After a monstrous 2024, Kendrick Lamar put his stamp on the final weeks of the year with the surprise release of a new album, GNX. The project features more bars about Drake after his feud with the Canadian rapper dominated the cultural conversation this summer.

GNX” is easily the most disciplined and direct music Kendrick Lamar has ever made, and if you really let yourself feel it, it might also be his most profound.

Kendrick Lamar starts his exhilarating new album by complaining that someone vandalized a mural depicting his face — a mural depicting his face in triplicate, in fact — on the side of a Honduran restaurant in his Compton hometown.