Yeezus is the sixth studio album by the American rapper Kanye West. It was released on June 18, 2013, through Def Jam Recordings and Roc-A-Fella Records. West began recording it in 2012 and produced it alongside Mike Dean, Daft Punk, Noah Goldstein, Arca, Hudson Mohawke, and Travis Scott. West recruited Rick Rubin as an executive producer 15 days before its release to help strip down the sound for a minimalist approach. Guest appearances include Justin Vernon, Chief Keef, Kid Cudi, Assassin, King L, Charlie Wilson, and Frank Ocean.
In contrast to West's previous albums, Yeezus is characterized by an abrasive, electronic soundscape with distorted drum machines and synthesizers. It draws from genres including industrial, acid house, electro, punk, Chicago drill, and horrorcore, while continuing West's use of unconventional samples. Music critics considered Yeezus the most experimental work by West, who described it as "a protest to music" and excluded tracks deemed too melodic or similar to his prior work. Lyrical themes include drug use, racial politics, sex, and relationships.
Yeezus was initially promoted with an unorthodox, minimalist marketing campaign that included worldwide video projections and live television performances. No singles preceded the release; "Black Skinhead" was released as the lead single in July 2013, followed by "Bound 2" in August. West embarked on the Yeezus Tour to support it between October 2013 and September 2014. Yeezus received acclaim from critics, who considered it among West's best work and commended its brash direction, though its departure from West's prior soundscape divided general audiences. It was the most acclaimed album of 2013, according to Metacritic, and topped numerous end-of-year list rankings.
Yeezus was nominated for Best Rap Album at the 2014 Grammy Awards. It debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200, selling 327,000 copies in the first week of release, while also topping the charts in Australia, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand, Russia, and the United Kingdom. It has been certified double platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Several publications named it one of the best albums of the 2010s, including Rolling Stone, which also included it on its 2020 list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Background
Following the release of his fifth studio album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010), Kanye West collaborated with longtime friend Jay-Z on Watch the Throne (2011). In July 2012, producer No I.D. revealed that he had been working on West's sixth solo studio album (and seventh overall) and that it would be released after Cruel Summer (2012), a collaborative compilation album between members of West's record label GOOD Music.
West was influenced primarily by minimalist design and architecture during the production of Yeezus, and visited a furniture exhibit in the Louvre five times. A single Le Corbusier lamp was his "greatest inspiration". West worked closely with the architect Oana Stănescu, and took "field trips" to Le Corbusier homes. Fascinated by Stănescu's comments on the unusual and radical nature of Corbusier design choices, West applied the situation to his own life, feeling that "visionaries can be misunderstood by their unenlightened peers". West also met with architect Joseph Dirand and Belgian interior designer Axel Vervoordt, and had "rare Le Corbusier lamps, Pierre Jeanneret chairs and obscure body-art journals from Switzerland" delivered to the loft. West also wanted a deep hometown influence on the album, and listened to 1980s house music most associated with his home city of Chicago for influence. Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain was also an inspiration for the album and its ensuing tour. The album was originally titled Thank God for Drugs.
Recording and production
In 2012, West began recording his sixth studio album with collaborators, including No I.D. and DJ Khaled. The first recordings were held in January 2013, in the living room of his personal loft at a Paris hotel, referred to in the album's credits as the "No Name Hotel". West kept compositions simple in order to hear the tracks more clearly; too much bass or complexity would simply overpower the room's poor acoustics. The beats emanating from the loft space, which sometimes lasted through the night, provoked complaints from neighbors. Reports emerged that he and his then-girlfriend Kim Kardashian had moved to the loft in order for West to begin work on the album.
The atmosphere in the studio was described by contributor Evian Christ as "very focused", and West once again brought in several close collaborators. Producer Hudson Mohawke noted the inclusive "group" atmosphere of the sessions, in which multiple contributors would work on similar pieces, with different elements ultimately selected from each. All involved were given a song to work on and return the next day to sit and critique, a process Anthony Kilhoffer compared to an art class. Producer Arca described being initially asked to send West music, noting that she purposefully sent perhaps the strangest material she had, with West happening to be excited by it. Describing West's collaborative style, Arca stated: It was a lot of coming up with design, like solving riddles. If the song called for something aggressive, it was up to three or four people to design what in their head was the best solution for that aggression in that moment. Everyone would approach it in completely different ways, and ultimately, it would all be edited by Kanye himself.
Determined to "undermine the commercial", several tracks were left off the finished product that were deemed too melodic or more in line with West's previous material. West set parameters regarding sound and style, insisting that there be no "bass wobbles" reminiscent of dubstep. The album's recording process was described as "very raw" by Thomas Bangalter of the French electronic duo Daft Punk, who produced four songs for the album, adding that West was "rapping – kind of screaming primally, actually". While previous albums, particularly Dark Fantasy, took considerable time in the studio, Yeezus was described by Kilhoffer as "the fastest record we ever made". In May 2013, Def Jam executives listened to the "final product", (only later to be changed) describing the album as "dark". American rapper Travis Scott opined that the snippets he'd heard of Yeezus were from the year 3000 and recalled "crazy memories" from being around West during the recording of it.
W writer Christopher Bagley reports that West's creative process often bordered on perfectionist. In March 2013, West described the album to Bagley as near completion, only to revise this statement one month later to the album being "only 30 percent complete". West made several last-minute alterations to Yeezus, enlisting the co-founder of Def Jam Recordings, Rick Rubin, as an executive producer for additional recording mere days before its release; changes included re-recording whole songs and rewriting entire verses. The rough cut West played Rubin ran nearly three and a half hours long. West's orders to Rubin were to take the music in a "stripped-down minimal direction", often removing elements already recorded. In a September 2013 interview with radio DJ Zane Lowe, West said of Rubin that "he's not a producer, he's a reducer".
For several days in late May and early June 2013, West and a "rotating group of intimates, collaborators and hangers-on" holed up at Rubin's Shangri-La studio in Malibu in service of completing the record. Rubin thought it impossible to meet the deadline and all involved ended up working long hours with no days off in order to complete the record. West had intended the album be 16 tracks until Rubin suggested cutting the album down to fewer tracks, from 16 songs to 10, saying the others could be reserved for a follow-up. Rubin gave as example "Bound", which was "a more middle of the road R&B song, done in an adult contemporary style" before West decided to replace the musical backing with a minimalistic sample, "a single note bassline in the hook which we processed to have a punk edge in the Suicide tradition". Two days before the album had to be delivered to the label, West wrote and sang the lyrics to two songs while also recording the vocals to three others in just two hours.
Music and composition
According to Chicago Tribune critic Greg Kot, Yeezus is a "hostile, abrasive and intentionally off-putting" album that combines "the worlds of" 1980s Chicago acid-house, 2013 Chicago drill music, 1990s industrial music, and the "avant-rap" of Saul Williams, Death Grips, and Odd Future. The Independent, Mass Appeal, and The Village Voice described it as an experimental release, while Meagan Garvey of The Outline described it as West's "industrial album". Rolling Stone described it as "an extravagantly abrasive album full of grinding electro, pummeling minimalist hip-hop, drone-y wooz and industrial gear-grind", while Vulture called it a "punk rap opus", and Rolling Stone called it an "industrial-rap opus". Slant Magazine critic Ted Scheinman described the album as "built on alien, angular beats, slowly morphing drones and sirens, abrupt periods of silence, and a pulse-quickening style of delivery from Yeezy himself", writing that West reconceives the "notion of what kind of music (or noise) can underpin hip-hop". According to Charles Aaron of Spin, Yeezus is "a hip-hop album, not a rap album", because of how its sounds and subject matter are assembled together, and although listeners can hear "'punk' or 'post-punk' or industrial'" throughout, "hip-hop has always been about noise and dissonance and dance music as agitation". The album also incorporates elements of industrial and trap music. The record "most closely resembles" 1990s industrial rock, during which the genre had a significant pop culture impact, with artists such as Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, and Marilyn Manson gaining success. The industrial scene created a "vast global underground community", and Esquire notes that one of its epicenters was in Chicago, where West was raised. Evan Rytlewski of The A.V. Club characterized its opening series of songs as electro and industrial hip-hop. Billboard and Spin additionally observed horrorcore elements, such as synths and screaming.
Referencing the sound of Yeezus in September 2013, West stated: "For me as Kanye West, I got to fuck shit up... I'm going to take music and try to make it three dimensional... I'm not here to make easy listening, easily programmable music". At the same time, he viewed himself as artistically being "here to crack the pavement and break new ground, sonically". West would later go onto describe the sound of the album as "a protest to music". West elaborated, claiming that he "was like 'I'm gonna take my ball and go home'".
Yeezus is primarily electronic in nature, and boasts distorted drum machines and synthesizers that sound like they're malfunctioning, low-resolution samplers that add a pixelated digital aura to the most analog sounds. To this end, the album incorporates glitches reminiscent of CD skips or corrupted MP3's, and Auto-Tuned vocals are modulated to a point in which they are difficult to decipher. Esquire cites "On Sight" as an early example of the album's connection to electronic music, citing its "droning synthesizer tone", which is "modulated until the signal starts throwing off harshly treble-heavy spikes and begins to clip, as if it were overloading a digital audio processor".