appear to have been pulled from live performances, including appearances at the 58th annual Grammys, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and the Colbert Report.
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