On December 12, Nas and DJ Premier will finally release their long-awaited joint album after decades of speculation under the auspices of Mass Appeal Records’ Legend Has It… banner. Today, they revealed the title and album cover, as well as confirming the release date, which DJ Premier teased during a recent show.
The album will be called Light-Years, and it’ll be the final album of the Legend Has It… initiative, which has also presented new albums from Slick Rick, Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, Mobb Deep, Big L, and De La Soul in 2025, as well as a Marvel Comics book. Light-Years is said to contain recordings spanning from the album’s initial announcement way back in 2006, all the way up to more recent recordings, when they began working on the project in earnest.
The cover, which they shared on social media, is a slick photo of the producer and rapper wearing all black, with lens flares and motion blurs being produced by their jewelry — old school rope chains and Rolex watches.
In a Rolling Stone interview about Light-Years and Legend Has It, Nas told Uproxx alum Andre Gee, “This series is to encourage [and] inspire hip hop and remind us all [of] the pureness of hip hop. I hope that we all can do this together.” Of the project itself, he said of the older material appearing on the album, “I’m going to say at least two of those ideas happened on this album. We didn’t get a chance to do ’em when we were talking about ’em, but we finally got a chance to put those recordings together this year. I can’t wait for people to finally hear it. I don’t know about anybody else, but for me and him, it was personally a long time coming for us to do it.”
Light-Years is out 12/12 via Mass Appeal Records. You can find more info here.
