Kanye West has offered some details about his follow-up to Yeezus, explaining that he is reworking the album to make it less "beautiful". Despite earlier plans to put out this seventh LP "by [the] summer", West now intends to release it in the autumn.
"I think most likely September," West revealed in an interview with GQ. Unless he opts for October. Or November. "I go back and forth," he admitted. "I was thinking it could somehow come out in June, like Yeezus, and just kill it for the summer. But then I'm like, I have to work on [my] Adidas [shoe line] and be with my child."
The main delay is West's propensity for reinvention. "I had an idea of the way I wanted to do the album," he recalled. It was a collection of "beautiful songs", which conveyed the message, "Hey, I'm a great musician, I make these beautiful songs, and they have all this meaning, and nobody can make anything that means this much."
Then West came up with something else, a song "so good that the album [had] to be balanced against it". He compared this new cut to Niggas in Paris, his duet with Jay Z from Watch the Throne. "Before … I had these beautiful songs, [but] they were just more songs. They weren't saying, 'OK, tuck your whole summer in.'"
When West spoke to GQ at the beginning of June, he still hoped to drop one new track, All Day, "in the next couple of weeks". For that song, West was trying to channel Jay Z. "Certain lines that I say on [All Day] ... usually Jay would say, but Jay's not there," West said. "So I say [them]: 'All day, nigga, it's Ye, nigga. Shopping for the winter, it's just May, nigga. Ball so hard, man, this shit cray, nigga. You ain't getting money unless you got eight figures.' Right? Jay would have said that."
Although West insists Yeezus marked "the beginning of a completely new era of music" and incorporated "the best rap verse of all time" (verse two on New Slaves), the rapper also concedes he is not as popular as he once was. "[Drake won] last summer," West said. "I'd never given it up till last summer." But the 37-year-old said he isn't even sure if we wants to compete for the overall hip-hop crown. "It's a real question for me. Do I want to?"
In the meantime, West said he is trying to learn from his wife – "In order to win at life, you need some Kim [Kardashian] skills" – as well as his old friend Jay. "[Hov] is the poster child of winning. [Whereas] I think I was the poster child of, like, fighting and winning. But you always saw the fight."
West's line of trainers for Adidas is expected to launch later this year.
