Amid controversy, Kanye West drops new album Bully as a short film

Kanye West seems to be trying to do it all in the past few days. Scathing tweets against his ex-wife, calling her a sex trafficker; allegations against Jay-Z, Carti, Kendrick and Future; and now a new project. The rapper has just dropped his eleventh studio album, Bully, in the form of a short film starring his son Saint. This marks Kanye’s first solo album since Donda in 2021.

The 11-track album seems to be taking Ye or Kanye West back to his roots, with carefully sourced samples which make you wish that MF Doom would come back to life just to do a verse. The songs have a soulful and gospel-like feel to them and sound like products of Madlib, with Kanye taking his sweet time to go through the narrative of the song. The album sounds brilliant; the visuals are simple but carry meaning. But even though the songs are brilliantly produced and fit over the simple and monochrome visuals, it is getting difficult to be able to appreciate anything Ye is putting out.

When the first song from Bully, “Preacher Man”, starts, you are suddenly transported to 2009, when Kanye’s album Graduation came out. The track list for the album also includes 03:00 – “I CAN’T BEAR”, 03:21 – “CLOSE TO YOU”, 05:38 – “SPANISH SONG”, 08:56 – “BULLY”, 10:57 – “BLUX INTERLUDE”, 13:03 – “CIRCLES”, 15:34 – “HIGHS AND LOWS”, 20:20 – “PREACHER MAN”, 23:22 – “CLOSE TO YOU” and 25:56 – BLUX REPEAT.

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Kanye West has been throwing fits on X (formerly Twitter) for the past few days. In the course of a week, he ignored a legal notice by his wife Kim Kardashian concerning their daughter North West’s involvement in a song with the currently incarcerated Diddy Combs. He has accused the Kardashians of being sex traffickers; he reposted a Captain America: Civil War poster which had Hitler, Diddy and himself on one team, and he has successfully burnt every bridge in the industry.