Announced by Kim K to her 38.8 million Twitter followers, Real Friends was uploaded to West’s Soundcloud and instantly deleted. The track was uploaded to bootleg site Vocaroo shortly after, and a following tweet from Kanye promised the corrected version of the track to be back up shortly, encouraging all rippers to ‘rip the new one instead’.
Slight distortion on the main loop or not, the internet still went into meltdown.
With the official versions now available on kanyewest.com, Real Friends features Ty Dollar $ign, production from Kanye, and samples from Frank Dukes and Boi 1der, while a preview to soulful No More Parties in LA introduces Kendrick Lamar to Kanye’s ouevre. The lyrics are reflective and echo his melancholic 808s flow, including a story about paying a cousin for a stolen laptop, and questioning his real friends, over a sparse production, that sounds more Nothing Was The Same than previous Kanye incarnations.
If this is a run up to Kanye’s forthcoming album, compared with today’s trend of surprise album drops, the long run up to Swish, track previews, and teasing releases followed by bootleg websites, it seems decidedly old-school.
“I hope you have a nice weekend”, Yeezy tweeted post-twitter storm. We’re about to spend it counting down to next Friday with patient praying hands emojis.