Surprise Albums™ aren’t exactly a surprise in the music industry any more, but even so, there was a collective intake of breath around the music world this morning when Ice Cube casually mentioned that his former NWA bandmate Dr Dre was planning on releasing an album on Saturday.
Dre, after all, has been promising an album since 1999, the year in which he released 2001. In the 16 years since, his next album — long understood to be entitled Detox, although he apparently scrapped that title a couple of years back — has assumed legendary vaporware status, outlasting even Guns N’ Roses’ long-delayed Chinese Democracy as far as the wait for a release goes.
So is this album that may or may not be released on Saturday actually Detox, or whatever else that album is called now, or something else entirely? From what Ice Cube has to say, this is unclear — he describes the album as “inspired by the Compton movie,” a reference to upcoming NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton, and given that the movie was written, cast, shot and finished in about an eighth of the time we’ve been waiting for (non-)Detox, this seems to imply it’s a new project… but really, who knows? We’ll find out on Saturday. Maybe.