If tweeted plans hold true, this Friday will bring the long-awaited arrival of Pusha T's new album. The tentatively titled King Push has, according to Pusha himself, gone through multiple iterations up until this point. Remember (the really fucking great) "Drug Dealers Anonymous," from two whole years ago?
As the first of multiple planned releases in the coming weeks to be graced with the production prowess of Kanye West, the G.O.O.D. Music boss' first new project since 2015's excellent Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude is expected to deliver, even while still shrouded in mystery just days before its scheduled release.
So what, exactly, do we know about King Push? We've rounded up the important album-related happenings and general speculation in an effort to get our hype a bit more honed in.
If tweeted plans hold true, this Friday will bring the long-awaited arrival of Pusha T's new album. The tentatively titled King Push has, according to Pusha himself, gone through multiple iterations up until this point. Remember (the really fucking great) "Drug Dealers Anonymous," from two whole years ago?
As the first of multiple planned releases in the coming weeks to be graced with the production prowess of Kanye West, the G.O.O.D. Music boss' first new project since 2015's excellent Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude is expected to deliver, even while still shrouded in mystery just days before its scheduled release.
So what, exactly, do we know about King Push? We've rounded up the important album-related happenings and general speculation in an effort to get our hype a bit more honed in.
Road to release
Serious King Push talk began not long after the release of Darkest Before Dawn, which dropped via G.O.O.D. and Def Jam in December 2015 in the wake of Pusha being named the new G.O.O.D. president. Sessions for the project, however, are believed to date back as far as 2014. During an appearance on Shade 45's Heavy Hitters show that same month, Pusha teased that the album was expected to drop in April 2016. While that obviously didn't happen, 2016 did see the release of a trio of new Pusha records, including the Jay Z collab "Drug Dealers Anonymous." At the time, the track was widely reported as being a King Push single. Pusha has given multiple in-depth updates on the album's status since. Most notably, during his Made in America set in September 2017, he revealed he had scrapped the project and started anew on more than one occasion.
Features
Given that this album has gone through at least three different revisions, guessing the features that'll land on the final product isn't the easiest thing to do. Will tracks like "Drug Dealers Anonymous" still make the cut? Better yet, could there be another Jay Z collab in the mix? Even with the album on the horizon, it's still too soon to know for sure. At least one Kanye West feature, however, feels like a pretty safe bet. We also wouldn't be surprised—insurmountably stoked, but not surprised—if Pharrell and fresh G.O.O.D. signees Valee and Sheck Wes popped in. The working tracklist, revealed in a recent studio video shared by West, didn't list any features at all:
- If You Know U Know
- Sociopath
- Games We Play
- Come Back Baby
- Infrared
- Hard Piano
- How Do You Respond
- Samaria
Production
We know for an absolute fact, at least for the moment, that King Push was produced "top to bottom" by original G.O.O.D. boss Kanye West. However, previous comments from Pusha suggest other producers may have been involved with earlier drafts. In June 2017, Pusha told Complex the album was 85 percent finished and would be largely produced by Yeezy. "It's mostly Kanye West," he said at the time.
Expectations
The power of a Pusha T x Kanye West collab has already been proven, arguably most awesomely in the My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy centerpiece "Runaway." This will, it's worth mentioning, also mark West's first major music move since poisoning his Twitter feed with confusing embraces of the far right. Thematically, we can expect matters of the nose to be well-represented. Pusha promised as much last month:
Darkest Before Dawn highlights like "M.F.T.R." and "M.P.A." gave a distinctly 2015 flair to Pusha's inimitable storytelling, an approach West should have no trouble following on King Push, only this time in the key of 2018.
