The Roots have released the tracklist to their upcoming album UNDUN. Their 13th album will be released December 6th through Def Jam Records and will tell the story of Redford Stephens.
The band’s goal was to make a complete album, something that is meant to be listened to from top to bottom.
“At this point in our career we’d like for our work to have a unifying theme, and an experiential quality,” says Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, 40. “We’ve been intentionally making our albums shorter in length so that they can be experienced as a continuous work. The music is band-oriented with an eye on the moody cinematic. As a DJ, I am the King of playlists, but I don’t want our albums to feel like a playlist or a mixtape for that matter. We want to tell stories that work within the album format and we want the stories to be nuanced and useful to people. undun is the story of this kid who becomes criminal, but he wasn’t born criminal. He’s not the nouveau exotic primitive bug-eyed gunrunner like Tupac’s character Bishop in “Juice”… he’s actually thoughtful and is neither victim nor hero. Just some kid who begins to order his world in a way that makes the most sense to him at a given moment… At the end of the day… isn’t that what we all do?”
Take a look at the tracklist below.
- Sleep
- Make My Ft. Big K.R.I.T.
- One Time
- Kool On
- The Jump
- Stomp
- Lighthouse
- I Remember
- Tip The Scale
- Redford
Check out the lead single, Make My feat. Big K.R.I.T, below.