AFTER a summer spent burying fellow rapper Drake in one of the most high-profile rap beefs this century, Kendrick Lamar has now wrapped up his domination of 2024 by dropping GNX, a surprise album that not even label Universal Music Group knew was coming.

The sixth studio album in Lamar’s prolific arsenal comes off the back from a venomous barrage of singles launched at Drake’s OVO camp almost seven months ago but it shows no signs of him turning on the safety on his metaphorical gun.

Named after the 1987 Buick GNX, which at release was the fastest car in the world that beat every Lamborghini, Ferrari and Porsche, Lamar’s GNX is very much a vehicle for his 2024 victory lap.

Racing past rivals

Album opener Wacced Out Murals has Lamar displaying there will be no rules of engagement on the album over aggressive staccato strings as he takes aim at his own heroes, such as Snoop Dogg who posted Drake’s AI-generated Taylor Made diss track on his Instagram.

This trend of calling out anything Drake-related without explicitly naming him is consistent for the entire album, such as Reincarnated. An obvious jab at Drake’s aforementioned Taylor Made, in which he used artificial intelligence to generate Tupac Shakur’s voice, Reincarnated uses a sample of Shakur’s Made N***** with Lamar’s own voice contorted to fit Shakur’s iconic delivery.

GNX also follows the route of the produced-for-clubs Not Like Us, the final diss track Lamar released at the end of the beef, leading to a much more accessible album compared with Lamar’s heavy and introspective Mr Morale & the Big Steppers from 2022.

To that end, the album features an eclectic array of tracks that is a cross-pollination of his earlier albums Damn, To Pimp a Butterfly and Good Kid, M.A.A.D City.

Supercharged production

Responsible for the production of Not Like Us, its meteoric impact on music charts and over 900 million streams on Spotify, producer Mustard (Dijon Isaiah McFarlane) has been brought back by Lamar for GNX.

The Mustard-produced Hey Now and TV Off are strategically placed in the middle of the album’s 12 tracks while other clearly inspired by Not Like Us tracks such as Squabble Up and Peekaboo are intermittently placed in the front and back halves of the album.

In between each of these club-ready songs, the Pulitzer-winning rapper slides his usual slower songs that range from deeply contemplative to rap rages such as Reincarnated. Similar to Mustard’s return, Lamar has also brought back Sounwave and Jack Antonoff from 6:16 in LA, another diss from the beef, to co-produce the new album. The duo are known for frequently producing Taylor Swift’s albums.

Though there are speculations that GNX is one half of a double album, particularly due to the rumour of Swift working with Lamar on an unreleased song, the album as it currently is strong enough to stand on its own as not only one of the year’s hardest rap albums but also the best way to cap off the biggest year in Lamar’s career.