Update on Jay Z’s Upcoming Album ‘4:44’ coming out in June
Jay Z’s focus has been on things much bigger than music over the last few years. Sure, he has popped up with a number of notable feature verses since 2013’s Magna Carta Holy Grail—his feature on Rick Ross’ “The Devil Is a Lie” is a highlight—but as far as solo work goes, Jay has been dormant.
The drought appears to be over, however, after it was finally revealed on Sunday night that 4:44, Jay’s mysterious new project, would be a full-fledged album. And there are hints that Jay might be throwing it back on the new project—his reps recently confirmed the hyphen in his name is back, perhaps signaling a return to his old ways. His name is also all caps; guess it’s JAY-Z SZN.
Here’s everything we know about the 4:44 project so far.
Release Date
4:44 started out as as a weird, unexplained ad campaign, with a series of flesh-colored ads popping up in early June. release date was confirmed to be June 30.
Features
Take a look at some of the inclusions in his list of shout-outs. There are a ton of no-brainers who made the cut, like Nas and André 3000, but Jay showed love to the new generation of artists as well. One particularly interesting inclusion was Playboi Carti, whose song “Magnolia” got a direct acknowledgment from Jay and is currently playing in the background of ads for Sprint’s partnership with Tidal.
You could sit and try to parse through his full list of acknowledgments all day and come up with 50 different answers. It’s also worth noting that he lumped a group of newer, established rappers—Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, Jay Electronica, and Chance the Rapper—right alongside some of the best to ever do it. Electronica and Cole are part of his Roc Nation imprint, so he has incentive to big up his guys, but it wouldn’t be shocking to see any/all of those artists on 4:44.
Songs
We already have a small piece of one off the songs from 4:44, courtesy of a trailer that dropped on Sunday evening. “Adnis,” which doubles as the name of Jay’s father, plays in the background of the advertisement, with Jay spitting a few bars about messages he never shared with his deceased dad.
Jay has mentioned his father in his songs before, but dedicating a full song to him is definitely a new step for him.
Aside from “Adnis,” we don’t have snippets, hints, or even a tracklist to comb through yet, with under two weeks to go until the project drops. The only thing we know for sure is that you’ll only be able to stream the project on Tidal, so if you’re a user of one of the other major streaming services, you might get left out in the cold.
— JAY-Z Daily (@JAY_Z_Daily) June 21, 2017