Kendrick Lamar - untitled unmastered

Kendrick Lamar is one of the very few people, besides Queen Beyonce, who can drop an album unannounced and still have, to paraphrase the great man himself, the whole world talking. His third album, untitled unmastered, is a collection of tracks that he has either only performed live or that have been left on the cutting room floor over the course of producing To Pimp A Butterfly and good kid, m.A.A.d city. Never one to play it safe, Kendrick delivers once more.

As the title suggests, the tracks are all nameless, leaving it up to the listener to guess the main aim behind them. As ever with Kendrick Lamar, his lyrics are so multi-directional that it’s easy to pick up on at least one angle that means something to you and expand this out to fit the whole song. In addition to this, he manoeuvres so well through such a huge quantity of subjects over the course of just one song that in taking a step back from pigeonholing his songs with names, he allows them to fill a wider space.

With untitled unmastered, as with his other albums, the devil is in the detail. It’s present in the soft transitional lilt at the end of each line of ‘untitled 02’, adding a soulfulness that shakes up the rhymes. It’s present in the fact that his five year old son contributed the beats and piano to ‘untitled 7’. It’s present in the simple contrast between the off-the-cuff riffing of ‘untitled 7’ and the well-produced groove of ‘untitled 8’. It’s particularly present in Kendrick’s signature: a reoccurring verbal motif that creeps in throughout the album. No stone is left unturned; no aspect of any track is left untended.

Once again, we are left stunned by Kendrick Lamar. He is unashamed, unflinching and unstoppable. Long reign King Kunta.

Rating: 9/10

Recommended tracks:

untitled 8

untitled 4

untitled 2