Soon after American rapper Jay Electronica released his debut mixtape 'Act I: Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge)' in 2007, he announced 'Act II' as a follow-up, and a track listing was revealed in 2012. Several songs from the project were released as loose singles that he dropped over the years, among these being 'Life On Mars', 'Better In Tune', 'Road To Perdition', 'Shiny Suit Theory', and 'Letter To Falon', but despite 'Act I: Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge)' being intended as the first part of a trilogy, with each title being inspired by the 2006 British-American film 'The Prestige', 'Act II' failed to appear. Following the official release of his hit single 'Exhibit C', he announced on American music station Shade 45 that 'Act II' would be released on Christmas Day 2009, but American record producer Just Blaze confirmed shortly after that the album would miss this date. In 2011, Electronica announced that the newly-titled 'Act II: Patents Of Nobility (The Turn)' was complete, and he shared a track listing on his Twitter page in 2012. The album apparently included guest appearances from American rappers Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Sean Combs, American singer The-Dream, and English-French actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, amongst others. However, 2013 passed with no sign of the record, and in 2014, he again announced that it would be releasing that year. Five long years later he announced that he had finally completed work on his official debut album, recorded over the course of 40 days, and 'A Written Testimony' was released on 13 March 2020, nearly thirteen years after the release of 'Act I'.
Over the years several tracks from 'Act II' had leaked online, including 'Memories & Merlot' and 'Real Magic', and so it was perhaps no surprise that the entire album leaked in October 2020, after a group of internet users on Discord raised $9,000 to purchase it from a hacker. Shortly after the leak, Electronica went to his Twitter and Instagram to acknowledge the leak and thanked his fans for the warm response to the album, and he confirmed that he would try to clear the samples, then get it on Tidal as soon as possible. The following day, he posted a link on his Twitter page to the official Tidal release, but on 28 October 2020, the album was taken down from Tidal for unknown reasons. A month later, he revealed in his Discord server that the finished version of 'Act II' has unreleased verses from Kanye West, and that he would try to get them cleared before re-releasing the album. In a side-note, when the album was leaked, the leaker accidentally uploaded the project with a typo in the title: a "The" was written before "Patents", when that was never actually meant to be in the title, which was always meant to be 'Act II: Patents of Nobility (The Turn)'. A day after the leak occurred, Electronica's team uploaded that exact leaked zip-file onto Tidal, rather than a mixed and mastered version, and so the typo with the extra "The" was left in it, and that is now canonically the official title of the album. There have been mixed signals over whether a final mixed and mastered version would be released onto all platforms, but knowing how long this project took to come out, if that is the plan, it likely won’t happen for a long time.
Track listing
01 Real Magic (feat. Ronald Regan)
02 New Illuminati (feat. Kanye West)
03 Patents Of Nobility
04 Life On Mars
05 Bonnie & Clyde (feat. Serge Gainsbourg)
06 Dinner At Tiffanys (feat. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jay-Z & The-Dream)
07 Shiny Suit Theory (featuring Jay-Z and The-Dream)
08 Memories & Merlot
09 Better In Tune With The Infinite (feat. Latonya Givens)
10 A Letter To Falon
11 Road To Perdition (feat. Jay-Z)
12 Welcome To Knightsbridge (feat. Sean Diddy Combs)
13 Rough Love (feat. Kanye West)
14 Run & Hide (feat. The Bullitts)
15 Nights Of The Roundtable
16 10,000 Lotus Petals
