Guess who’s back? Eminem dropped a bomb on the rap world last night, releasing his 11th studio album out of nowhere.
The artist, real name Marshall Mathers, announced the new album on Instagram last night, January 16, to a rapturous response – so far, his post has more than 800,000 likes.
Titled Music To Be Murdered By, it’s his first LP since Kamikaze (which was also dropped without warning) in 2018. Eminem captioned his announcement with: ‘It’s your funeral.’ Unsurprisingly, the album itself is quite dark.
The 20-track selection features collaborations with late rapper Juice WRLD, Ed Sheeran, Anderson .Paak, Royce Da 5’9, Skylar Grey, Young M.A, and others. He’s worked with a lot of the artists on the album previously, too – for example, Grey featured heavily on Eminem and Dr. Dre’s iconic I Need a Doctor.
However, this marks the first time Eminem has worked with Juice WRLD, the 21-year-old Lucid Dreams rapper who died in December last year – he’d said previously that Slim Shady was a big influence on his own work.
As for the songs, Music To Be Murdered By features tracks like You Gon’ Learn, In Too Deep, Leaving Heaven, Never Love Again and Darkness – the latter of which has been given the music video treatment and is available to watch now, along with streaming the album.
Eminem’s inspiration is so brilliantly wacky that you couldn’t have made it up. Taking to Twitter to explain the name of the album, it turns out he was inspired than none other than movie legend Alfred Hitchcock. Eminem wrote: ‘Inspired by the master, Uncle Alfred!’
Throughout the new album, Slim – as you’d expect – takes aim at and discusses a number of topics on the album. On the track Unaccommodating, Eminem raps about the Manchester Arena bombing during an Ariana Grande concert in 2017. He raps: ‘I’m contemplating yelling bombs away on the game like I’m outside an Ariana Grande concert.’
If Music To Be Murdered By hits number one on the charts from the off, Eminem will pass Kanye West to have the most consecutive number one debuts (West reached nine with his most recent album, Jesus Is King).
The album comes after a long string of beef between Eminem and a number of rappers, from Machine Gun Kelly to Nick Cannon. He’s mostly remained quiet through all the supposed diss tracks and social media slams – if the title of this album suggests anything, it’s a mighty put-down.
Music To Be Murdered By is available to stream now.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.