Eminem has evidently scrapped plans to release a sequel to his brilliant Relapse album. At least, that's what it looks like.
Only three months ago, the rapper announced that he'd almost finished work on the follow-up to his comeback effort. "It's extremely close to being finished," he said of the sequel LP. "It just depends on how many songs I wanna put on it."
Early Wednesday morning, he crushed hopes with the following tweet:
It was the first tweet from Marshall Mathers since March 29, when he promised, "Don't worry. Some big news is coming. Soon."
Has Em completely scrapped the album to head in a new direction, or head back into the hole he'd been in for years prior to Relapse? There's little to go on presently, but with his mentor Dr. Dre's Detox album set to drop in the coming months the climate is right for the blond one to reemerge.
50 Cent spoke to BANG Showbiz last year about Relapse 2, and how excited he was to see it released. "He made a whole body of work when he recorded 'Relapse'," said 50. "When I go to Detroit I stay at his house, so we go in the garage and sit in his car and listen to his new music - and my favourite material is going to be on 'Relapse 2'."
He also said the songs were even darker than Relapse, adding: "You have to balance concepts: The deep stuff, the club songs and songs that connect directly with the audience you're looking for - and there was more of the last two on Relapse, and I mean, Em, he was coming off... Well, he had a tough time. He was getting high when he was making these albums."
Just last week, producer Just Blaze told MTV News that he'd been working on new songs for Eminem, saying "[the album], it's getting there, but we still got a lot of work." Blaze promised that "a lot of good music is being made. ... He's really back spitting. The wordplay is crazy, the metaphors are crazy. He's really back on his game. He had his ups, he had his downs, he's back way, way, way up. This is definitely going to be up there with the best of his albums, for sure, for sure. The fact that he's branched out working with a lot of different people now, collaborating in a lot of different ways that he never has before, I think he's going to surprise a lot of people."
With talk like that, one would think/hope that Em's simply re-titling the album to establish the work as its own entity rather than a sequel, but only time will tell for sure. Meanwhile, Eminem will be seen alongside Paramore's Hayley Williams on B.o.B.'s upcoming debut album, The Adventures of Bobby Ray.
Williams didn't hide her adoration of Mathers when speaking of the rhymes on the track they did together: "He just slays me, he's such a genius," she said.
UPDATE: Eminem is moving forward with Recovery, a new collection of tracks, due June 22.
From Eminem.com:
The much-anticipated new album from Eminem, Recovery (Aftermath/Interscope), will be released June 22, 2010, it was announced today by Interscope Records. On Recovery, his seventh major label studio album, Eminem has reached out to an exciting list of first-time collaborators, including DJ Khalil, Just Blaze, Jim Jonsin and Boi-1da, among others.
Eminem releases Recovery just over a year after his last album, 2009’s Relapse. Relapse put the cap on an impressive ten years of recorded output, and contributed to Eminem being the biggest selling artist of 2000-2009. In recognition of this, Neilsen SoundScan named him their Artist of the Decade. Relapse entered the charts at #1 and, at nearly double platinum, was the best selling rap album of last year. It also earned Eminem his 11th Grammy award, winning in the Best Rap Album category. Relapse’s first single, “Crack A Bottle” from Eminem, Dr. Dre and 50 Cent, soared to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (Eminem’s second #1 after 2002’s “Lose Yourself”) and set a SoundScan record at the time of its release for opening week download sales (418,000). The album also spun off two other hits; the Top 10 “We Made You” and Top 20 “Beautiful.”
"I had originally planned for Relapse 2 to come out last year," remarked Eminem. "But as I kept recording and working with new producers, the idea of a sequel to Relapse started to make less and less sense to me, and I wanted to make a completely new album. The music on Recovery came out very different from Relapse, and I think it deserves its own title."
