This might turn out to be something of a controversial post, with everything that's being going on in Kanye West's life in the last couple of years, but the blog is all about the music, and this album will certainly never be officially released in its original form. In February 2025, West met American rapper Dave Blunts and they started working on an album together, with the two spending hours talking to each other, and Blunts would then write three songs a day based on their conversations. On a June 2025 episode of the Dope As Usual podcast, Blunts elaborated that West asked him to write the entirety of the album only a day after they met, and that he usually spent 20–30 minutes on each reference track, but once rewrote a track upwards of twenty times at West's request. Blunts repeatedly denied that the lyrical content is antisemitic, describing the album as being "about one man going between hurt, betrayal and pain and he's putting that shit down". On 2 April DJ Akademiks announced that the album, initially titled 'WW3', would be released the next day, following 'WW3' appearing as a single the previous week, but when the album failed to drop, West revealed the album cover, which depicts a male and female Klan member wearing white and red KKK-inspired outfits, posing in front of a stack of hay bales. The album cover is an edited version of a 2015 photo of the wedding of two members of the KKK in a barn in rural America by Peter van Agtmael, who claimed that West's use of the photograph was unauthorized.
On 21 April, West announced that he was changing the title of the album to 'Cuck' (in popular culture, short for cuckold), and stylised as 'CUKKK', and he released the music video for the second single called 'Cousins' the same day in a tweet. The track contains lyrics discussing West's experience having an incestuous relationship with a male cousin as a child, and his recreational use of nitrous oxide. On 7 May, West stated on Twitter that he was uploading the third single called 'Heil Hitler', but after it was banned by all digital streaming platforms, an instrumental version titled 'The Heil Symphony' was uploaded in its place on 14 May. On 22 June, West posted to X that he was thinking about changing the album's name from 'CUKKK' to 'In A Perfect World', but by then the album had been leaked in its entirety on 18 May, after a $999 charity group buy for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum via the messaging site Discord. The leaked album files contained derogatory messaging towards West in its media and metadata as a form of protest, including listing Blunts as the song artist instead of West, listing "AI" and "1945" as its genre and date respectively, and replacing the cover with a 1994 picture of West wearing an antifascist shirt with the title "Fuck Nazis", and a subtitle "50 year old loser promoting fascism and hate speech" overlaid onto it. West acknowledged the leak on Twitter, clarifying that the song 'Uncle' was no longer part of the album, and its lyrics were not related to his wife Censori.
On 13 September 2025, Blunts took to Instagram to announce that he was cutting ties with West and would no longer work on the album, urging him to "find God", and alleging that West "groomed" him into writing the album's antisemitic lyrics. In November 2025, 'WW3', 'Cousins', and 'Heil Hitler', along with their alternate versions 'Hallelujah' and 'Hit Symphony', were removed from all streaming services following his apology to Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto, and the song 'Gas Chambers' was repurposed for his 'Bully' album under its alternate title 'All The Love', appearing in the tracklist for that album. In January 2026, West published an open letter in The Wall Street Journal in which he apologized for his antisemitic remarks and behaviour, stating his outbursts stemmed from manic episodes in which he "gravitated toward the most destructive symbol I could find, the swastika", as he refused to accept his bipolar disorder diagnosis. West said he was "deeply mortified by his actions" and pledged to take "accountability, treatment, and meaningful change". Whether you believe that his apology was genuine or not, there are still fans out there who would want to hear this album, and so that's why I'm posting it in its original form, with just a couple of tracks updated with later, better versions, and an out-take added to the end to bulk up the running time. I've also included the alternative recordings of 'All The Love' and 'Hallelujah', in case you don't want tracks called 'Gas Chambers' and 'Heil Hitler' on the album.
Track listing
01 WW3
02 Cosby
03 Diddy Free
04 Dirty Magazines
05 Jesus
06 Bianca
07 Cousins
08 Virgil
09 Uncle
10 Free My Kids
11 Heil Hitler
12 Gas Chambers
13 Hitler Ye Jesus
14 Jared
15 Nitrous
16 Bulletproof
17 All The Love
18 Hallelujah
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