Friday afternoons are better known as a time to quietly bury bad news, not loudly drop one of the biggest albums of the year – but Kendrick Lamar doesn’t really operate by the usual rules of media engagement.
The rapper’s recent career path has felt wildly counterintuitive: right as he seemed to be settling into a position of critical adoration but commercial mid-tierness, releasing head-scratchingly ruminative 18-track double albums like Mr Morale and the Big Steppers, he roared back with the biggest hit of his career. The fact that said hit was a diss track – the sort of slightly grubby, inside baseball affair usually tucked away on mix tapes or the back halves of albums – made it stranger still, not to mention that it made some pretty wild allegations about one of the biggest musicians on the planet.
So it was fittingly contrary that Lamar’s victory lap, in the form of sixth studio album GNX, arrived not on the back of a months-long media onslaught but with a sudden drop last Friday that left music editors scrambling to cover it before clocking off (though Kendrick’s late Friday release did allow critics the weekend to get their heads around it before filing their reviews on Monday). GNX was a surprise album in the truest form, too – there was none of the breadcrumbs you often get in these situations: just a one-minute YouTube teaser and 30 minutes later, bam!
Perhaps the biggest surprise was that Lamar opted for a surprise release at all. Because it had seemed that the surprise album release era was very much over, 12 years after it began. That 12-year number is up for debate: lots of people would argue that the first surprise album was Radiohead’s In Rainbows in 2007 (though that release was technically announced just over a week before it came out). But the real liftoff moment for the surprise album was in 2013, and the release, ushered out in the bleary early hours of a mid-December morning, of Beyoncé’s self-titled album. It was a move that felt thrillingly new: that the biggest artist in the world, a position that comes with carefully managed publicity campaigns, would sidestep all that and just put the thing out there, seemed almost transgressive. (Although in retrospect it maybe was just a savvy understanding of the direction of travel: the weakening power of traditional media campaigns and the rise of fan-powered spontaneity.)
Naturally, the phenomenon exploded after that: U2 did their foolhardy, if in retrospect pretty brave, iTunes stunt around their album Songs of Innocence the following September, and we were off to the races. By 2016, as Eamonn Forde notes in this Guardian piece, it was almost expected for an album to be launched out into the world with minimal promotion, that the most surprising thing you could do with your new album was trail it with a handful of appearances, a couple of broadsheet interviews and an appearance on Jimmy Fallon’s show. Frank Ocean, Taylor Swift, Eminem, Björk: everywhere you looked, any musician with any clout (as well plenty without) started dabbling in sudden album drops. At the same time, the term “surprise album” seemed to lose its meaning altogether, with it being used to refer to anything short of floating a statue of the artist in question down the Thames.
The overuse of the surprise album, both the term and the thing itself, would ultimately doom it. The 2020s have seen a steady decline in the number of big-name surprise releases. Possibly the format’s last true triumph, before GNX, was the release of Taylor Swift’s Folklore, and its follow-up Evermore, as Covid raged in 2020. That made sense at the time – it’s difficult to mount a whopping great promo campaign in the middle of a pandemic – but Swift soon reverted to a more traditional promo campaign for her next album, Midnights, in 2022. So it seemed did everyone else: the biggest albums of 2024 – the likes of Swift’s Tortured Poets Department, Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft and, yep, Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter – have stuck to more old-school release schedules, often complete with lavish campaigns (as music site Loud & Quiet’s Midnight Chats podcast recently laid out).
Enter Lamar and GNX. Will its success jumpstart another wave of surprise releases? God, I hope not. The surprise album works forLamar – someone with an aura of mystery, artistic integrity and sheer bloody-mindedness around them – and maybe a handful of others at the top of the pile. And it also works for bands and artists considered broken up or at least long dormant: My Bloody Valentine’s 2013 album m b v was a fantastic surprise album because, even though it had effectively been trailed for the best part of two decades, no one ever expected it to come out, let alone suddenly on a random night in February.
For everyone else, the best advice is to leave the surprise album well alone. Stick to the good old-fashioned promo campaign. Have fun with it – hire an arena for a listening party or burn a million quid or something. Just give us a heads-up first.
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