After a full decade of recording, J. Cole’s upcoming album, The Fall-Off, is finally en route—and he’s not taking any chances on details slipping prematurely.
Cole has been talking about The Fall-Off since he was 33. How old is J. Cole now? He’s 40. The rapper/producer has maintained extreme supervision over the music, reportedly keeping limited-edition “Stealth Edition” vinyl pressings under 24/7 surveillance in facilities throughout North America.
His overprotectiveness is understandable: The Dreamville founder’s upcoming release has developed a mythical lore akin to Dr. Dre’s Detox. And now, after spending years hyping it up via interviews and lyrics, the J. Cole album release date is Feb. 6. It’s a date that nods to his North Carolina hometown’s “2-6” nickname.
The formal rollout for The Fall-Off kicked off Jan. 14, with the release of an album trailer and the generically titled buzz single, “Disc 2 - Track 2,” which suggests that the project will be a double album. The Ryan Doubiago-directed music video visualizes Cole’s acrobatic storytelling, while the album preview clip depicts Cole washing a Lamborghini and eating at Waffle House as comedian and content creator Dan Harumi reflects on the impermanence of stardom.
“Everything is supposed to go away eventually,” Harumi narrates. “You see this especially in show business with famous actors or musicians, and it’s like, ‘Oh, this guy used to be famous and then he fell off. What happened?’... Instead of thinking that it’s kind of crazy they got famous in the first place.”
The Fall-Off marks Cole’s first studio album since his brief dust-up with Kendrick Lamar in 2024, which fizzled out after the Fayetteville MC dropped his “7 Minute Drill” diss in reply to perceived shots from K. Dot on Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That.” Feeling conflicted about his jabs, Cole publicly apologized shortly afterward, removing the track from his Might Delete Later mixtape days after its release.
That controversy only raised the stakes for the new album, which is a follow-up to 2021’s The Off-Season. Fans and pundits are curious about whether Cole can still drop napalm following his infamous ceasefire. They want to hear the J. Cole tracks he’s been laboring over for years; it’s a project he’s likened to the potency of Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt. And they want to hear whether The Fall-Off sticks the landing of an arc that began with 2007’s The Come Up mixtape. If this is the end of the road for J. Cole albums, will he go out on top?
There are more questions than answers at this point. With so much lore surrounding the upcoming release of J. Cole tracks, Complex sifts through the details that have surfaced over the years. In the process we complied everything we know about J. Cole’s new album, The Fall-Off.
The Fall-Off could be J. Cole’s final album
Cole began openly contemplating retirement a decade ago, around the time he first embarked on The Fall-Off journey. “Said all that I could say, now I play with thoughts of retirement,” he rhymes on “Jermaine’s Interlude,” from DJ Khaled’s 2016 album, Major Key.
There are even more swan-song raps on 2023’s “Adonis Interlude (The Montage). ”On that song he raps, “Just cop The Fall-Off, and he'll explain/Is it the end of the chapter, happily ever after?”
The music video for “Disc 2 - Track 2” begins with a note that Cole’s mission is “to create my best work” and “do on my last what I was unable to do on my first.” Despite being spotted last year wearing a Vetements hoodie that read “I’m retired,” Cole has wavered on whether he’d ever market his grand finale as a selling point.
“I’m super comfortable with the potential of being done with this shit,” Cole said in a 2021 SLAM cover story. “But I’m never going to say, ‘Oh, this is my last album.’ … Because I never know how I’m going to feel two years, three years, four years down the line, 10 years down the line. But please believe, I’m doing all this work for a reason.”
“Disc 2 - Track 2” took an estimated 12 hours to write
With the first confirmed track from The Fall-Off, Cole accomplished the difficult feat of narrating his life story in reverse, all while maintaining a consistent rhyme scheme from start to finish. In a recent interview with journalist Timmhotep Aku, Cole spoke about the painstaking process, which he said took 12 hours stretched over two days.
“I remember writing songs—especially with the great ones—like how people remember scoring game-winning touchdowns,” Cole told Aku, in a conversation dated Jan. 14 but shared on Jan. 20 on the journalist's Instagram. “The greatest feeling is every time you get a line, every time you get closer to the end... But then you still have the fear of, like, yo, what if you ran out of rhymes? What if you can't connect it? What if you stall out? What if you run out of gas?”
J. Cole said he sat on the song until he found a fitting beat, then recorded it while in Miami.
“Those moments writing it, that's the number-one experience,” he said. “True fulfillment comes from that. And then recording it, there's an awe and a wonder and an appreciation, because I know... I'm only capable of doing this because God blessed me. He's sending me the words, all I gotta do is be clear enough to hear them.”
J. Cole is paying homage to his predecessors
Fans quickly compared the backward storytelling of “Disc 2 - Track 2” to Nas’ innovative 2001 classic “Rewind,” in which he narrates a street tale in reverse.
Cole’s music video ends by introducing another untitled song with a nostalgic feel, thanks to a sample of Mobb Deep’s “Drop a Gem on ’Em.” Prodigy and Havoc famously clap back at Tupac Shakur on their ’96 diss—it begs the question of whether Cole might be similarly sniping at rivals or naysayers.
“Come view the style of the unibrow Unibomber/who maneuvers through the drama,” he raps, perhaps alluding to those who had lots to say after he bowed out of the battle with Kendrick.
Cole has done this throughout his career, nodding to classics by the likes of Erykah Badu (“Too Deep for the Intro”), OutKast (“Land of the Snakes”), The Diplomats (“Ready ’24), so paying homage to the greats of yesteryear is very much on brand.
A mixtape with four new J. Cole tracks? Yes, please.
Speaking on the Joe and Jada show,Jadakiss was the first to reveal that J. Cole was planning to release a mixtape in addition to his album.
"He's got a project coming out called The Fall-Off, and he's got a mixtape where he used some of The LOX [beats],” he said, citing “Money, Power, Respect” and “Can I Live” as instrumentals he tackled. “Cole is coming back in a major way… he’s coming crazy.”
On Jan. 27, just a couple of hours before his birthday, J. Cole dropped Birthday Blizzard ‘26, a four track mixtape hosted by DJ. Clue. And just like Jadakiss said, Cole raps over “Can I Live” and “Money Power Respect.” He also spits over Diddy’s “Victory” and The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Who Shot Ya?”
On one of the songs, “Bronx Zoo Freestyle,” addressed the “7 Minute Drill” diss against Kendrick and then the apology that followed. On the song he raps:
“I used to be top, see, the apology dropped me way out of the top three, no problem, I’m probably my best when they doubt me…The top ain’t really what I thought it would be, so I jumped off and landed back at the bottom and restarted at a level where I wasn’t regarded as much, just to climb past them again and tell them all to keep up.”
The Fall-Off is a self-imposed challenge for J. Cole
The spark for Cole’s seventh solo studio album, which in 2021 he called “the most ambitious shit I have ever done,” ironically originated from being complacent. Coming off the massive success of 2014 Forest Hills Drive and its accompanying 2015 tour, he found himself feeling overly comfortable. It was apparent to him in the music he made during that period.
“Every day I’d open my laptop up [and] try to make a beat, and then I’d try to write. And then when I’d start writin’, I’d be like, ‘Man, this shit kinda ass, if I’m bein’ honest with myself,” he told Lil Yachty during a November 2023 appearance on A Safe Place podcast. “If I go out and close the chapter—not sayin’ I will, but if I do—I want to do it at the highest level of achievement and skillset that I ever been in my life.”
“It’s somethin’ I want to prove for myself,” he continued. “And all of them features have just been exercises at getting better, and pushing myself to getting better, [and] sharpening the sword to ultimately end up [at my goal].”
The opening note in the music video for “Disc 2 - Track 2” suggests that Cole is satisfied with what he created.
“I had no way of knowing how much time, focus and energy it would eventually take to achieve this, but despite the countless challenges along the way, I knew in my heart I would one day get to the finish line,” the note reads. “I owed it first and foremost to myself. And secondly, I owed it to hip-hop.”
Cole is not focused on making conventional hit singles
Once upon a time, crafting a hit record was J. Cole’s personal Rubik’s Cube—the only way he’d free his studio debut album from record label purgatory. Those days feel like eons ago, and according to his “Pi” and “A Plate of Collard Greens” collaborator Daylyt, The Fall-Off won’t feature songs that pander to mainstream tastes.
“Cole is going out with a nuclear missile, I’m telling y’all that,” Daylyt said during an April 2024 Instagram livestream, while also reinforcing retirement rumors. “It’s his last go-around and he literally was like, ‘I don’t give a fuck about radio; I just wanna show the world my pen before I die.’ I heard it, all of it. It is the most amazing-est rapping I have seen and heard thus far.”
Several songs created for The Fall-Off have already been released
Days before the 2016 release of 4 Your Eyez Only, Cole dropped two loosie statement tracks to build anticipation: “False Prophets,” an ego check that many listeners believe snubbed Kanye West and Wale, and “Everybody Dies,” a lyrical exercise sniping at rap’s uninspired rookies and relics.
In May 2018, Cole told Angie Martinez that the two songs were intended for The Fall-Off, which he formally announced the prior month via the closing track on KOD, “1985 (Intro to “The Fall Off).”
A two-song drop in July 2020 titled Lewis Street features the songs “Lion King on Ice” and “The Climb Back,” which Cole introduced as the first two songs from The Fall-Off. The latter appeared on The Off-Season in 2021.
On Applying Pressure: The Off-Season, a documentary capturing that album’s recording process, Cole noted that his 2019 single “Middle Child” was also originally made for The Fall-Off.
Even if none of these orphans survive the final cut—which seems likely after years of revision—they function as early drafts of a thesis Cole has been refining in public, wrestling with legacy, purpose, relevance, and the pursuit of his artistic ceiling.
The Fall-Off is expected to be a personal, introspective project
On “Lion King on Ice,” J. Cole hints at opening up: “I need y'all to see every part of me/Every scar and every artery/Every story that I can recall/Then I can fall.” It’s likely an indicator of what’s to come on his long-awaited LP.
Last April, DZL confirmed in an interview with Complex that The Fall-Off will get deep. “This project is going to give people a deeper insight into him as a man, him as a human being, him as a father, and him as a husband,” said the producer, who contributed to “Port Antonio,” “Clouds,” and several tracks on 2024’s Might Delete Later. “Top-tier raps, top-level rapping, top-level storytelling... It’s Cole in his bag.”
Few producers and guest features have been confirmed—but some are rumored
There’s no word on whether Cole will include any guest features on the album. When JID appeared on The Joe Budden Podcast last year, he disclosed that he has an album's worth of songs with Cole, but he did not specify whether any of the tracks would appear on The Fall-Off.
On a recent episode of The New Rory & Mal podcast, Mal claimed that both Drake and Kendrick Lamar had recorded multiple features for the album. He said the fallout of their beef forced J. Cole to scrap the cameos and re-record significant portions of the project. Cole and Dreamville have not confirmed or denied the rumor.
As for producers, DZL told Complex in April that he’d spent four years working on The Fall-Off (he co-produced “Disc 2 - Track 2” with Maneesh). No other beatmakers have been confirmed, but some fans speculate that The Alchemist could be chipping in music. When a fan asked in August 2024 if Alc had any production credits on The Fall-Off, the legendary producer responded cryptically by dropping a zipped-lip emoji.
The Fall-Off album artwork depicts Cole’s very first beat machine
Cole’s album artwork has been hiding in plain sight for nearly six years. He posted a throwback photo of his first makeshift studio setup via an Instagram burner account back in March 2020. That same photo, which shows a red ASR sampler sitting atop a small table, has now been revealed as the album cover for The Fall-Off.
Complex got an inside look at this creative space in Cole’s childhood home back in 2014.
“I begged my mom every day for a beat machine, for like a year-and-a-half,” he remembered. Cole finally got his wish when he landed an analog machine at age 15. “That’s when I started making my own beats, writing my own songs. It all started on this machine right here.”
The image evokes a full-circle return to the modest tools and quiet isolation that shaped Cole’s earliest work, reminding listeners that after years of recording and refinement, The Fall-Off brings him back to where it all began.
On Thursday, Jan. 29, Cole shared a second cover for the album. Unlike the first, this photo prominently features the rapper himself. Upon releasing the cover, he shared the backstory behind both images. He wrote:
“The Fall-Off that is currently circulating is a picture that I took on a disposable camera when I was 15 years old,” Cole wrote in a post on X. “My very first set up. My first beats were made in that spot, surrounded by my mother's CD collection that I would comb through looking for samples.”
He continued:
“The mental space I entered writing that joint was a feeling I will attempt to explain, but I doubt it will do it justice. It was the strongest possible combination of creativity (the imagination at work), focus (in search of the next line), faith (belief that the next line will come), and excitement (in knowing this thing being written is truly something special) that I imagine one can't understand until they've been in it.”
Cole also explained why the decision to use another cover came more recently:
“However, two years ago, after the events that still feed the algorithm to this day, I became incredibly re-inspired, and the album slowly blossomed into a double disc as the concept expanded…I felt there should be an additional cover that represented that—something just as strong as the first, with my face on it, so that when I look back in 20 years, I can see an image of who I was at the time I released the project I worked on for so long.”