Kendrick Lamar's New Album Art Suggests He Is Truly About to Bless Us

KDot took to Instagram last night to post his second photo ever: the album cover for his new album, To Pimp a Butterfly, out March 23rd. A tracklist has been circulating but it seems to be fake; regardless, you can pre-order the LP (track names redacted, except for “The Blacker The Berry“) on iTunes now.

In the explicit, complicated and contradictory political stances just between “i” and “Blacker the Berry,” it has seemed in the run-up to this album that Kendrick is about to apply the same textured, rich, elliptically incisive (and almost radical in its specific black traditionalism) critical imagination well beyond the m.A.A.d. city of his previous joint to America at large; this wild album cover confirms it, every tiny detail calibrated to show a palimpsest of anger, grief, joy, protest, celebration, death, justice and tragedy—and black voices only, no mistake.

All this and the beats, too. To Pimp a Butterfly is going to be a heavy fucking banger, you ready?