Kendrick Lamar - GNX

“Before I take a truce I’ll take them to hell with me.” One of rap’s truly premier figures, Kendrick Lamar has returned with a surprise release that, somehow, nobody saw coming. Having dominated 2024 without so much as a hint of an imminent album, Kendrick’s sixth studio LP is a masterstroke - exquisitely fuelled by his love of his home city of Compton and his rage at his storied adversary, Drake.

Leaving behind the introspective, confessional intellectualism of ‘Mr Morale & the Big Steppers’ for much leaner, more direct, more conventional tracks, K-dot seems to be taking aim squarely at the chart-dominating, club-filling rappers he names here. Lil Wayne, Snoop Dogg - no one legend is safe from Kendrick’s ire. As if loading up for a battle of the charts, Kendrick recruits the most lethal hired gun of all to produce: Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey’s favourite collaborator, Jack Antonoff.

It’s an interesting contradiction - the sort that’s followed Kendrick since the early days. By going back to basics, his supreme technical talent - the variation of flow and genius lyricism - is even more obvious. By restricting the scope of the piece, it’s able to reach an intensity that’s not been as often touched upon since 2012 masterpiece ‘Good Kid M.A.A.D City’. Across ‘wacced out murals’, ‘squabble up’, ‘hey now’ and ‘tv off’ Lamar finds a claustrophobic groove, a pulsating intensity perfectly complicated by Sounwave and Antonoff’s skittish, bubbling production. It’s not an album that overwhelms its guests, nor lets them fully take center-stage, with SZA adding emotion and depth to ‘luther’ and ‘gloria’ for some of the album’s most heartfelt moments.

So consciously West Coast yet so ready-for-MTV, it’s maybe the clearest picture of Kendrick as both a self-aware super-brand and the high-climbing champion of the streets. After so much abstraction, so much thought-provoking chin-stroking, it’s vital and exciting to hear Kendrick speak on himself: “Flip a coin, want the shameless me or the famous me? How annoying, does it anger me to know the lames can speak. On the origins of the game I breathe? That’s insane to me. It’s important, I deserve it all because it’s mine. Tell me why you think you deserve the greatest of all time?” On all the evidence we’ve got so far, it’d take a brave person to argue he isn’t close.