Kanye West

It’s still clear when Kanye West’s tenth album Donda will arrive. It was first announced last summer, and though Kanye played new music, presumably from it, during a July listening session in Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, it still hasn’t been released. At this point, all fans can do is fantasize about what it is. That’s what one person, who unveiled a bizarre theory about Kanye’s tenth album, did.

The fan shared their thoughts on the project to a subreddit page under the title “[Theory] Kanye Wants To Make The First Official Unreleased Album.” The user believes Kanye’s “concept with donda is an album that has materialized itself into existence without being officially released.” They add that the songs on Donda will play on the radio, the album will be reviewed as the rapper “wants everyone to pretend and act like it’s out” — but no one will ever be able to buy it.

To conclude, they point to the mask Kanye has worn over the past month to promote Donda as well as the fact that the album currently has a completely black cover art to argue that the project is “an album you can’t see.” They added, “It doesn’t seem real. but the music exists. the experience exists. and it will be talked about for generations to come.”
Truthfully, this sounds similar to what releasing Donda as an NFT would feel like. But people will just have to keep waiting.

You can read the full theory above and check out what some fans had to say about it below.

https://twitter.com/ElliottBros1/status/1427649761906135041?s=20

The world continues to await the release of Kanye West’s Donda, although it remains unclear when the project will actually come out. In the meantime, fans are hunting for any sort of information on the album, of which there is not much. It looks like Apple Music have let some information slip, though.

Recently, the Apple Music description of the album was updated, as it now hints at a bevy of features on the album: “Yeezy’s 10th solo album features a wealth of the MC’s favorite voices.”

So far, the only confirmed track set to appear on the album is “Hurricane” featuring The Weeknd and Lil Baby. Other artists expected to appear on the album include Travis Scott, Baby Keem, Lil Yachty, Rooga, Gesaffelstein, Kid Cudi, Don Toliver, Playboi Carti, Fivio Foreign, Young Thug, Roddy Ricch, KayCyy, The Lox, and Jay Electronica.

Meanwhile, the Apple Music page indicates the album is set for release on August 20, although it remains to be seen if that’s speculation or if they got that date from a reliable source. That said, even West himself hasn’t proven to be a reliable source when it comes to release dates.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

This past Friday came and went without a peep from Kanye West regarding his new album Donda but he didn’t let that stop him from continuing to promote it as if it had come out as planned. Fans have reported and posted photos of massive billboards in such locations as Times Square in New York proclaiming that Donda is now streaming, even though a cursory glance at Kanye’s DSP profiles confirms that it is not.

The album, which was originally supposed to drop in 2020, was pushed back to January, then to the summer of 2021 when Kanye decided to have a massive listening event at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta ahead of its release. However, while the listening made a splash and its live stream broke Apple’s previous viewership records, the album never materialized and instead, Kanye announced a second listening event with a new release date. In the meantime, he was apparently holed up in a room in the bowels of the stadium while he worked to make last-minute tweaks — only to push the release back again after the second listening event.

That release date has since passed but it appears Kanye was at least serious enough about it to approve the billboards to go up, which is now having the opposite effect of making fans wonder if indeed the album is ever coming out. This could all be a ploy to build more buzz for it, but if so, that’s a very sharp two-sided blade for Kanye to wield, as similar strategies have backfired for predecessors like Dr. Dre, who promoted Detox for over a decade before finally pulling the plug and releasing Compton in 2015 instead.

Kanye apparently still plans to release Donda, but with each missed release date, it’s possible that fans’ enthusiasm — and patience — will get lower and lower until the album itself becomes an afterthought.