Mustard was in the gym on a Friday afternoon when he saw Kendrick Lamar post a snippet of a new song on social media. He guessed the record might land the following week, maybe timed to Thanksgiving. Ten minutes later, it was out.
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That was November 22, 2024, and the surprise was total. GNX, Lamar’s sixth studio album, arrived with no warning. The only warning was a minute-long teaser video posted to YouTube just before the album dropped. None of the music in that clip made the final tracklist.
The record’s title comes from a 1987 Buick GNX, the model Lamar’s father drove him home from the hospital in the year he was born, and the same car sits on the album cover. The release was widely read as a victory lap after Lamar beat Drake in the biggest rap battle in a generation. But according to Sounwave, the producer who has worked with Lamar for more than fifteen years, the record’s earliest songs had nothing to do with the feud. Their foundation was laid in late 2022 and early 2023, after Lamar finished the first leg of his Big Steppers World Tour, long before the feud with Drake erupted.
Where the songs actually started
The first two tracks Sounwave and Lamar recorded were “Squabble Up” and “Man at the Garden.” For “Squabble Up,” Sounwave brought in a collaborator he calls “a master of the 808,” the producer Scott Bridgeway, to help shape a beat built around a sample of Debbie Deb’s 1980s freestyle track “When I Hear Music.” The first version ran too fast to work. Only once they slowed it down, Sounwave says, did the song click into something special.
“Man at the Garden” came together in New York, with Jack Antonoff in the room. Sounwave got the rapper Nas’s blessing to interpolate “One Mic,” from his album Stillmatic, and Lamar found a flow on the spot that felt, in Sounwave’s words, “so nostalgic, so personal.”
Not every song began as a song. “Luther,” the duet with SZA that samples the late Luther Vandross, started as an interlude with no drums at all, just a chopped sample and Lamar humming a melody over it. The sample sat unfinished for a long time, Sounwave says, until Lamar landed on one particular melody. “I knew that this had to be bigger,” Sounwave recalls. The songwriter Ink, brought in to help finish the track, remembers the call: “pull up on this.” “Luther” later picked up three Grammy nominations, among them Record of the Year.
“TV Off” grew the same way, expanding from a single idea into a two-part song with help from the jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington, who has worked on every Lamar album since To Pimp a Butterfly. “It felt like an honor,” Washington said of the sessions. DJ Mustard co-produced the track alongside Sean Momberger, Sounwave, Antonoff and Washington, and says its echo of his earlier hit “Not Like Us” was “definitely intentional.” The moment in the song where Lamar shouts Mustard’s name was met, the first time the room heard it, with “instant laughter, joy, and energy.”
An unlikely name on the credits
Antonoff’s name sits alongside Sounwave’s on eleven of the twelve tracks, an odd credit for a producer whose main body of work is pop: Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, his own band Bleachers, and Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet. He and Lamar first tested the partnership months earlier, on “6:16 in LA,” one of the diss tracks Lamar aimed at Drake that spring.
Sounwave remains the constant. He and Lamar have worked together since Lamar’s earliest mixtapes, and Terrence “Punch” Henderson, president of Top Dawg Entertainment, has described the partnership bluntly: Lamar will “half-state an idea,” and Sounwave will “finish the thought for him.” Mustard, for his part, built the “Hey Now” beat alone, three or four years before Sounwave and Antonoff added to it. Mustard first heard the finished song at the video shoot for “Not Like Us”, where Lamar told him the beat made him feel like Goku, the Dragon Ball Z character. Mustard had originally pitched it as “this really weird-ass beat” that he loved regardless.
LA’s fingerprints, and a cast of newcomers
Aside from SZA, GNX carries almost no guest verses from artists of Lamar’s own stature. The title track instead hands the microphone to three rising Los Angeles rappers, Hitta J3, Peysoh and YoungThreat, and Lamar brings on AzChike, Dody6 and Lefty Gunplay elsewhere. The mariachi singer Deyra Barrera makes several cameos, a nod to how much Mexican culture runs through the city Lamar keeps writing about. On “Reincarnated,” he goes further still, rapping from the imagined perspective of the blues musician John Lee Hooker and the singer Billie Holiday over a sample of Tupac Shakur’s “Made Niggaz,” before a voice representing God, voiced by Lamar himself, cuts in near the end to admonish him.
The feud that wasn’t the whole story
None of that history stopped GNX from reading as a feud record. His diss track “Not Like Us” had already broken Spotify’s record for the most plays of a hip-hop song in a single day, topped the US charts, and reached number six in the UK. It also outgrew music entirely: the song fed into messaging in that year’s US presidential campaign, became an American sports anthem, and inspired a video game. By the time GNX arrived, Lamar had scored two US Number One singles for the year and a booking to headline the Super Bowl LIX halftime show.
“Heart Pt. 6” is where Lamar looks backwards rather than at Drake. Built around a sample of SWV’s “Use Your Heart,” the song reclaims a title Drake had used for one of his disses, by instead recounting Lamar’s early years at Top Dawg Entertainment. He raps about the “yearnin’ for independence” that led him to leave the label and start his own company, pgLang, with his longtime collaborator Dave Free. The Guardian’s review noted that the album also covers the end of Black Hippy, Lamar’s old rap collective.
The album carries a second, smaller score to settle. On opener “Wacced Out Murals,” Lamar raps that his “hard work let Lil Wayne down,” a reference to the backlash after the NFL picked Lamar over Wayne, a New Orleans native, for the Super Bowl slot. Wayne told the crowd at his own festival that he had been “robbed” of the moment.
Not everyone read it the same way
Early reviews leaned positive. The BBC reported that the news agency AP had called GNX “another thrilling chapter” in Lamar’s career, and that the outlet Rating Game Music judged the album a reminder of “why he’s one of the greats,” even while calling it less a major statement than “a creative purge.” Pitchfork’s review took a sharper line, arguing that Lamar’s move from Top Dawg Entertainment into his own company had crept into the writing itself, so that lines like “we got the same 24 what you mad for” landed with the flatness of a line from “a speech” rather than a song. Both readings describe the same record. One hears an artist settling scores on his own terms. The other hears a businessman who has started to sound like one.
Why the numbers kept climbing
GNX opened at Number One on the Billboard 200 with 319,000 equivalent album units in its first week, largely on the strength of streaming. Of those units, 285,000 came from 379.72 million streams, the third-biggest streaming week for any album that year. Pitchfork counted it as Lamar’s fourth studio album in a row to open at Number One, after To Pimp a Butterfly, DAMN., and Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.
The chart story did not end there. GNX returned to Number One in February 2025, after Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show and the album’s first physical release, on CD, cassette and five vinyl variants. Vinyl sales alone made up 87,000 of the 116,000 physical copies sold that week, Lamar’s best vinyl week on record. DAMN. and good kid, m.A.A.d city climbed back into the top ten alongside it, making Lamar the first rap artist with three albums simultaneously in the Billboard top ten. SZA, a guest on two of the album’s songs, performed alongside him at the halftime show.
Days before that performance, Lamar spoke to Apple Music’s Ebro Darden and Nadeska Alexis. “Not Like Us” had just won five Grammys, the most for any rap song in the show’s history, and he said his goal throughout had been to treat hip-hop “as a sport.” He traced the sound of tracks like “Squabble Up” and “TV Off” back to the G-funk of DJ Quik and Dr. Dre, and said he still watches battle-rap footage from Smack DVD and the Ultimate Rap League. Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, he said, had been “my most intimate album.” GNX, by contrast, was what he made once he was ready to “come out of that cocoon.”
That contrast is the clearest account anyone involved has given of what GNX actually is. It was not a quick answer to Drake. Sounwave says “Squabble Up” and “Man at the Garden” were the first songs recorded, in late 2022 and early 2023, long before the feud.
