After the singer Bilal demonically recites some dirty talk toward a “little lamb,” Lamar launches into a furious narrative about the Book of Revelations coming to pass while a gut-rumbling bass line and dread-making strings play behind him. Lamar often raps as a form of dialectic, and on the opening track, he’s in the difficult position of arguing with God. Don’t be too surprised if all his songs are untitled from here out. If it’s not always easily digested, that’s part of the message. But after listening a bit, the album’s form and content together come to feel like Lamar’s starkest statement yet about the struggle for purity in the face of capitalist pressures to compromise. The arrangements are skeletal the song structures are disorienting the rapping is excellent. The (un)titles for this new album and its songs, the fact that its release apparently only happened because of a LeBron James tweet, and the fact that the music originated in the sessions for his 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly suggest that untitled unmastered should be approached as a bonus release. The whole thing is kind of like “Bohemian Rhapsody,” if Freddie Mercury had just recorded himself saying “guitar solo goes here” where Brian May’s shredding currently is. Later, the song mutates yet again into what sounds like a live acoustic demo, featuring Lamar ad-libbing imaginary back-up singers and crowd sounds.

Two minutes and 30 seconds in, the groove disappears, a child sings a jingle about Compton, and the tempo resets for a whole different Lamar rap.

But in the form it’s in now, a hit it shall likely not become. It’s possible to imagine a version of that song as a hit, booming from car windows in summertime as America learns to say “no, no-no-no” in the exact cadence Lamar does. What I Learned About Equal Partnership by Studying Dual-Income Couples Jennifer Petriglieri

Untitled unmastered review