Rapper Black Thought has revealed that The Roots are working on a new album.
The band are a pivotal force in hip-hop, with their live instrumentation approach blending with forward-thinking production. Building a seminal catalogue, the group have been largely silent since 2014, when they dropped full-length project ‘…And Then You Shoot Your Cousin’.
Now it seems that work on a follow-up is well under way. Black Thought has just released a joint album with Danger Mouse, the two working on ‘Cheat Codes’. Out now, Clash writer Nathan Evans writes in his 8/10 review:
Lyrically, ‘Cheat Codes’ is a gangsta rap album that describes a seedy world Black Thought hustles in and receives battle scars from.
Fresh from this, Black Thought spoke to Zane Lowe for Apple Music, and revealed that seminal hip-hop group The Roots are “well underway” work on their first album in almost a full decade.
In a status update on the group, the rapper said: “Ready to put a new album out. Yeah. A new Roots album is well underway. Could be done. Yeah. Could be. It’s just not up to me. You know what I mean? It’s not only up to me, so… a couple other people have to chime in. But yeah, we’ve got lots of stuff recorded for the Roots album.”
On his creative process, he added: “I’m constantly jotting down ideas, a bar here, a word here, and a random idiom. And then when it’s time to write, I’m able to draw from that, pull from some of those notes. But that’s only when I have to. When it’s good, at its best, best case scenario, it works the way that this dynamic has in that what I write is just directly in response to the music.”
Check out the full interview below:
