J. Cole is still on the road as part of Drake’s It’s All A Blur – Big as the What? Tour, and he’s teasing more music leading into his anticipated The Fall-Off album.
The Dreamville boss unleashed the second edition of his Might Delete Later, Vol. 2 vlog recapping his travels on Monday (March 18), which includes an unreleased track featuring Cole rapping as if his rent was overdue.
Just shy of the five-minute mark, the scene switches to Cole riding his bike and getting some rhymes off over the thumping production. “Going to sleep at night praying to God release the stress/ Now I’m on G4 jets across the seas to decompress/ My recent texts, how much you think? Hmm, decent guess/ They go, ‘Cole, who you gon’ kill on the feature next?’” he raps.
Another part of the Smack DVD-inspired content finds J. Cole reflecting on his early days of signing to Roc Nation circa ’09, when he wanted to just create a classic body of work no matter the commercial success.
However, Jay-Z had other ideas. “When I first signed to Jay, all I wanted to do was drop a classic. That sh– could’ve sold 3,000,” Cole reminisced. “But it’s gotta be an Illmatic. Once I signed to Jay and this n—a was like, ‘Nah, you not putting the album out until you got some f—ing hits.’
“I had to trial-and-error for a year and a half, two years. ‘Workout,’ I squeezed that sh– out last-minute. That was an unnatural space for me. Even if you listen to it, I can’t even hear that sh– back.”
Cole went on to release a pair of mixtapes (The Warm Up and Friday Night Lights) before delivering his Cole World: The Sideline Story debut album in 2011. The LP debuted atop the Billboard 200 with 218,000 album units sold in the first week.
Might Delete Later, Vol. 2 features cameos from plenty of Jermaine’s rap peers, including Central Cee, Drake, Benny the Butcher, Lil Yachty and meeting Sexyy Red for the first time.
There’s additional footage of Cole in the studio where he reveals there’s been “six iterations of this album” in regards to The Fall-Off, which fans can expect at some point later this year.
Watch Might Delete Later, Vol. 2 below.