DJ Premier has officially announced that his long-anticipated collaborative album with Nas will drop next month, marking the culmination of a partnership decades in the making, and one fans have been clamoring for since Illmatic.
Preemo revealed the news during his He’s The Preemo, I’m The Chemist show with Alchemist on Wednesday in Bristol, England. Footage from the event showed the buzzing crowd erupting when the legendary producer made the surprise announcement.
“How many people are ready for that Nas/Premier album?” he shouted. “Are you ready for it? December 12th. Get ready, motherfuckers.”
He then launched into “Represent,” the iconic Illmatic track that helped define the duo’s legendary chemistry. While Premier didn’t reveal the album’s official title, the project arrives as the final installment of Mass Appeal’s Legend Has It… rollout, a series spotlighting hip-hop greats through new, curated releases.
The Legend Has It... series has already included projects from Slick Rick, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Mobb Deep, Big L, and added another addition this week with De La Soul’s Cabin In The Sky, which dropped on Friday.
The Nas–Preemo collab album has been teased for months, especially after the duo released “Define My Name” last April. At the time, both confirmed it was part of a larger rollout, but details remained under wraps until now. In an October interview with Rolling Stone, Nas said he couldn’t wait for fans to finally hear what he and Premier had been cooking up.
“I don’t know about anybody else, but for me and him, it was personally a long time coming for us to do it,” he said, noting that he and Premier had been trading creative ideas all last year. “I’m going to say at least two of those ideas happened on this album. We didn’t get a chance to do ’em when we were talking about ’em, but we finally got a chance to put those recordings together this year.”
Nas and DJ Premier’s history dates all the way back to Illmatic, where Premier produced several of the album’s defining tracks, including “N.Y. State of Mind” and “Memory Lane (Sittin’ in da Park).” Their gritty, jazz-infused collaboration helped shape the sound of the 1994 classic and cemented one of hip-hop’s most revered rapper-producer pairings. A little more than a decade later, anticipation of a collaborative album soared when the duo appeared together on the cover of Scratch magazine.