Last month, TDE president Terrence “Punch” Henderson said that Kendrick Lamar would return with new music soon.
According to MixedByAli, Kendrick Lamar‘s engineer, the rapper has six albums worth of unreleased material.
During his appearance on Kevin Durant’s The ETCs podcast, Ali talked about the unrelease material Lamar has accumulated from music he has worked on.
“For Kendrick alone, let me say I think we could put together like six albums,” he said. “Everyone’s the same way, it’s all about just understanding that you could always do something better. It’s having that mindset to just strive for the best possible version of you. That’s Kendrick’s whole mind state, always striving to do better. Whether it’s recording a new verse, you know he would record a whole song and get one ad-lib back a month later because he don’t like how he breathed the ad-lib, y’know?”
The moment comes at the 34-minute mark of the conversation. Last month, the To Pimp a Butterfly artist playfully refuted rumors that he was leaving TDE to focus on his media start-up pgLang.
“Top, you gotta stop them from smutting my name,” he said in a since-deleted Instagram post. “Enough is enough. Got them saying I done shook the label and all that.”
“Can’t even try to be mysterious and vague in my tweets no more,” wrote TDE president Terrence “Punch” Henderson in regards to the rumor. “A rumor gets halfway around the world before the truth get its shoes on.”
The rumors stem from an Instagram Live session by user @Antixbound, which made their way to the official Kendrick Lamar subreddit. The person posted rumors about the upcoming TDE release schedule, which mostly hinged on whether or not Kendrick was leaving TDE. The rumors speculated that Kendrick would be taking Baby Keem and British singer Jorja Smith along with him. Keem and Jorja appeared in the launch visuals for pgLang that Kendrick dropped back in March.
That same month, Top Dawg promised that Kendrick would make his return to the rap game in the near future. “Stay patient,” he wrote in an Instagram comment, “King Kendrick will return soon.” Lamar did recently appear on Busta Rhymes’ new album though, so there’s that.