You get a gentle musical coda that seems completely unconnected to the track that precedes it, lyrics that switch dizzyingly between narrators and a light sprinkling of the kind of high, wailing synth sounds that decorate Roy Ayers’ Everybody Loves the Sunshine and dozens of g-funk tracks. In the opening eight minutes alone you get a burst of Isaac Hayes-ish pillow talk (disturbingly directed at someone the protagonist calls “little lamb”), some distinctly free playing on sax and piano, a concentrated burst of brilliantly turned apocalyptic imagery, a scattering of off-key, arrhythmic samples, ruminations on the pressures and pleasures of fame, along with thought about racism, the Catholic church sex abuse scandal and what position Lamar likes to have sex in. Or, as a few cursory spins reveals, perhaps not.

Or perhaps Lamar, who is clearly intelligent and empathetic, has noted that we live in a grim world of instant reactions and first-listen reviews and decided to throw critics a bone, knocking out something straightforward and throwaway that can neatly be summarised after a few cursory spins.

Lamar finds himself pressured to push artistic boundaries while selling millions of copies and acting as hip-hop’s political conscience, or, as he puts it on Untitled Unmastered’s opening track, “to use my vocals to save mankind for you”. This gives the impression of an artist keen to deflate the kind of expectations heaped upon him since To Pimp a Butterfly’s release. In fact, the latter isn’t an entirely ridiculous suggestion: the second half of 2014-2016, as we’re going to have to call it, appears to consist of a rough lo-fi recording – it might be of a rehearsal or a songwriting session, but it sounds like Lamar trying to amuse his mates with the aid of a bass guitar riff, endlessly harping on a pun about oral sex that also turns up in – might conceivably have been captured by a child inadvertently pressing record. It appears to suggest it’s unfinished and no credits – a state of affairs that’s enabled producer Swizz Beatz to claim that his five-year-old son produced the penultimate track. By contrast, its successor is less than half as long, arrives in a plain sleeve with its tracks unnamed, save for a series of mysterious dates that may allude to when the tracks were written or recorded, or the incidents that inspired the lyrics took place, or indeed neither of those things.

Untitled unmastered review hip hop dx