The long wait for J. Cole’s seventh studio album, The Fall Off, may be coming to an end. Cole, who is currently on tour with Drake, shared a snippet of a new song, along with a short tour vlog using a burner account on Instagram. The video tracks his and Drake’s tour from behind the scenes, capturing Cole in the studio and featuring appearances from the tour’s new opener Lil Durk. You can check it out below or, if you just want to skip to the song, there’s another embed under that.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3n-XnLrmjm/
J. Cole shares a new snippet ‘Might Delete Later, Vol. 1’ 🎞️
He’s currently on tour w/ Drake for Leg 2 of the ‘It’s All A Blur Tour’ 🎫
— OnThinIce (@OnThinlce) February 21, 2024
The song itself is a stripped-down, no-holds-barred rhyme barrage over an eerie, ominous piano loop with cyberpunk-ish synths slowly building to a furious breakdown. Drake, Cole’s tourmate, is clearly an influence, with paranoid but triumphant lyrics in the vein of the Canadian rapper’s latest releases. And lest fans question the veracity of the Instagram burner, its authenticity was confirmed by no less an authority than Cole’s longtime business partner Ibrahim “Ib” Hamad, who told followers on Twitter to “tap in.”
Tap in @mightdelete_26 https://t.co/JYIMhizRA9
— Ibrahim H. (@KingOfQueenz) February 21, 2024
Earlier this year, Cole insinuated that The Fall Off might very well be finished, telling fans at one of his and Drake’s It’s All A Blur tour stops, “Right now, I’m at the tale end of working on this album. This album that I’ve been working on for a long time. It’s called The Fall Off.” And although Cole joked “I don’t know how many people know about it,” he’s been teasing the project since shortly after the release of his fifth album, KOD. Perhaps this teaser is just the beginning of a rollout fans have been waiting for since before the pandemic.