Vince Staples has released his first solo song and video since 2024, and it’s quite an experience — one influenced equally by DOOM and Martin Luther King, Jr.
The California rapper’s new “Blackberry Marmalade,” viewable above, is an aggressive, punk m-influenced track that Staples teased just hours before it dropped. The video, directed by Vince and Bradley J. Calder, features a mass shooter, portrayed as if they (eerily, the viewer never sees the person’s face) are the lead character in a DOOM-style first-person-shooter video game.
The shooter attacks Vince, then goes inside a restaurant (the Burbank-area Frank’s Coffee Shop and Restaurant, famous for appearing in numerous movies and TV shows and which, not having been a functioning restaurant since 2020, now only exists as a film set). Once inside Frank’s, the shooter kills pretty much everyone except the distracted-by-his-phone security guard and a woman. Then the shooter ends the clip the way many real-life mass shooters do, by suicide.
The video ends with a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail”: “So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.”
Watch and listen to “Blackberry Marmalade” above.
In other Vince Staples news, earlier this year his Netflix show was canceled after two seasons.
The cancellation comes after the streamer released its What We Watched semi-annual report on July through December 2025 viewership on January 20, 2026. According to the report, Season 2 of The Vince Staples Show drew modest viewership, with the show logging 1.7 million views.
