2017 was the year of the high-profile collaboration album. There was Future and Young Thug’s project Super Slimey. Travis Scott and Quavo dropped Huncho Jack. 21 Savage, Metro Boomin and Offset released Without Warning, and so on, and so forth. Looking ahead to 2018, a lot of people felt that the superstar-packed project was a played move, but then the news of this new collaboration album between the Police frontman Sting and reggae dancehall superstar Shaggy hit, and the Internet went off.
This has got to be one of the weirder, or at least most unexpected marriages of music we’ve seen in quite some time. “The most important thing to me in any kind of music is surprise,” Sting said in a profile piece by Rolling Stone. “And everybody is surprised by this collaboration – by what they’re hearing. We’re surprising.”
Heralding the project, today the pair unveiled the lead single from their upcoming record 44/876, with an effervescent track titled “Don’t Make Me Wait,” that sounds like something that could have truly popped off on commercial radio had it dropped sometime around in 1999. Apparently, the plan was to stop with this one song, but the pair enjoyed working together so much that they simply kept going.
44/876 is scheduled to be released on April 20th. You can listen to the lead single “Don’t Make Me Wait” above.
