The hardest truth to accept as a music listener is that there are likely hundreds of songs that we’ll never hear. Whether they’re all good or not is a separate matter. But artists will sketch out raw demos to full, complete songs that will rest eternally in a hard drive somewhere. The best-case scenario is nabbing a few loose records as one-offs or as extensions on a deluxe. This is especially true for an artist like Kendrick Lamar, who will spend years workshopping an album. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have an abundance of ideas stashed away.
Apparently, this is the case for his last album, GNX, in 2024. Recently, Variety spoke to Mustard, Sounwave, and Jack Antonoff as the publication’s Producers of the Year. There, they share that Kendrick Lamar recorded anywhere from 80 to 100 songs for the blockbuster album. “We have such a specific language between us, me and Sounwave,” Antonoff says. “And then we developed our own thing, the three of us. You have it or you don’t with people. When you have it, it’s really magical; when you don’t, you go home.”
‘GNX’ Producers Explain the Creative Process of Working With Kendrick Lamar
Initially, the album didn’t start off firing on all cylinders. In fact, it started off merely spitballing ideas in the immediate aftermath of Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers. All Sounwave knew for certain with Kendrick was that they wanted to lean into the West Coast sound, past and present.
“The beginning of it was throwing paint on the wall,” Sounwave says of working with Kendrick Lamar at the time. “And it started to form this massive funky West groove that we love because [Kendrick and I are] from Compton. And in that, I started to realize the people who we should bring in to push it even further, like the Mustards, the Jacks. … I was very fortunate to have these friends who are very talented to push it to the next level.”
As for Mustard and his contributions, he felt like he couldn’t play it too safe. Ultimately, Kendrick Lamar needed something fresh, so he tinkered and experimented accordingly. “I knew that I couldn’t send Kendrick normal Mustard beats,” he tells the outlet. “I was sending all types of s—t, anything that I thought sounded like something that I’ve never made before. That’s what I was going for, because Kendrick is different.”
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