Kendrick Lamar casually dropped an announcement last week to confirm the release date of his highly-anticipated third album is but a few days away: Kendrick’s album will be released on March 23. This week, Kendrick Lamar also released the album art and track listing for the inevitable work of art: To Pimp A Butterfly’ is the album’s title, and along with its provocative artwork, featured above, will be making critics swoon and falter very, very soon.
While tracks like ‘The Blacker The Berry’ and ‘I’ have already been released for ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’, Kendrick Lamar today unveiled the newest single from the album, ‘King Kunta’.
Critics delving into the art and profundity bubbling at the bold surface of Kendrick Lamar’s work are countless—Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon even annotated Lamar’s “I” recently—the album’s title is already creating a stir for its riff of Harper Lee‘s seminal ‘To Kill A Mockingbird‘; the album is already anticipated to be a contemporary take on race relations in America, during a political climate where deaths like those of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown shake the US to its core.
Lamar spoke to Rolling Stone and described the album as “honest, fearful, and unapologetic.” He also claimed that the loaded meaning behind the album’s title “will be taught in college courses someday.”
Listen to ‘King Kunta’ below.
