Announcing they have a joint album coming later this year, Nas and DJ Premier started out the roll-out with the release of its first single “Define My Name,” on the 30th anniversary of Nas’ iconic debut album Illmatic.
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Named after a line from one of the pair’s past fan-favorite collaborations, 1999’s “Nas Is Like,” the brand new track features that distinct Premier boom-bap scratchy production and Nas’ classic flow.
Reflecting on his long lasting career in Hip-Hop, Nas raps, “At 20, I said I’d better quit by 30 / Then by 30, I thought by 40 rapping is corny / How wrong was I? / Never would have thought at 50, new songs by Nas would be hard and live.”
Also name-dropping some of his Hip-Hop heroes, Nas flows, “It was Rakim, Kool G and Kris / Few names like Cool James, ‘Face, Cube and Rick / That was musically sick, successful and unnatural / I throw they songs in a cyanide capsule.”
The track ends with some back-and-forth bars between Nas and Premier, with the latter starting, “Ayy, yo, thirty years later, Illmatic was dropped / Yeah— man, what the f*** am I doing? Hahahaha.” Then Nas, “Ayy, yo, Preem, chill / I got the rhymes, you got the beats (Aight) / Thirty years later, we back in the streets, we back in the lab… It's time, it's album time, yeah.”
The pair’s album doesn’t have a drop date just yet, but according to a press release, its planned to be released later this year.
The collaborative project has been in conversation for quite some time, with Nas first discussing it in as far back as 2006, during an interview with Scratch magazine, the cover of which he appeared on alongside DJ Premier.
At the time he said, “We talked about doing an album together and some of the listeners want to rush the s*** — I wanna rush it, too — but I just want to pull pieces from all kinds of different people for this next puzzle because a lot of people think s*** got easy, that I quit,” he said of his then-forthcoming LP Hip Hop Is Dead.
Despite wanting to, Nas was clearly in no rush, but did drop hints it was still on the brain on his 2022 track “30,” with the lyrics, “Doesn’t matter this is sheer relief, I feel the breeze this is / Superhero material, rap star status / Premier album still might happen.”
Nas and Preem’s partnership dates back three decades, with producer contributing three tracks to Illmatic — “N.Y. State of Mind,” “Represent” and “Memory Lane (Sittin’ In Da Park).”
Listen to the pairs brand new track above.