Kanye West - So Help Me God (2015)

In 2015 Kanye West spent a week in Europe promoting an '80-percent done' new album that didn’t have a title or a release date. He later revealed on Twitter that his upcoming 'Yeezus' follow-up would be titled 'So Help Me God', and it was accompanied by an image that could be the album's cover: a diamond shape connected at the points by four lower-case m's, that Reddit users discovered is a 13th century monastic symbol for the Virgin Mary. At the 2015 Brit Awards he debuted a fiery new track called 'All Day', then followed that up with a performances of 'Only One' on U.K. chat show 'The Jonathan Ross Show' and on Sweden's 'Skavlan'. Along the way he chatted with BBC Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe about the new album, saying "It's fun to work hard. We’re being inventive, and the College Dropout came out of a fight to rap. This new album is coming out of a fight to design". Despite West finally offering up his new album title, a release date was nowhere to be seen, and when pressed he said that release dates are '100 percent played out', and that his new LP would arrive in a surprise fashion, like Beyoncé’s 'Beyoncé' or Drake’s 'If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late'. Some months later another tweet announced that the album would no longer be called 'So Help Me God' and would instead be titled 'Swish', but as we now know, that didn't happen either. Eventually, West's new album did appear, and surprise, surprise, it wasn't called 'So Help Me God' or 'Swish', but 'The Life Of Pablo', and it included none of the tracks that had been rumoured to be on the record, apart from a shortened take of 'FML'. Luckily for us, a lot of the tracks were either released as singles or leaked online, and so enterprising fans have attempted to put together an approximation of SHMG, and this is just one of them, with a fan-created cover that I think is the best of the ones out there, especially the 'official' one that West tweeted, which was, to be honest, pretty boring. I have to admit that I'm not the biggest Kanye West fan, so I'll have to leave it to the rap fans out there to tell me if this really is as good as everyone seems to think that it is.    

Track listing

01 Ultralight Prayer (feat. Kirk Franklin & Choir)
02 All Day (feat. Allan Kingdom, Kendrick Lamar, Paul McCartney & Theophilus London)
03 I Feel Like That
04 Fall Out Of Heaven (feat. Bon Iver & The-Dream)
05 New Angels
06 When I See It
07 God Level
08 Can't Look In My Eyes / Can U Be (feat. Kid Cudi)
09 Awesome
10 FML (feat. Travis Scott, The Weeknd & Bon Iver)
11 FourFiveSeconds (feat. Paul McCartney & Rihanna)
12 Only One (feat. Caroline Shaw & Ty Dolla)