J. Cole has surprise-released four new freestyles in a project called Birthday Blizzard '26.
The rapper announced the news on X Tuesday and linked to a website—thefalloff.com— where fans could get the project for free. With five tracks in total, Birthday Blizzard '26 costs $1 to download — but there's an option to pay whatever you want, meaning you could get it for free.
J. Cole's new project is the latest glimpse of what to expect on his long-awaited upcoming album, The Fall-Off. Earlier this month, Cole revealed that the LP will arrive next month.
In another tease of the project, J. Cole released a new song called "Disc 2 — Track 2" that features him rapping about his life in reverse. In the striking music video that accompanied it, Cole wrote that his album had been "handcrafted" over the past 10 years, and framed it as music that he owed to not just himself, but hip-hop altogether.
“My life, I see it in reverse,” Cole raps at the start of the song, before painting a disturbing, but detailed, picture of his death. “I first appeared in a hearse,” he continues, building the image of a funeral. From there, he backtracks all the way to before he comes out of his mom's womb as an infant.
The Fall Off will be a follow-up to Cole's most recent projects Might Delete Later and The Off-Season. There's a chance that Cole's new album could be his last, if his comments in a 2021 SLAM cover story still hold true.
“I’m super comfortable with the potential of being done with this shit,” Cole said at the time. “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.”