Eminem's four-year hiatus ends with Revival, his brand-new album following 2013's The Marshall Mathers LP 2. After frenzied anticipation, the much-awaited album has officially dropped, marking the best-selling rapper of all time's ninth solo release.
Ahead of the full LP, the multi-awarded rapper released "Walk on Water" and "Untouchable," the former is an elegiac Beyoncé-backed track which sees Eminem reflecting upon his legacy and people's expectations of him as a musician and artist, while the latter is a no-holds-barred commentary on white privilege and police brutality-slash-racism.
Revival contains 19 tracks, many of them collaborations: "Chloraseptic," for instance, features Phresher, while "River," "Like Home," and "Need Me" feature Ed Sheeran, Alicia Keys, and Pink, respectively. The album steps into a variety of genres, including rock, gospel, pop, and of course, hip-hop and rap. It is sonically diverse, with producers like Rick Rubin and Alexa da Kid pulling off golden-age beats and piano ballads, respectively.
Revival also features Skylar Grey, Emile Haynie, NEFF-U, Rock Mafia, Scram Jones, DJ Khalil, and many others as collaborators. Each track was penned by multiple writers, but Slim Shady is credited in the entire tracklist, save for "Remind Me (Intro)."
The album features Eminem on the cover, face-palmed behind the American flag, a not-so-subtle suggestion that the album contains, most of all, political commentary, which makes sense when contextualized alongside Eminem's heavy-hitting Donald Trump slam-diss track that debuted at the BET Awards. In that song, "The Storm," the rapper critiqued the collapse of American politics, mentioning hot-button topics such as immigration, white supremacy, corruption, and environmental disasters.
As Billboard predicts, Revival is likely yet another monumental album for the Grammy-winning rapper, considering the hype and anticipation around it, plus his history of selling millions of records. The Marshall Mathers LP, released in 2000, and the The Eminem Show, released in 2002, both went diamond, selling over 10 million copies each. Throughout his career, Eminem has also had 50 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, five of which were number ones.
In celebration of the album's release, Eminem is hosting a pop-up shop in his hometown, Detroit, on Dec. 15 and Dec. 16, with the main meal served at the event a homage to what are perhaps Eminem's most famous lyrics: mom's spaghetti.
Revival is available on iTunes, Apple Music, and Spotify. Stream it below. As always, if you have any thoughts, feel free to sound off in the comments section below!
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