The Roots are surely one of the busiest acts in the business. They spend 5 nights a week as Jimmy Fallon’s late night band, and between that, they found time to record a new album. The LP is titled undun and it will be released on December 6 via Def Jam.
The first single is the suave cool slow jam “Make My” which features Big K.R.I.T. It’s pretty awesome. Stream that below:
The album chronicles the life of a man named Redford Stephens who passed away in 1999. Here’s how Questlove described the album in a press release:
At this point in our career we’d like for our work to have a unifying theme, and an experiential quality. We’ve been intentionally making our albums shorter in length so that they can be experienced as a continuous work. The music is band-oriented with an eye on the moody cinematic. As a DJ, I am the King of playlists, but I don’t want our albums to feel like a playlist or a mixtape for that matter. We want to tell stories that work within the album format and we want the stories to be nuanced and useful to people. undun is the story of this kid who becomes criminal, but he wasn’t born criminal. He’s not the nouveau exotic primitive bug-eyed gunrunner like Tupac’s character Bishop in “Juice  he’s actually thoughtful and is neither victim nor hero. Just some kid who begins to order his world in a way that makes the most sense to him at a given moment… At the end of the day… isn’t that what we all do?
How can you not respect that? Catch the tracklist after the jump:
1. Sleep
2. Make My
3. One Time
4. Kool On
5. The Jump
6. Stomp
7. Lighthouse
8. I Remember
9. Tip The Scale
10. Redford
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