AZ Chike answered the question hanging over No Rest For The Wicked by posting the thing that caused it. The clip he put on Instagram this weekend is from the studio session with Kendrick Lamar whose photographs started the collaboration rumours in the first place. There is no Lamar verse on the album.
The expectation was not unreasonable. Chike was one of several West Coast guests on Lamar's GNX, a cosign he has built the whole of this album on, and pictures of the two of them working together did the rest. What the footage shows is not a session that produced a feature but one where the older rapper was giving notes.
"Knock them out, just go," Lamar tells him in the clip, adding "don't even overthink it" and telling him to have fun with it. Chike speaks for himself later in the same promo video. "In the most humblest way, this album is a big deal for me," he says, and he means to give it everything he has, on the basis that if that is not enough then there is nothing else to give.
He had already set expectations in an interview with Bootleg Kev, recorded a couple of weeks before the album came out and released over the weekend. He said he was keeping his fingers crossed for a collaboration and still is, that the pair are spontaneous and hard to read, and that the person who mattered most to the record was not Lamar at all. Sounwave, he said, has been with him since he started the album, and was more concerned with how the whole thing held together than with any one guest.
That is the useful part of the story for anyone listening to the record. Hit-Boy and Sounwave have both put their weight behind it publicly, which is a different kind of endorsement from a verse and arguably a more durable one.
Chike's run up to this point is already on the site: he and Tyler, The Creator shared the single Look Like My Mama and then restaged two films in its video. No Rest For The Wicked is the album those were building towards, and it is filed under hip-hop.
The facts
- AZ Chike posted footage of a studio session with Kendrick Lamar.
- The album No Rest For The Wicked carries no Kendrick Lamar feature.
- Photographs from that session started the collaboration rumours.
- Chike was one of several West Coast guests on Lamar's album GNX.
- In the clip Lamar tells him not to overthink the record.
- Chike says the producer Sounwave was involved from the start of the album.
- Hit-Boy and Sounwave have both praised the record publicly.
- He told Bootleg Kev he is still hoping for a collaboration.
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