Kendrick Lamar drops new surprise album ‘GNX’: Here are 5 first-listen takeaways

Everyone suspected a new Kendrick Lamar album was coming soon — between a Super Bowl halftime show slot next year and a haul of Grammy nominations for “Not Like Us,” the time was as ripe as could be. Yet fans woke up Friday to the startling release of “GNX,” Lamar’s followup to 2022’s ruminative “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.”

“GNX” finds him back in the lane of 2017’s “DAMN.” — a mix of menacing, lyrically lacerating street cuts and dense, narrative-driven work. He hasn’t lost the scorched-earth spirit of beefs with Drake but now puts that venom in the full widescreen scope of his life and work. His albums take a long time to absorb, but this one also hits with ferocious immediacy.

Here are a few early reads on the LP and where it sits in the arc of Lamar’s career. After “GNX,” it’s pretty hard to dispute his claim to be the best rapper alive.

People walk by a defaced mural of Kendrick Lamar in Compton.

(Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)

Restore that mural asap!

Whoever defaced the Kendrick mural in Compton must be waking up surprised that their scribbling prompted the opening salvo for the record. “Wacced out murals” kicks off with the plaintive Spanish vocals of mariachi singer Deyra Barrera (who returns on “reincarnated” and “gloria”), and finds Kendrick surveying how his claim on the “best rapper alive” title has churned up mixed feelings — “Used to bump ‘Tha Carter III,’ I held my Rollie chain proud / Irony, I think my hard work let Lil Wayne down,” he raps about winning the slot at the Super Bowl Halftime show in New Orleans that Wayne craved. Still, he promises, “Put that on my kids’ children, we gon’ see the future first.”

More Mustard, but so much Antonoff

After an absolute smash at the level of “Not Like Us,” of course Kendrick was going to return to producer Mustard on an album deeply rooted in West Coast lore. The tense, brooding “Hey now” and strings-stabbing “tv off” revisit Mustard’s mix of soul sampling and funk bounce. But it’s striking to see just how much Jack Antonoff is spread over this album — the Taylor Swift regular and Bleachers frontman is credited with production on 11 of “GNX’s” 12 songs, the second most after Kendrick’s longtime producer Sounwave. Antonoff has suddenly become a significant part of Kendrick mythology; he recently worked on the Drake diss “6:16 in LA,” which came after Drake’s “Taylor Made Freestyle” that roasted Kendrick’s Swift collaborations.

Kendrick Lamar, posing for his new album, “GNX.”

(pgLang)

Disrespect Pac? This might be your last stop

If Kendrick was furious about Drake’s AI 2Pac disrespect, he fully avenged Pac on “reincarnated,” which flips his 1996 track “Made N—“ and absolutely nails Pac’s flow with the care and craft of a lifelong devotee. But the story winds back decades in a sort of past-life regression, where Kendrick imagines other versions of himself in music history, including an evocative verse as “a Black woman in the Chitlin’ Circuit … My voice was angelic, straight from heaven, the crowd sobbed … Had everything I wanted, but I couldn’t escape addiction / Heroin needles had me in fetal position, restricted.”

Where do Kendrick Lamar and Drake go from here?

This is Sam Dew’s breakthrough

The LP doesn’t have many A-list guest features, really only showcasing SZA on “Luther” and “gloria.” The real discovery for many will be singer-songwriter Sam Dew, an Antonoff and Sounwave collaborator in the band Red Hearse, who lends some velvety textures to seven tracks. This should be a huge breakout performance for him. The other feature credits go to much more underground rappers including Dody 6, AzChike, Wallie the Sensei, Hitta J3, Peysoh and Young Threat.

The Heart Pt. 6, Pt. 2

The best pettiness is acting like your nemesis’ music doesn’t exist. Kendrick blew right past Drake’s trollish diss of (nearly) the same title with his own new track called “heart pt. 6.” The song is typically dense with novelistic details about the early days of Lamar’s career — “Back when the only goal was to get Jay Rock through the door.” He laments how his success may have complicated his friendships in Black Hippy, and lest anyone think the Dave Free allegations on Drake’s “Family Matters” rattled Kendrick, he flips some phrasing here to show just how far they go back — “My n— Dave had a Champagne Acura / A bunch of instrumentals I freestyled in the passenger ... For this little thing of ours we called TDE.”