The Death Grips comparison also helps underline the anger and aggressiveness of the lyrics. (Though the French house duo have only been confirmed as producers on four other songs.) Other tracks rattle as if they’d been produced by industrial hip-hop group Death Grips, with the heavy bass on “I Am a God” sounding like it’s straight out of “ Come Up and Get Me.” “Hold My Liquor” features a guest verse from 17-year-old Chicago rapper Chief Keef-sung, taking after his elder, through a vocoder-before Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon comes in with a falsetto, and is greeted by what sound like layered guitars from Daft Punk.
In “Blood on the Leaves” he sets “ Strange Fruit,” boldly, over a trap beat, and ends with a vocoder solo familiar from 808s and Heartbreak and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy tracks like “ Runaway.” “Bound 2” is the only track that could reasonably fit in on one of his first two or three albums, with Kanye making signature use of vintage vocal samples from soul and pop, this time from ’60s singer Brenda Lee (“ Sweet Nothings”) and ’70s group the Ponderosa Twins Plus One (“ Bound”).Īt other times Kanye’s list of collaborators from all sides of the musical zeitgeist can be heard loud and clear.
West is known for soaking up sounds from around the zeitgeist and elevating them to exciting new levels, and here he soaks up in particular the rise of electronic dance music in recent years, fusing industrial and trap music with the sounds he’s more traditionally known for. That all changed with the leak, with listeners discovering a dark and abrasive album more or less devoid of any commercial radio single. Outside of previews of “ Black Skinhead” and “ New Slaves” on Saturday Night Live and on projections around the world (and, for a few friends and critics, at a private listening party on Monday), little had been heard or revealed about the album. Just when it began to seem like Kanye West’s Yeezus would never leak-Yeezy has been known to take extraordinary precautions to prevent leaks, including moving mixes only in locked Pelican briefcases and on “ hard drives that can only be accessed by biometric fingerprint readers“-the album made its way onto file-sharing services this afternoon, a few days ahead of its June 18 release date.